Sanjeev Sabhlok has converted into plain text on 13/7/13
ADDENDUM dated 27/9/13. Gandhi did not agree with violence against Muslims for cow slaughter
(as indicated in this compilation by Puniyani). He did believe in protection of the cow. This is
confirmed by a commentator who provided me with this citation:
Cow protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world. And Hinduism will live so ling as there are Hindus
to protect the cow…… Hindus will be judged not by their TILAKS, not by the correct chanting of
MANTRAS, not by their pilgrimages, not by their most punctilious observances of caste rules, but
their ability to protect the cow. (YI, 6-10-1921, p. 36) [Source]
Cow on Indian Political Chessboard E-Digest
Compiled by Ram Puniyani
Preface .................................................................................................................................................... 2
Cow and the Elusive Hindu Identity ........................................................................................................ 2
(2) Commissar Sadhvi’s Cow Agenda by Ram Puniyani ........................................................................ 11
(3) The Dilemma of Cow Slaughter in India By Anshul Kumar Pandey ................................................. 13
HISTORICAL ROOTS OF COW PROTECTIONSIM ................................................................................ 14
COMBATING THE COMMUNAL SCOURGE ........................................................................................ 16
(4) Hindutva Politics and The Holy Cow: The politics of the holy cow By Manoj Joshi......................... 17
(5) ‘Holy’ Cow And ‘Unholy’ Dalit by S. Anand...................................................................................... 20
(6) Holy Cow! Who Moved My Meat by Divya Rajagopal, .................................................................... 30
(7) Cow in Contemporary Political Chessboard Ram Puniyani ............................................................. 31
(8) Cow’s Urine as Medicine: Faith’s leap into blind Alleys Ram Puniyani ........................................... 33
(9) Using the cow by Javed Anand ........................................................................................................ 35
(10) Tribute to the holy cow by By Jawed Naqvi .................................................................................. 37
(11) What a hypocrisy, gau mata! Assault on food habits by A.J.Philip................................................ 39
(12) M.P.: Path Way to Hindu Rashtra by Ram Puniyani ...................................................................... 42
(13) Interview with D.N. Jha: ‘A political tool’ by AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA ....................... 44
1
Preface
Cow slaughter, beef eating have been being brought up on regular basis by communal forces. This
issue is used to browbeat the Muslim minorities in particular. Time and over again this issue in the
form of inciting communal violence, inciting anti dalit killings, inciting the killing of someone in the
trade of cow selling is targeted. The issue is now being used more often as a divisive communal
agenda and the aim of this is very clear. It is a political tool in the hands of communal forces.
There are very rigorously researched papers proving that cow was consumed extensively in ancient
Vedic period. In India, the consumption of beef is more than that of goat mutton or chicken. Many
an Indian communities are eating beef. The latest law in M.P. is the worst in the line of the
impositions by state. This law empowers the police to arrest any body suspected to be carrying,
storing or eating beef.
This E Digest is a compilation of major essays, articles and interviews on the theme. The aim of this E
Digest is to bring together all the amiable material on the topic.
Ram Puniyani
Cow and the Elusive Hindu Identity
D. .N. Jha
An average Indian of today rooted in what appears to him as his traditional Hindu religious heritage
carries the load of the misconception that his ancestors, especially the Vedic âryans, attached great
importance to the cow on account of its inherent ‘sacredness’. The ‘sacred’ cow has come to be
considered a symbol of community identity of the Hindus whose cultural tradition is often imagined
as threatened by the Muslims who are thought of as beefeaters. The sanctity of the cow has,
therefore, been announced with the flourish of trumpets and has been wrongly traced back to the
Vedas, which are supposedly of divine origin and fountainhead of all knowledge and wisdom. In
other words, some sections of Indian society have traced back the concept of ‘holy’ cow to the very
period when it was sacrificed and its flesh was eaten.
Since the Bràhmanical injunctions against beef eating led to the veneration of cow in the medieval
period, it tended to become a political instrument at the hand of rulers. The Mughal emperors (e.g.
