Jeetrai Hansda, a tribal activist and professor at the Government School and College for Women, Sakchi, in Jharkhand has been arrested almost two years after he wrote a Facebook post asserting his community’s right to eat beef. Hansda's arrest is based of a complaint filed against by RSS' student wing Akhil Bharati Vidyarthi Parishad.
Arrested two days after the declaration of the Lok Sabha election results, the complaint was ‘investigated’ by inspector Anil Kumar Singh of Sakchi police station, Jamshedpur, Hansda wrote that the Adivasi community in India has had a long tradition of eating beef and ceremonial cow sacrifice. He had added, it is their democratic and cultural right to consume beef.
Supporting Hansda, Dasmath Hansdah, chief of the Majhi Pargana Mahal, in a letter to the vice-chancellor said that there were no inaccuracies in Hansda’s post, calling the assertions made by him a “truthful representation of the cultural and religious traditions of the Adivasi community and their culinary legacies”.
The letter also said, “Adivasis are citizens of India as well. We have a democratic right to follow our cultural and religious traditions like everybody else… If the Central government brings in a law banning cow slaughter, it will end our traditions and religious beliefs”.
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