Beef Is Now Highly Illegal In India And Excuse Me While I Stuff Down This Triple-Decker Cheeseburger

India’s ‘Golden Age of Beef’ (as I am calling it) has officially come to an end after a bill 19-years in the making came to fruition, banning the possession or sale of beef in Maharashtra (the state home to Mumbai and over 100 million Indian citizens).

The Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill was actually passed way back in 1995 but wasn’t signed into effect by an Indian President until President Pranab Mukherjee inked it into legislation yesterday. Why am I even bother to tell you bros about this? Because buying or selling beef in Mumbai is now punishable by up to 5-years in PRISON. That’s right, if you want to buy, possess, or eat a burger in Mumbai you better expect to spend five long years in a shitty Indian prison.

What this bill has done is actually outlaw the slaughtering of cows, a sacred animal in parts of India. Yet for some reason the slaughtering of water buffalo is still totally acceptable under this new law….but who the hell wants to eat a ‘water buffalo burger’? What’s that even called, a ‘soggy burger’?

Indian Express reports:

Beef lovers in Maharashtra will now have to do without the red meat as President Pranab Mukherjee has given his assent to the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, 1995, nearly 19 years after the Maharashtra Assembly passed the Bill during the BJP-Shiv Sena rule in 1995.

The slaughter of cows was previously prohibited in the state under the Maharashtra Animal Preservation Act of 1976. However, the passage of the new Act will ban the slaughter of bulls as well as bullocks, which was previously allowed based on a fit-for-slaughter certificate.

The new Act will, however, allow slaughter of water buffaloes, which provides carabeef — generally seen as an inferior quality meat that makes up only 25 per cent of the total beef market in the state. Beef traders claim the move will not only render thousands jobless, but will also drive up the cost of other meats in the state.

‘Carabeef’ does not sound appetizing. Nope, not at all.

The President had signed the Bill and sent it to the Ministry of Home Affairs, which then informed the Maharashtra Governor of the decision.
Now, anyone found to be selling beef or in possession of it can be jailed for five years and fined Rs 10,000.

The beef trade in the state is largely controlled by Muslims of the Qureshi caste. “Apart from rendering people jobless, the immediate effect will be the spiralling price of other meats as people will be forced to gravitate to them,” president of the Mumbai Suburban Beef Dealer Association Mohammed Qureshi said.

Beef, generally seen as the poor man’s meat, costs almost a third of mutton. Mumbai alone consumes nearly 90,000 kg of mutton every day, sold through 900 licensed stalls and an equal number of illegal stalls.

The beef industry is now looking into any legal recourse as the rest of the world sits idly by waiting for ‘The Great Beef Wars of 2015’ to erupt.

I’ve never really planned on visiting India but I’ve also never dismissed the idea, but I have to admit the thought of a country where eating burgers is illegal is pretty damn off-putting. Just look at these delicious burgers and tell me you could live in a country where eating these carried a sentence of five years in prison:

A world without burgers isn’t even a world I want to visit in a thought experiment. It sounds like my own personal hell.

[TheDailyBeast via IndianExpress]