Babar, Akbar, Jahagir and Aurangzeb etc), thus imposed a restricted ban on cow slaughter to
accommodate the Jaina or Bràhmanical feeling of respect for the cow. Similarly Shivaji, sometimes
viewed as an incarnation of God who descended on earth for the deliverance of the cow and
brahman, is described as proclaiming: We are Hindus and the rightful lords of the realm. It is not
proper for us to witness cow slaughter and the oppression of brahmanas. But the cow became a tool
of mass political mobilisation when the organised Hindu cow protection movement, beginning with
the Sikh Kuka (or Namdhari) sect in the Punjab around 1870 and later strengthened by the
foundation of the first Gorakshini Sabha in 1882 by Dayanananda Saraswati, made this animal a
symbol to unite a wide ranging people, challenged the Muslim practice of its slaughter and provoked
a series of serious communal riots in the 1880s and 1890s. Although attitudes to cow killing had
been hardening even earlier, there was undoubtedly a Bdramatic intensification of the cow
protection movement when in 1888 the North-Western Provinces High Court decreed that a cow
was not a sacred object. Not surprisingly cow slaughter very often became the pretext of many
2
Hindu-Muslim riots, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century. The killing of the kine
emerged again and again as a troublesome issue on the Indian political scene throughout the
twentieth century and has become a rallying point for communalists in India. The veneration of this
animal has been converted into a symbol of communal identity of the Hindus and the obscurantist
and fundamentalist forces obdurately refuse to appreciate that the sacred cow was not always all
that sacred in the Vedic and subsequent Bràhmanical and non- Bràhmanical traditions and that its
flesh, along with other varieties of meat, was quite often a part of the haute cuisine in early India.
Although the Shin, Muslims of Dardistan in Pakistan, look on the cow as other Muslims do the pig,
avoid direct contact with cows, refuse to drink cow’s milk or use cow dung as fuel and reject beef as
food, the self-styled custodians of non-existent ‘monolithic’ Hinduism assert that the practice of beef
eating was first introduced in India by the followers of Islam who came from outside and are
foreigners in this country, little realising that their Vedic ancestors were also foreigners who ate the
flesh of the cow and various other animals. Fanaticism getting precedence over fact, it is not
surprising that the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Samgha, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and their numerous
outfits have a national ban on cow slaughter on their agenda. So high-geared has been the
propaganda about abstention from beef eating as a characteristic trait of modern day ‘Hinduism’
that when the RSS tried to claim Sikhs as Hindus, it led to a vehement opposition from them and one
of the Sikh youth leaders proposed, Why not slaughter a cow and serve beef in a gurudwara langar?
The response of historical scholarship to the communal perception of Indian food culture, however,
has been sober and scholars have drawn attention to the textual evidence of beef eating which, in
fact, begins to be available from the oldest Indian religious text Rgveda, supposedly of divine origin.
H.H. Wilson, writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, had asserted that the sacrifice of the
horse or of the cow, the gomedha or ashvamedha, appears to have been common in the earliest
periods of the Hindu ritual---a view convincingly put forth by Rajendra Lal Mitra whose article on the
subject formed a chapter of his book The Indo-Aryans published in 1891. In 1894 William Crooke, a
British civil servant, collected an impressive amount of ethnographic data on popular Indian religious
beliefs and practices in his two-volume work and devoted one whole chapter to the respect shown
to animals including the cow. Later in 1912, he published an informative piece on the sanctity of cow
in India. But he also drew attention to the old practice of eating beef and its survival in his own
times. In 1927, L.L. Sunadara Ram made a strong case for cow protection for which he sought
justification from the scriptures of different religions including Hinduism. However he did not deny
that the Vedic people ate beef, though he blamed the Muslims for cow slaughter. Later in the early
forties P. V. Kane in his five-volume monumental work History of Dharmashàstra referred to Vedic
and early Dharmashàstric passages which speak of cow killing and beef eating. Similarly, Laxman
Shastri Joshi, a Sanskritist of unquestionable scholarship, drew attention to the Dharmashàstra
works, which unequivocally support the prevalence of the practice of flesh eating including beef
eating in early India and H.D. Sankalia reinforced the scholarly view on the basis of both literary and
archaeological evidence. While the contribution of the scholars mentioned above cannot be
minimized, the limitation of their work lies in the fact that they have referred to isolated bits of
information on beef, concentrating mainly on the Vedic texts without treating those as part of a
flesh-eating tradition prevalent in India. But as will be shown in the sequel there is sufficient Indian
textual evidence of cattle killing and beef eating widely dispersed over time so as to indicate its
continuity for a long time in the Bràhmanical society and to suggest that the idea of cow’s supposed
sanctity/holiness does not tie up with practices prevalent in Indian society.
