DEHRADUN: Seer-turned-politician Gopal Mani Maharaj, who is contesting as an independent candidate from the Tehri Lok Sabha seat, says that unlike his gau-kathas (cow sermons) “which attract huge crowd”, he is disappointed by the low turnout of people in his election rallies. He claims that he had expected better response from people in the state where the legislative assembly had sometime back passed a resolution to declare cow as ‘Rashtra Mata’.In one of his public gatherings last week, Gopal Mani, who is the only seer in the poll fray in Uttarakhand this time, gave vent to his disappointment by telling the gathering, “Jab main gau ke liye katha karta tha, toh log mujhe mala pehnate the. Jabse gau ke liye chunav mein utra hoon, logon ne mujhse doori bana li hai. (When I used to give cow sermons, people would garland me. But when I have entered the political arena for the sake of cow protection, people seem to be maintaining a distance from me.”The cow conservationist who is pitted against BJP’s Mala Rajya Laxmi Shah, the sitting MP from Tehri as well as state Congress chief Pritam Singh, says that he has “a good chance of winning since I am genuinely working for cow issues while parties like the BJP only talk about the cow in public gatherings for political mileage but do nothing.”On the reasons why he chose to contest from Tehri, Gopal Mani said that “it is an auspicious seat as both Gangotri and Yamunotri dhams are situated within the constituency.” “What could have been a better seat to propagate the magic of cow? Only kings and queens have won from Tehri but nobody has really done anything for the place. I am confident people will give me a chance to do work for the cow as well as for their development.”A B Ed as well as MA in Sanskrit, 61-year-old Gopal Mani has been giving cow sermons since 1984. He claims to have fasted for 11 months at the age of 25 by standing in the icy waters of the Ganga and drinking only half a glass of cow’s milk once a day.Notably, the issue of ‘cow protection’ has been in centre-stage in Uttarakhand ever since the BJP government came into power in March 2017. In September 2018, Uttarakhand became the first state in the country to pass a resolution to declare cow as ‘Rashtra Mata.’ The state also became the first to start a sex-sorted semen laboratory recently. CM Trivendra Rawat had also declared soon after taking over that the Uttarakhand Protection of Cow Progency Act which had been passed in 2007 will “now be enforced in true letter and spirit in the state.”

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