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In the next year, with patience and deep conviction, caring individuals worked with Gurudev to convince the municipal corporators to vote favorably on a new bill: to close the slaughterhouses on a total of eight holy days a year. In addition to Mahāvir Jayanti, Gurudev suggested Buddha Jayanti, Krishna Jayanti, Rama Jayanti, Gandhiji Jayanti, Shivaji Jayanti, Samvatsari or the Day of Forgiveness, and Divali. In this way, people would become reminded of the sanctity of life both by acknowledging the rights of animals to live and be free from harm, and by revering India's great teachers of the past who believed all life to be sacred.
Mayor Bandukwalla had retired before the bill came to be passed, but his successor, Mayor B. P. Divgi was an enthusiastic supporter. With the great help of Mr. Jivraj Mehta, Chairman of the Municipal Corporation, the bill was passed after many hurdles on July 23, 1964. Mayor Divgi was so elated by this legislative triumph that he ignored all custom and protocol to rush straight to Gurudev at the Shantinath monastery and deliver the good news to him in person.
Thanks to this bold decision on the part of the Bombay Council, a clear precedent was set for resolutions of this kind to be passed in other city and state governments throughout India. In one city, Radhanpur, a decision to close the slaughterhouses for nineteen days each year was turned into law.
Now Gurudev and fellow workers faced an even greater challengem-to try and stop the national government from establishing new slaughterhouses in major cities countrywide, to convince them to call a halt to pig breeding which had begun in 1964, and to reverse a plan to set up more than one hundred meatpacking plants and ten bacon factories in smaller cities. Also, in 1965, the proposal of exporting meat, leather, and other animal products which had been dropped a few years earlier was being reconsidered.
In February, Gurudev organized a deputation of Bombay citizens to speak to the President and Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in New Delhi. The meeting was fruitless.
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