3
II
The early Aryans came to India as a semi-nomadic people with a dominantly pastoral economy, in
which cattle rearing played an important role and agriculture occupied a secondary place. They
inherited their pastoral economy from their Indo-European past, which showed up prominently in
different aspects of their life including their religious beliefs and practices. Like pastoralism, they
brought from outside the practice of animal or cattle sacrifice, widely prevalent among the early
Aryans. It has been suggested on the basis of linguistic and archaeological evidence that the practice
of cattle sacrifice of the Vedic period, called pashubandha, can be traced in the chronologically
earlier steppe cultures of Eastern Europe. Nearer home in ancient Iran through which the eastern
branch of Indo-Europeans migrated to India, the Avesta bears ample testimony of animal sacrifice
and the Vedic term yaja (= sacrifice) occurs as yasna in this text. It speaks of the sacrifice of 100 oxen
and 1000 small cattle, in addition to that of 100 horses, 10,000 sheep or goats and 1000 camels just
as the Vedic texts frequently refer to the sacrifice of cattle, horses, sheep, goats and pigs, etc.
The Rigveda frequently refers to the cooking of the flesh of the ox for offering to gods, especially
Indra, the greatest of the Vedic gods. At one place he is stated to have said: they cook for me 15 plus
twenty oxen. At other places he is said to have eaten the flesh of bulls, of one or of a hundred
buffaloes or 300 buffaloes roasted by Agni or a thousand buffaloes. Second in importance to Indra is
Agni who has some 200 hymns to himself in the Rigveda. Born of the mythic parents, Dyaus and
Pçthivã, the god Agni, unlike the licentious Indra, drank Soma moderately, his main food being ghee.
Protector of all men, he is, nevertheless, described in the Rigveda as ‘one whose food is the ox and
the barren cow’. There is indeed nothing in the text to indicate his aversion to the flesh of the cattle
and other animals. On the contrary, horses (ashva), bulls (çshabha), oxen (ukshan), barren (?) cows
(vashà) and rams (mesha) were sacrificed for him. In a passage dealing with the disposal of the dead,
clear reference is made to the burning of a goat which is the share of Agni, and to the use of the
flesh of the cow to protect the body against the flame. Third in order of importance was the god
Soma whose name is derived from a plant which was the source of a heady drink. It has been
suggested that the fundamental and typical Vedic sacrifices are those of Soma in which the killing of
animals including cattle played a crucial role. There was not much variation in the menu of the
Rigvedic gods. Milk, butter, barley, oxen, goats and sheep were their usual food, though some of
them had apparently their preferences. Indra, for example, had a special liking for bulls and the
guardian of the roads, Pusan, being devoid of teeth, ate mush as a Hobson’s choice
The later Vedic texts provide detailed descriptions of sacrifices and frequently refer to ritual cattle
slaughter and the Gopatha Bràhmana alone mentions twenty-one yajas, though all of them may not
have involved animal killing. A bull (vçshabha) was sacrificed to Indra, a dappled cow to the Maruts
and a copper coloured cow to the Ashvins. A cow was also sacrificed to Mitra and Varuna. In most of
the public sacrifices (e.g. ashvamedha, ràjasåya and the vàjapeya) flesh of various types of animals,
especially that of the cow/ox/bull was required. The agnyàdheya, which was a preparatory rite
preceding all public sacrifices, required a cow to be killed. In the ashvamedha (horse sacrifice), the
most important of the Vedic public sacrifices first referred to in the Rigveda and discussed in the
Bràhmanas, more than 600 animals (including the wild ones like boars) and birds were killed and its
finale was marked by the sacrifice of 21 sterile cows. The gosava (cow sacrifice) was an important
component of the ràjasåya and vàjapeya sacrifices and in the latter, the atapatha Bràhmana tells us,
a sterile spotted cow was offered to Maruts. Similarly a sterile cow was sacrificed in the agnishtoma
4
just as the immolation of seventeen dwarf heifers under three was an important element in the
pacashàradãyasava (darshapårnamàsa). The killing of animals including cattle (pashu) figures in
several other yajas including càturmàsya, sautràmani, and independent animal sacrifice called
pashubandha or niruóhapashubandha, which was also an important component of many sacrifices.
The Taittirãya Bràhmana, thus, unambiguously refers to the sacrificial killing of the cow which is
verily food (atho annam vai gauþ), and praises Agastya for his sacrifice of a hundred bulls. That the
flesh of the sacrificial victim was meant for human consumption is clear from passages, which
discuss the mode of cutting up the immolated animal and the distribution of its flesh by the samitàça
who kills the victim by strangulation. There is thus evidence to show that the flesh of the sacrificed
cattle was consumed by various categories of people.
