Modi finally slams killings

NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has broken his silence over a wave of attacks on people accused of eating beef or slaughtering cows, saying that killing in the name of an animal sacred to majority Hindus was wrong.

Modi was speaking a week after a Muslim boy, 16, was stabbed to death on a train on suspicion of possessing beef, the latest of an estimated 28 people killed in cow-related violence since 2010.

Most victims were killed after Modi and his Hindu nationalist party won elections three years ago.

“Killing in the name of ‘gau bhakti’ is not acceptable,” he told a crowd at a Hindu ashram, referring to cow worship.

“No person in this nation has the right to take the law in their own hands,” he said at the ashram dedicated to the father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi in Gujarat. The slaughter of cows is banned, and the consumption of beef restricted, in most Indian states. Reuters