Ghazala Wahab

The chickens, or should one say cows, are coming home to roost. The marriage of convenience that the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had contracted to form the government in Jammu and Kashmir has become the proverbial fishbone in the PDP’s throat which can neither be spitted out nor swallowed.

The most recent crisis to hit the PDP government (PDP is the face of the government, at least in the Valley) is the bovine brouhaha. The most unfortunate part in this saga is that it reflects deliberate mischief on the part of the BJP and utter slothfulness on the part of the PDP. In the bargain, both have hammered in yet another nail in the cross of persecution that an average Kashmiri believes he/ she carries.

Here is the brief history of the events. In 1932, Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of the state of Jammu and Kashmir imposed a ban on slaughter, sale and consumption of cows in deference to the Hindu belief that holds them sacred, despite the fact that the majority in the state did not believe that cow was sacred. Howev