Prime Minister Narendra Modi eats beef while on foreign trips. He is duplicitous over the cow protection campaign. His minions are headless chicken playing to the tune of the corporates who make big bucks from the beef business. These are accusations by former Kerala Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan.
It's probably the first occasion since 2003 that a Prime Minister's dietary preferences have been conjured up in a political debate. It was the Congress Party that famously accused former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of eating beef in 2003.
The top leftist leader from Kerala has obviously some beef with the BJP and Modi. It was only a day earlier that Hindu Sena activists stormed CPI (M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury's press conference in Delhi and 'manhandled' him.
Yechuri is possibly the last line of defence for Achuthanandan within his party, and this might have hurt him too badly. However, the nonagenarian politician with an acerbic tongue defied norms of civility in political discourse. "BJP is trying to create a new ideology on behalf of the 'cow-mother and the bull-father' (sic)," Achuthanandan said in his freewheeling tirade targeted at octogenarian O Rajagopal, the lone BJP legislator in the Kerala assembly.
He was speaking in the state assembly session specially convened to condemn the recent central government directive curbing the sale of cattle for slaughter, Malayala Manorama reported.
"The Modi government's ulterior motive is to lend meat business monopoly to tycoons like Adani and Ambani," the former CM thundered. He lampooned the Sangh Parivar -- who he says have usurped the BJP -- saying the "bull-father" they treat as venerable must be castrated. He then says: "They oppose castration of the bull-father as that would cause inconvenience to the cow mother," obviously cheap a peel-off from the multitudinous internet trolls and memes.
When the Congress Party accused Vajpayee of eating beef in 2003, it was taken seriously. Vajpayee had to chip in with a desperate rebuttal to embellish his already redoubtable commitment to the holy cow. "I prefer to die rather than eat beef," Vajpayee had said.
It remains to be seen how PM Modi and BJP will counter the ageing Left warrior. It's unlikely that Modi, a vegetarian, would react as Vajpayee did. For, even for his most hardboiled followers, Achuthanandan has outspent his political capital. A fierce leader once seen as the epitome of Marxist rigour has long become his own comic doppelganger.
But in Kerala, the beef slugfest continues.
