Isn’t gaushala spend also freebie?

Cows at a gaushala, on the outskirts of New Delhi, in 2017. Pic/AFP

Gujarat's former deputy chief minister Nitin Patel was spearheading, in August, the Har Ghar Tiranga rally at Kadi town, Mehsana district, when a stray cow charged at the procession. It brushed past Patel, who fell down and suffered a minor fracture in his left leg. Last month, charitable trusts running gaushalas, or cow shelters, set free hundreds of bovines in Banaskantha and Patan districts, leading to traffic snarls. These trusts were protesting against the Gujarat government's failure to release Rs 500 crore promised to them for taking care of mostly abandoned cows.

Television can be exploited to rig people's minds. But it can also be harnessed to beneficially influence social attitudes. For instance, exposure to cable television lowered women's acceptability of spousal abuse and preference for sons, and enhanced their autonomy in Tamil Nadu. These benefits were outcomes of Chief Minister M Karunanidhi's 2006 decision to distribute colour TV sets free to the poor, as academicians Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found in their survey there.

The contrasting pictures above underscore that the State governments' expenditure on gaushalas or distributing television sets to people can be seen as symbolic of what Prime Minister Narendra Modi calls the "revdi culture" - or the culture of giving freebies to people to get their votes. In fact, the distribution of TV sets was a one-time affair, but the expenditure on gaushalas will likely be in perpetuity - and will continue to rise as stray cattle multiply and gaushalas mushroom to shelter them.

Pavithra KM, of the Factly website, has analysed the 20th Livestock Census Report to point out that the number of stray cattle reduced from 52.88 lakh in 2012 to 50.21 lakh in 2019 at the national level, a fall of 5 percent. Yet the population of stray cattle, during the same period, increased in the range of 9 percent to 65 percent in Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. These are the States where the slaughter of cows and their progeny, including bulls and bullocks of all ages, is banned. Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the veritable cradle of Hindutva, accounted for nearly 66 percent of the 2019 stray cattle population.

Media has reported stray cattle are ruining farmers by grazing their crops. An RTI enquiry showed that between February 2018 and March 2020, around 241 people were killed in road accidents involving stray cattle in Haryana. The menace of stray cattle became acute since Modi came to power, in 2014, with Hindutva stormtroopers waylaying vehicles ferrying bovines and, at times, lynching drivers and traders. Procuring cattle for slaughter became a risky business proposition. With few to turn to for selling cows no longer lactating, they were abandoned by farmers.

Hindu farmers were no less religiously devoted to the cow before 2014. But they balanced economic pragmatism and religiosity, selling cows and feigning ignorance as to their fate. The Bharatiya Janata Party's insistence on observing the cow's sanctity turned farmers into self-conscious Hindus unwilling to commit paap, or sin, by selling cows. New gaushalas were required to house cows abandoned in greater numbers than before.

Uttar Pradesh allocated R40 crore for the upkeep of stray cattle in 2017, the year in which Adityanath became chief minister, and the sum rose to Rs 447 crore in 2019. An India Today report shows that the Vasundhara Raje government spent Rs 240 crore on gaushalas in 2018-19, and her successor Ashok Gehlot Rs 565 crore in 2020-21.

It is not the case that expressions of religious sentiments should not be respected and subsidised by the state. Or that old, infirm cows should be sent to abattoirs. Nonetheless, the state's bankrolling of gaushalas has all the attributes of a freebie. Most cows are owned by families that rear them to consume their milk or sell it in the market, or both. The upkeep of non-lactating cows is their responsibility, for they had profited from selling the milk of their cows in the past.

BJP knows farmers would not or cannot bear the cost of keeping cows that have stopped yielding milk - and the state, therefore, takes over this responsibility. Not too different from Karunanidhi gifting TV sets to those who could not afford them. The politics over the cow and gaushalas has also become a potent electoral weapon, evident from Congress leader Kamal Nath's efforts to neutralise the BJP's advantage on this score when he was Madhya Pradesh's chief minister. Nath's only budget during his 18-month reign earmarked Rs 130 crore for gaushalas in 2019-20.

Freebies are often defined as subsidising or offering free public goods that do not boost the society's productivity. By this yardstick, the expenditure on gaushalas is a waste, for cows there have no economic value. Their dung and urine cannot sustain gaushalas. Should economic utility be the sole criterion for assessing the value of state expenditure? How do we categorise Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal's promise of giving Rs 1,000 a month to women if his party is voted to power in Gujarat? Truly, what is one leader's idea of the freebie is another leader's sense of social responsibility.

The writer is a senior journalist

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