New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath has issued orders to set up help desks for the protection of cows in each district of the state and ensure medical equipment for the animals, the news agency IANS has reported.
The Adityanath government, according to the agency report, has directed that COVID-19 protocols be maintained at all cow shelters, including stocks of equipment like oximeters and thermal scanners “for cows and other animals as well”.
The order comes while Uttar Pradesh, along with most of India, suffers from escalating COVID-19 numbers and a crippling shortage of medical supplies.
Claiming that the state has the coronavirus situation under control, the Adityanath administration has been accused of suppressing all indications of what is actually happening on the ground.
Uttar Pradesh has been reeling from a stray cattle problem which has been alleged to have exacerbated since the prohibition of cow slaughter and the rise of cow vigilantism.
Sandeep Pandey and Kushagra Kumar had reported for The Wire, on how 35 villagers had attempted to march to CM Adityanath to request him to manage the stray cattle situation.
IANS has reported that in Uttar Pradesh, 4,64,311 cows are housed in 4,529 temporary shelters, and 5,73,417 cows in 5,268 shelters.
Late last year, a number of panchayat chiefs from Banda district in Uttar Pradesh’s Bundelkhand had written to Adityanath stating that the state government stopping funds for the cowshed project has resulted in starvation deaths among animals.
Many districts had reported that they had not been receiving any funds for cow welfare since April 2020.
Since the pandemic, cows have occupied the discourse of medicine, spurred by the rightwing’s comments extolling their unproven virtues.
In March last year, The Wire had reported how a Hindu group called the Akhil Bhartiya Hindu Mahasabha organised a ‘party’ and collectively drank cow urine to ‘neutralise’ the effects of coronavirus in India. Bengal’s BJP chief Dilip Ghosh had said that drinking cow urine was a sure way of protecting oneself against COVID-19.
Even before the pandemic, in 2019, former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, said cows are the only animal which can inhale and exhale oxygen. Proximity to a cow would cure breathing problems and even tuberculosis, Rawat had said, according to two India Today reports.