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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Voters boot out cow, happiness ministers

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NEW DELHI: The country’s only dedicated “cow minister” has been dumped in state elections, ending a controversial tenure that saw hundreds of the sacred animals starve to death and poisoned on his watch.
Otaram Dewasi, the first head of Rajasthan’s cow ministry, was turfed out on Tuesday when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was thumped in the western desert state and two other key regional polls.






He was not the only noteworthy casualty from the ruling party, with the country’s only “happiness minister” — who stands accused of murder — also tossed aside by voters in Madhya Pradesh. Dewasi, the cow minister who in office wore the red turban and white sarong of a desert herdsman, lost by 10,000 votes to an independent candidate.
Hindus consider cows sacred and the BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has campaigned for their protection at state and national levels, and introduced harsh penalties for mistreating them.
But the cause has spawned cow vigilantism in parts of the country.
The state created India’s first ministry exclusively for cow protection in 2015 when the BJP won elections and appointed Dewasi, a policeman turned politician, to be in charge.
He imposed a 20 per cent surcharge on new property purchases — dubbed a “cow tax” — to generate cash to run the 2,300 shelters in his state for abandoned cows. He also branded hundreds of thousands of cows under his care to stop them being smuggled.
But his reputation was marred in 2016 when 500 cows starved to death at a state-run shelter when the facility was flooded during heavy rains.
Voters in Madhya Pradesh booted out Lalsingh Arya, the state minister in charge of country’s only “happiness ministry”, after a scandal-ridden term.
The ministry he helped set up in 2017 was modelled on the “gross national happiness” index used in Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan country, to measure the well-being of its citizens.
But weeks after it was inaugurated, Arya was on the run, accused of murdering a political rival in 2009. He was eventually arrested, and his trial is ongoing.
He lost by 25,000 votes to a rival from Congress. — AFP



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