Cattle and other animals were killed not only in public sacrifices but also in ordinary and domestic
rites of daily life. The later Vedic and post- Vedic texts mention many rites and rituals associated
with agricultural and other activities and, in at least some of them, the killing of animals including
cattle was de rigueur. Among the rites relating to agriculture, which tended to become stable from
the later Vedic period onwards, mention may be made of the shålagava (sacrifice of “the ox on the
spit”). In this sacrifice a spit-ox was killed for Rudra; its tail and skin etc were thrown into the fire and
its blood was poured out on the kusha or darbha grass for the snakes.
An interesting rite repeatedly mentioned in the texts from the later Vedic period onwards is the one
relating to the reception of guests and is called arghya, or more popularly, madhuparka. The killing
of the kine to honour guests seems to have been prevalent from earlier times. The Rigveda mentions
the word atithinãr, which has been interpreted as ‘cows fit for guests’, and refers to a Vedic hero,
Atithigva, whose name literally means slaying cows for guests. The cow was also killed on festive
occasions like marriage. A Rgvedic passage, for instance, refers to the slaughter of a cow on the
occasion of marriage and, later, in the Aitareya Bràhmana, we are told, that if the ruler of men
comes as a guest or any one else deserving of honour comes, people kill a bull or a cow. It was
performed in honour of special guests, namely the teacher, the priest, a snàtaka, father-in-law,
paternal and maternal uncles, a friend and a king. Their reception not only included the offering of a
mixture of curds and honey (whence the term madhuparka was derived) but, more importantly, of a
cow which was either immolated or let loose according to their wishes, though in no case the rite
was performed without beef or flesh-meat. Several Gçhyasåtras describe madhuparka both
independently as well as part of the marriage ceremonies in which cow was slain more than once in
honour of guests. In subsequent times Pànini, therefore, uses the term goghna for a guest.
The Gçhyasåtras also attest to the use of the hide of the bull or the cow in domestic rituals like the
simantonnayana (lit. parting of the hair of the woman upwards) ceremony performed in the fourth
month of pregnancy and the upanayana (investiture ceremony preceding the beginning of one’s
studenthood) implying cattle killing. Cattle, in fact, seem to have been killed even on what would
appear to be a flimsy ground to many of us. Thus if one were eager to have a learned son with a long
life he could find solution in the Upanishadic precept which permitted such a person to eat a mess of
veal or beef or of other flesh with rice and ghee, though six months after the birth the child itself
could be fed on the flesh of birds (e.g., bhàradvàjã, tittira, kçkasà etc) and fish.
The practice of cattle killing was also intimately connected with the cult of the dead, which occupies
considerable space in the Vedic as well as post-Vedic texts. One of the several Rigvedic passages
5
relating to cremation, for example, refers to the use of the skin and the thick fat of the cow to cover
the dead body and the Atharvaveda at one place speaks of a bull presumably being burnt along with
the dead to ride with in the next world. The Gçhyasåtras, elaborately describing the funerary
procedure, provide ample evidence of cattle killing at the time of cremation and of the practice of
distributing different limbs of the animal on those of the corpse. The cremation was followed by
several rites performed in honour of the Manes, variously mentioned as pitçryaja, mahàpitçryaja and
ashtakà in the Vedic passages and as some other types of shràddha discussed in the post-Vedic texts,
especially the Gçhyasåtras. The central point of these rites was that the Manes were to be well fed
and this could be possible only if beef was offered to them. Therefore apart from other animals,
cows and / or bulls were slain in shràddhas, though the degree of satisfaction they derived from the
shràddhas seems to have varied sometimes according to the animal offered. However not
everything depended on their choice and preference for beef was generally unquestioned. After all,
the shràddha, apart from being a ritual to please the ancestors, was also a feast for the community
members, especially the bràhmans, whose preference for beef is clearly indicated in the texts. There
were several other occasions when cattle were slaughtered for community. One of them was the
gavàmayana, a sessional sacrifice, performed by the bràhmans, culminating in an extravagant
bacchanal frolicsome festival, mahàvrata. Similarly the gçhamedha was some kind of a lavish
communal feast in which an unspecified number of cows were slain not in the strict ritual manner
but in the crude and profane manner.
