Protecting Cows, Protecting Power
By Praful Bidwai
Asia Times
21 August, 2003Faced with uncertain prospects in elections to five state
legislatures due within three months, India's pro-Hindu coalition is
bringing in a bill in the national parliament to ban the killing of
cows and win the sympathies and votes of Hindus, but this is likely
to stir a hornet's nest.To start with, it means pandering to a particular religious group-
many but by no means all groups of Hindus consider the cow a sacred
animal-in India's multi-cultural, multi-religious society. Indeed,
the preamble to the bill exhibits a strong religious bias-
unprecedented for parliamentary legislation in India. It says that
"the cow is the embodiment of divine virtues like love, compassion,
benevolence, tolerance and non-violence", and that it commands
reverence and cultural sanctity.This is not universally true, even of the Hindus, who form a little
over four-fifths of India's billion-strong population. Many Hindus,
who keep cows as milch and draught animals and use bullock power in
agriculture, sell them once their economic life is exhausted. India
has a sixth of the world's cows and 57 percent of the world's
buffaloes. Apart from slaughtering millions of cows and buffaloes for
domestic consumption, India also exports over US$200 million worth of
meat, mainly beef.Bringing in a national law on a subject that falls within the domain
of India's 32 states and territories is itself a highly questionable
move. More than a quarter of these states, including Kerala in the
south, West Bengal in the east and some Christian-majority states of
the northeast, and Jammu and Kashmir, permit cows to be killed for
their meat.Some of the states have registered an angry protest against the
proposed bill. For instance, the deputy chief minister of north
Meghalaya says, "A particular diet may be poison to one community,
but food for another, as in the case of hill people in the northeast
whose main diet is beef." Neighboring Mizoram state's chief minister
argues, "If a bill banning cow slaughter is passed, it could set the
ball rolling for efforts to ban the slaughter of pigs. But both beef
and pork are part of the food habits of the people." Kerala
agriculture minister K R Gowri, herself a Hindu, has termed the
proposed bill "detrimental to the interests of Kerala". In Kerala,
beef accounts for an estimated 40 percent of all meat consumed. Some
80 percent of Kerala's people regularly eat beef. They include 72
Hindu communities, besides Muslim, Christian and indigenous people.Even more undemocratic is the government's crude attempt to regulate,
dictate and censor the dietary habits of Indians. Banning cow
slaughter involves preventing people from choosing what they eat.
Permitting it would not impose a particular diet on an individual or
group.A blanket ban on the killing of cows, bulls and calves, irrespective
of age, utility or health status, is a draconian measure that will
inflict a heavy burden on the peasant-owners of such animals, besides
increasing the proportion of unhealthy bovines in the total
population. Animal husbandry experts have often warned against the
overpopulation of cattle in India and the emaciated state of a high
proportion of cows. K R Ramaswamy, a former director of the Indian
Institute of Management in Bangalore, has argued that India must cull
half its bovine population, which is extremely unhealthy and cannot
be looked after.There is yet another economic angle to cow slaughter. Beef in India
costs less than half the price of lamb or chicken. It is the
preferred source of first-class protein for the poor, who constitute
a majority of India's population. The absence of beef will raise the
food bill for the underprivileged. Even more important, surveys of
butchers in different states show that three-fourths of all beef is
consumed by non-Muslims, largely Hindus. A higher proportion of the
sellers of cattle are Hindus. Abstinence from beef-eating is largely
a caste or class question among Hindus. The low castes prefer beef to
other meat for reasons of taste and habit too. Yet, to impose this
ban on cow slaughter, the government, led by the Hindu-chauvinist
Bharatiya Janata Party, has conjured up, of all things, an ecological
and animal rights argument. The bill seeks to shift the
constitutional subject matter from the purview of the states to items
common to both national and state legislatures under measures for
prevention of cruelty against animals. This is patently duplicitous.
If the real objective is to prevent cruelty to animals, then why
single out the cow? Why not extend the law to hundreds of other
animals and birds that are maltreated or vulnerable to abuse?It is not as if Indian society is particularly caring of animals. One
can see thousands of ill-fed, sick cows roaming the streets of Indian
cities, including the capital. Most are left to forage through
garbage. They end up consuming rotten vegetables, meat, and above
all, an enormous amount of plastic bags. India is notorious for its
overconsumption and unsafe disposal of recycled, ugly plastic
carry-bags, which are not required to be separated from biodegradable
matter. Autopsies on cows turn up literally hundreds of plastic bags
in their stomachs. Indian cows suffer from a range of ailments,
including foot-and-mouth disease. The bill is hypocritical in evading
issues at the center of the professed concern for the welfare of the
cow. The proposed law is open to objection on two other grounds too.
It originates in the mistaken belief that cow slaughter was "brought"
to India by invading Muslims in the Middle Ages, and that Hindu
scriptures unanimously proscribe cow slaughter. In reality, eminent
Indian and European historians have conclusively shown, on the basis
of contemporary accounts, that beef eating was an integral part of
the dietary customs in ancient India.Animal sacrifice, including the killing of cows, was the prescribed
ritual in many Indian traditions. Non-Hindu cultures, including that
of the indigenous people or even Buddhists, permitted beef-eating.
Rich evidence of this is found in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the
Dharmashastras and other Hindu scriptures. For Vedic Aryans, cows
were an important form of wealth. They were gifted to the priestly
class of Brahmins as fees. Cows were defined as "food" in these
texts. There is evidence that in a later period, many Brahmins
stopped eating beef. But they formed less than 5 percent of the
population. In no major scripture, says Professor D N Jha of Delhi
University and author of The Myth of the Holy Cow, "is killing a cow
described as a grave sin, unlike drinking liquor or killing a
Brahmin". "It is only in the 19th century that the demand for banning
cow slaughter emerged as a tool of mass political mobilization by
right-wing Hindu communalists, out to isolate Muslims by aggressively
challenging their dietary practices as 'alien'," says Jha.