Beef ban has been a debatable issue since it was implemented in 2017. Cows are considered holy in Hinduism, thus the trade and consumption of beef has became a very contentious issue ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party came into power in 2014. This time, when a beef food festival was held in Kolkata, it courted a huge controversy. Threat calls and abuses from various pages on Facebook forced the organisers of ‘Kolkata Beef Festival’ to change their name to ‘Kolkata Beep Festival’.
The organisers were planning to lodge a complaint in the police station on June 7. But on the night of June 6, one of the organisers got nearly 300 threating calls. ‘A lot of them to show support, but a lot of them were direct threats’, they said in a Facebook post.
“We are afraid, because everything has been blown out of proportion somehow. Things are not in our control anymore. For all of these reasons, the Kolkata Beep* Festival stands cancelled,” The Accidental Note, a Kolkata-based event management company, said.
Talking to universo virtual, Arjun Kar, the organiser, said that he received threatening calls and messages. People insulted him for organising a beef festival, but he has no interest in making this political.
The Kolkata Beef Festival was scheduled to be held at a restaurant in South Kolkata on June 23. “Even though we planned for this to happen after the elections, to avoid political tension, we couldn’t avoid it. If it was just political tension, and if we were sure that we can still provide a safe conflict free food festival that allows everyone attending to enjoy, we would’ve gone ahead with it,” the organisers said.
The festival had a variety of food like tenderloin, back ribs, Bolognese pasta to burgers and the fest ‘was aimed to celebrate good food’.
The Accidental Note
Initially, the organisers thought that by planning the fest after the elections they would be able to avoid political tension, but that clearly did not happen.
‘Most importantly, we cannot ensure the safety of all of you amazing people who were planning to attend and our team’, the post added.
It’s one thing to stand against something, and quite another to compel others to do the same using violence or threat of violence. Who would not be daunted by 300 calls? Had this not been called off, there was no saying what would have happened, considering the resistance to the festival, even before it had started.