Evidently then, judging by the copious textual references—not to mention the massive
archaeological evidence, there is little doubt that the early Aryans in the northwestern part of the
Indian subcontinent and their successors in the middle Gangetic valley slaughtered animals and
cattle including the cow whose flesh they ate with great relish. Although flesh eating was forbidden
for a Vedic teacher during the months between upàkarma and utsarjana, according to a
Dharmasåtra text the flesh of cows and bulls was pure and may be eaten. Not surprisingly, beef was
the favourite food of the much respected sage from Mithila, Yàjavalkya, who is said to have made
the well-known statement that he would continue to eat the flesh of cows and oxen so long as it was
tender (amsala), though his obdurate position may also imply that already in his time an opinion
against beef eating was gaining ground.
Despite all this, it has been argued that the cow was described as aghnya (unslayable) in the Vedic
texts. The term aghnya/aghnyà (lit. not to be slain) has been used at four places in the ègveda and
the Atharvaveda as a masculine noun equivalent to bull or ox and 42 times with a feminine ending to
mean a cow. Attention has also been drawn to the use of words for cow as epithet or in simile and
metaphor with reference to entities of highest religious significance, though these occurrences do
not indicate their primary sense with reference to the actual animal. Neither of the two types of
evidence adduced in favour of the sacredness of the Vedic cow, indicates the basically unslayable
character of cows. On the contrary the references seem to emphasize their economic value. When
slaughtered they provided food to the people and their priests and the atapatha Bràhmana states
unambiguously that meat is the best kind of food. When milked the cows gave additional
nourishment not only through milk but also through a variety of dairy products, which formed part
of human diet as well as of the Vedic sacrificial oblation (havis). They produced oxen, which were
used as draught animals. The cattle hide was used in a variety of ways. The bowstring (jya) was made
of a thong of cowhide - a practice that may have continued in later times. The different parts of the
chariot were tied together with leather straps, which were also needed for binding the arrow to the
6
shaft. The goad for driving the animals was made of cow’s skin or tail. Leather strings were used not
only for making snares but also a kind of musical instrument called godhà. The utility and importance
of the cattle therefore inspired warriors to fight wars (gavishti) for them and it is likely that part of
the cattle stock of the vanquished tribes was killed in course of the raids. All this goes against the
popular notion of the inviolability of the cow throughout the Vedic period and proves that it was
certainly killed for sacrifice (yaja) and food as well as for other requirements, notwithstanding some
Atharvavedic passages, which have been interpreted as a strong voice of protest against the
slaughter of the cow.
It seems likely, however, that the cow belonging to the bràhman came to acquire a certain degree of
inviolability. It is known that the cow was an ideally preferred form of dakshinà (sacrificial fee) given
to the bràhman priest. There are many references to the Vedic bràhman’s interest in his dakshinà
(the good milch cow), and to the dire consequences that will befall one who withholds it or injures
or misappropriates it and the corresponding benefit accruing to him who bestows it. The special
importance attached to the bràhman’s cow, however, cannot be stretched to argue that the Vedic
cow was inherently sacrosanct and unslayable, though in the later Vedic period we see the
Upanishads questioning the efficacy of animal sacrifice as a means of achieving self realization,,
reading new meanings in the sacrifices, and propounding the notion of ahimsà, even if some of them
continued to betray a friendly attitude to the sacrificial cult.
Although the Vedic and subsequent texts present divergent perceptions of ritual butchery of animals
including the cattle, the general Upanishadic idea of its futility gained in strength and may have
culminated in the doctrine of ahimsà, which is the defining trait of Buddhism and Jainism. These two
religions, as is well known, forcefully challenged the Vedic sacrificial slaughter of animals including
the cattle and paved way for the emergence of stable agrarian settlements, state society and other
related developments, though the undermining of Bràhmanical world of sacrifice did not lead to the
total disappearance of the cattle flesh or other meat types from the Indian dietary menu. Gautama
Buddha, despite his vehement opposition of the Vedic animal sacrifice, was not averse to eating of
meat. He is known to have eaten beef and pork and the texts amply indicate that flesh meat very
well suited the Buddhist palate. Ashoka, whose compassion for animals is undeniable, allowed
certain specified animals to be killed for his kitchen. In fact, neither Asoka’s list of animals exempted
from slaughter nor the Arthashàstra of Kautilya specifically mentions cow as unslayable. The cattle
were killed for food throughout the Mauryan period. Like Buddhism, Jainism also enthusiastically
took up cudgels for non-violence but it did not develop the sacred cow concept.
