The Guardian opinion editorial on Gadhimai

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/25/gadhimai-animal-sacri\

fice-nepal

The

Gadhimai sacrifice is grotesque

The ritual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of animals runs counter to

Hindu principles of reverence for life

*Anil Bhanot*

Wednesday 25 November 2009 12.00 GMT

 

-

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/25/gadhimai-animal-sacr\

ifice-nepal#history-byline>

 

Yesterday, Mangal Chaudhary and Dukha Kachadiya, descendants of a feudal

landlord and a village healer adept in the Hindu occult, who in the 18th

century started a mass animal

sacrifice<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/24/hindu-sacrifice-gadhimai-f\

estival-nepal>to

the goddess Gadhimai, presided over a ceremony to begin this year's

festival by beheading 10,000 buffalo. Their deaths are being followed by the

slaughter of a further quarter of a million animals and birds today. It is

all happening in Bariyarpur, a village in the south of

Nepal<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/nepal>,

bordering the state of Bihar in India<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/india>.

The region is well known as the homeland of the Bhojpuri people, a

close-knit ethnic community devoted to the worship of Gadhimai.

 

The history of this bloodthirsty event began when Bhagwan Chaudhary, the

feudal landlord, a imprisoned in Makwanpur fort prison about 260 years ago.

He dreamed that all his problems would be solved if he made a blood

sacrifice to Gadhimai. Immediately upon his release from prison he took

counsel from the local village healer whose descendant, Dukha Kachadiya,

started the ritual yesterday with drops of his own blood from five parts of

his body. Apparently then a light " appeared " in an earthenware jar, and the

gory sacrifice began.

 

To me it all seems utterly abhorrent. Yet the Nepalese government made a

ridiculous decision to give 4.5 million rupees to the organisers to build an

abattoir so as to avoid pollution and disease but undoubtedly also to hold

on to Bhojpuri votes. The whole incident has quite rightly sparked an

international outcry from animal welfare campaigners, Indian politicians

like Menaka Gandhi and religious icons like the " Buddha Boy " Ram Bahadur

Bomjan, among others.

 

Personally, I see this practice as one utterly opposed to the non-violent

principles of my Hindu religion. Five to six thousand years ago our Vedic

seers recognised that we can only survive by taking life from a lower level

of consciousness to ours as is the case with plants and animals, but never

did they condone senseless and purposeless killing. In Hinduism all life is

sacred and the whole idea of animal sacrifice in those ancient days was

based on the principle that we must pray to God before killing an animal for

food – by reciting Vedic mantras to God – and simply put that we think twice

before taking a life for our own consumption.

 

Many Hindus may not like it, because we like to think we are tolerant, but I

see several superstitious practices in what otherwise is a wise and profound

religion, and issues such as this which should be robustly challenged are

instead allowed to pass.