Indian gov’t says hug cows on Valentine’s Day, Twitter cracks up

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Animal welfare division appeals to mark February 14 this yr not as a celebration of romance however as ‘Cow Hug Day’ to advertise Hindu values.

India cow
A cow seen on a road in capital New Delhi [File: Harish Tyagi/EPA]

An attraction by India’s animal welfare division asking residents to mark Valentine’s Day this yr not as a celebration of romance however as “Cow Hug Day” to higher promote Hindu values has been ridiculed on social media.

In an announcement, the Animal Welfare Board of India on Wednesday stated “hugging cows will deliver emotional richness and improve particular person and collective happiness”.

Religious Hindus, who worship cows as holy, say the Western vacation goes towards conventional Indian values.

Lately, far-right Hindu teams have raided retailers in cities, burned playing cards and items, and chased hand-holding couples out of eating places and parks, saying that Valentine’s Day promotes promiscuity.

Teams such because the Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal say such actions pave the best way to reassert Hindu identification.

Younger educated Indians, no matter their faith, sometimes spend the vacation crowding parks and eating places, exchanging items and holding events to rejoice like another Indian pageant, particularly since India started the method of financial liberalisation within the early Nineteen Nineties.

The Hindu nationalist authorities led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been pushing a Hindu agenda, looking for supremacy of the faith on the expense of a secular nation recognized for its variety.

Hindus comprise almost 80 p.c of its almost 1.4 billion folks. Muslims account for 14 p.c, whereas Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains account for a lot of the remaining 6 p.c.

The cow has lengthy been embedded within the Hindu psyche and is deeply revered by many as just like one’s mom. Most states in India have banned cow slaughter.

Based on information analytics web site India Spend, at the least 45 folks had been killed by Hindu cow vigilante teams within the nation between 2012 and 2018.

The animal welfare board’s attraction asks folks to exit and bodily hug cows on February 14.

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a political analyst, stated the attraction is “completely loopy and defies logic”.

“The unlucky half is that this has now official sanction,” he added. “This reveals an eraser of yet one more line between the state and faith, which may be very miserable. Now the state is doing what political and non secular teams have been campaigning to do.”

In a satiric column in The Indian Specific, journalist Aakash Joshi questioned if the federal government’s bovine deification may serve an financial operate.

“Since there’s little signal of India main the march on new tech, maybe we will all discover gigs as cow hug facilitators or domesticated animal safari guides,” he wrote.

The federal government’s Valentine’s Day attraction has been extensively ridiculed. Pattern some tweets:

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