III
Despite the Upanishadic, Buddhist and Jaina advocacy of ahimsà, the practice of ritual and random
killing of animals including the cattle continued in the post-Mauryan centuries. The law book of
Manu (200 BC-AD 200), which is the most representative of the legal texts and has much to say on
the lawful and forbidden food, and, like the earlier law books, mentions the animals whose flesh
could be eaten. Manu’s list includes the porcupine, hedgehog, iguana, rhinoceros, tortoise and the
hare and all those domestic animals having teeth in one jaw only, the only exception being the
camel, and, it is significant that the cow is not excluded from the list of edible animals. Manu asserts
that animals were created for the sake of sacrifice, that killing on ritual occasions is non-killing and
injury (himsà) as enjoined by the Veda (vedavihitahimsà) is known to be non-injury. In the section
7
dealing with rules for times of distress, Manu recalls the legendary examples of the most virtuous
bràhmans of the days of yore who ate ox-meat and dog-meat to escape death from starvation
(X.105-9). Since Manu does not mention beef eating as taboo one can infer that he did not treat cow
as sacrosanct---in fact the killing of cow and other cattle on ritual occasions (madhuparka, shràddha
etc), according to his commentator Medhàtithi (9th century), was in keeping with the Vedic and
post- Vedic practice.
Yàjavalkya (AD 100-300), like Manu, discusses the rules regarding lawful and forbidden food.
Although his treatment of the subject is less detailed, he does not differ radically from him.
Yàjavalkya mentions the specific animals (deer, sheep, goat, boar, rhinoceros etc) and birds (e.g.
partridge) whose flesh could satisfy the Manes According to him a student, teacher, king, close
friend and son-in-law should be offered arghya every year and a priest should be offered
madhuparka on all ritual occasions. He further enjoins that a learned bràhman (shrotriya) should be
welcomed with a big ox or goat (mahoksham và mahàjam và shrotriyàyopakalpayet) delicious food
and sweet words. The lawgivers generally accept as lawful all those sacrifices, which, according to
them, have Vedic sanction. The sacrificial slaughter of animals and domesticated bovines, as we
have seen, was a Vedic practice and therefore may have been fairly common among the
Bràhmanical circles during the early Christian centuries and even well into the later half of the first
millennium AD. It would be, however, unrealistic to assume that the dharmic precept of restricting
animal slaughter to ritual occasions was always taken seriously either by bràhmans for whom the
legal injunctions were meant or by other sections of society. It is not surprising, therefore, that
Bçhaspati (AD 300-500), while discussing the importance of local customs, says that in Madhyadesha
the artisans eat cows (madhyadeshe karmakaràþ shilpinashca gavàsinaþ).
The evidence from the epics is unambiguous. Most of the characters in the Mahàbhàrata are meat
eaters, but what is more, it makes a laudatory reference to the king Rantideva in whose kitchen two
thousand cows were butchered everyday, their flesh, along with grains, being distributed among the
bràhmans (III.208.8-9). Similarly the Ràmàyana of Vàlmãki makes frequent reference to the killing of
animals including the cow for sacrifice as well as food. Ràma was born after his father Dasharatha
performed a big sacrifice involving the slaughter of a large number of animals declared edible by the
Dharmashàstras, which sanction ritual killing of the kine. Sãtà, while crossing the Yamunà, assures
her that she would worship her with thousand cows and a hundred jars of wine when Ràma
accomplishes his vow. Her fondness for deer meat drives her husband crazy enough to kill Màrãca, a
deer in disguise. Bharadvàja welcomes Ràma by slaughtering a fatted calf in his honour. The
evidence of the Sanskrit epics finds support from the earliest Buddhist Tamil epic, Manimekalai (6th
century AD?) which relates the story of one âpputiran (lit. the son of a cow) who tried to rescue a
cow from the bràhmans eager to kill it for sacrifice and food.
Even if we leave aside the references to the therapeutic use of beef in early Indian medical
literature, the continuity of the tradition of eating flesh including that of the cattle is also echoed in
early Indian secular literature till late times. In the Gupta period, Kalidasa alludes to the story of
Rantideva who killed numerous cows every day in his kitchen. More than two centuries later,
Bhavabhåti (AD 700) refers to two instances of guest reception, which included the killing of a heifer.
Ràjashekhara (10th century) mentions the practice of killing an ox or a goat in honour of a guest and
Somadeva (11th century) narrates the story of seven bràhman boys who ate a cow. In the 12th
century rãharsha mentions a variety of non-vegetarian delicacies served at a dazzling marriage feast
8
and refers to two interesting instances of cow killing, though in the same century the Càlukya king
Someshvara indicates his preference for pork, which, despite the lawgivers’ abhorrence for it,
continued to be sacrificed and eaten by non-Muslims in India.
IV
The above references, albeit limited in number, indicate that the ancient practice of killing the kine
for food continued till about at least the 12th --13th century, there is considerable literary evidence
to show that even when the practice of eating beef was strongly discouraged by Brahmans and fast
falling into desuetude, its memory was preserved in later texts. For example, Jayaratha, a Kashmirian
commentator (twelfth century) of the Tantràloka of Abhinavagupta cites the Vãràvalã Tantra to say
that the ancient çsis ate both beef and human flesh. Evidence of this kind is also available from the
commentaries on the kàvya literature and the earlier Dharmashàstra texts. Among the
commentators on the secular literature, Cànóupanóita (late 13th century) from Gujarat, Narahari
(14th century) from Telengana in Andhra Pradesh, and Mallinàtha (14th-15th century), who is
associated with the king Devaràya II of Vidyànagara (Vijayanagara), clearly indicate that, in earlier
times, the cow was done to death for rituals and hence for food. As late as the 18th century
Ghanashyàma, a minister of a Tanjore ruler, states that the killing of cow in honour of a guest was
the ancient rule.
Similarly the authors of Dharmashàstra commentaries and religious digests from the 9th century
onwards keep alive the memory of the archaic practice of beef eating and some of them even go so
far as to permit eating beef in specific circumstances. For example, Medhàtithi (9th century),
probably a Kashmirian bràhman, says that a bull or ox was killed in honour of a ruler or any one
deserving to be honoured and unambiguously allows eating the flesh of cow (govyajamàmsam) on
ritual occasions. Several other writers of exegetical works seem to lend support to this view, though
some times indirectly. Vishvaråpa (9th century), a bràhman from Malwa and probably a pupil of
aïkara, Vijàneshvara (11th century), who may have lived not far from Kalyana in modern Karnataka,
Haradatta (12th century), also a southerner (dakshinàtya), Lakshmãdhara (12th century), a minister
of the Gahaówala king, Hemàdri (late 13th century), a minister of the Yàdavas of Devagiri,
Narasimha/ Nçsimha (14th century), possibly from southern India, and Mitra Mishra (17th century)
from Gopàcala (Gwalior) support the practice of killing a cow on occasions like guest-reception and
shràddha in ancient times. As recently as the early 20th century, Madana Upàdhyàya from Mithila
refers to the ritual slaughter of milch cattle in the days of yore. Thus even when the Dharmashàstra
commentators view cow killing with disfavour, they generally admit that it was an ancient practice
and that it was to be avoided in the kali age, though there is reason to believe that beef eating
continued among the Tantric circles.
V
While there is massive evidence of beef eating until very late, there is much in the normative texts to
indicate that the bràhmans began to discourage it from about the middle of the first millennium AD
when the Indian society began to be gradually feudalized leading to major socio-cultural
transformation. This phase of transition, first described in the epic and Purànic passages as kaliyuga,
saw many changes and modification in social norms and customs. The Bràhmanical religious texts
now begin to speak of many earlier practices as forbidden in the kaliyuga --- practices which came to
be known as kalivarjyas. While the number of kalivarjyas swelled up over time, most of the relevant
9
texts mention cow killing as forbidden in the kali. According to some early medieval lawgivers a cow
killer was an untouchable and one incurred sin even by talking to him. They increasingly associated
cow slaughter and beef eating with the proliferating number of untouchable castes. It is, however,
interesting that they consider the killing of cow as no more than minor behavioural aberrations like
cleaning one’s teeth with one’s fingers and eating only salt or soil. None of the prescriptive texts
enumerate cow killing as a major offence (mahàpàtaka) and they provide easy escape routes by
laying down expiatory procedures for intentional as well as inadvertent killing of the cow. This may
imply that cattle killing may not have been uncommon in society and the atonements were
prescribed merely to discourage eating of cattle flesh. To what extent the Dharmashàstric
injunctions were effective, however, remains a matter of speculation; for the possibility of at least
some members eating beef on the sly cannot be ruled out.
VI
Although cow killing and beef eating gradually came to be viewed as a sin and a source of pollution
from the early medieval period, the cow and its products (milk, curds, clarified butter, dung and
urine) or their mixture called pacagavya had been assuming a purificatory role from much earlier
times. The Vedic texts attest to the ritual use of cow’s milk and milk products, but the term
pacagavya occurs for the first time in the Baudhàyana Dharmasåtra. The law books of Manu, Vishnu,
Vasishtha, Yàjavalkya and those of several later lawgivers like Atri, Devala and Paràshara mention
the use of the mixture of the five products of the cow for both purification and expiation. The
commentaries and religious digests, most of which belong to the medieval period, abound in
references to the purificatory role of the pacagavya. The underlying assumption in all these cases is
that the pacagavya is pure. But several Dharmashàstra texts forbid its use by women and the lower
castes. If a sådra drinks pacagavya, we are told, he goes to hell.
It is curious that the prescriptive texts, which repeatedly refer to the purificatory role of the cow,
also provide much evidence of the notion of pollution and impurity associated with this animal.
According to Manu (V.125) the food smelt by the cow has to be purified. Other early lawgivers like
Vishnu (XXIII.38) and Yàjavalkya (I.189) also express similar views and the latter says unambiguously
that while the mouth of the goat and horse is pure that of the cow is not. The notion of the impurity
of the cow’s mouth, reinforced by most of the later legal texts, runs counter to the ideas about the
purificatory role of the cow.
It is evident from the above that the Bràhmanical texts abound in ambiguous and contradictory
statements about the cow. But despite this the Hindutva forces have been trumpeting the idea of its
sacredness and unslayability as a characteristic trait of Hinduism. While the effectiveness of the
Dharmashàstric injunctions remains largely a matter of speculation, the possibility of at least some
members of society eating beef cannot be ruled out. As recently as the late 19th century Swami
Vivekananda was alleged to have eaten beef during his stay in America, though he strongly defended
his action. Similarly in early twentieth century Mahatma Gandhi spoke of the hypocrisy of the
orthodox Hindus who do not so much as hesitate or inquire when during illness the doctor …
prescribes them beef tea. Even today the practice of eating beef is quite common among the Dalits
throughout the country which is why the members of upper castes in many parts of the country view
it as impure and polluting. But beef is a common dietary item in most parts of the north-eastern
India where it is not considered a source of pollution. This is largely true of the southernmost state
10
of Kerala where nearly 80% of the people including 72 Hindu communities (except the bràhmans)
eat beef in preference to the expensive mutton and lamb, despite the fact that the Hindutva forces
have been persuading them to go easy on it. Recent statistics of 2000 show that the meat India
produces most is beef (1.44 million tones) and buffalo meat (1.42 million tones) and the per capita
consumption of beef/buffalo in India is 2.8 kg, about half that of fish, but more than twice the
average intake of mutton, pork and poultry. This indicates that beef eating must be quite common
among meat-eaters of all religions, including the Hindus---- a fact also supported by the surveys of
butchers in different parts of the country.
Needless to say, then, that the image of the cow projected by Indian textual traditions, especially the
Bràhmanical- Dharmashàstric works, over the centuries is polymorphic. Its story through the
millennia is full of inconsistencies and has not always been in conformity with dietary practices
prevalent in society. It was killed and yet the killing was not killing. When it was not slain, mere
remembering the old practice of butchery satisfied the bràhmans. Its five products including faeces
and urine have been pure but its mouth has been considered impure. Yet through these incongruous
attitudes and puzzling paradoxes the Indian cow has struggled its way to sanctity and its veneration
is being bandied about as a characteristic trait of Hinduism though she has failed to achieve the
status of a goddess and earn a temple in her honour. On the contrary it is often found bumbling
between the luxurious limos of the privileged and the pushcarts carts of the poor, causing traffic
snarls in Indian metros and, browsing on heaps of garbage, ranging from inedible throw-outs to the
stinking carrion. Not surprisingly, the holiness of the cow is elusive--as elusive as Hindu identity
itself!
******
(2) Commissar Sadhvi’s Cow Agenda by Ram Puniyani
It is generally believed that BJP victory in the three assembly elections was on the plank of Bijali,
Sadak, Pani (BSP). Whatever be the truth of that, the so-called Hindutva agenda is starkly visible in
these states with the BJP Governments firmly in power. MP has a unique distinction of having
a ’World Renouncer’, Sadhvi as the chief commissar of the state. And true to the Sadhvi spirit, she
has been bringing in the clerical presence in the matters of state. Right from the word go, i.e. her
swearing in ceremony, she has brought in Hindutva into her style of functioning and polices. Not
only that her Sadhu brethren were the guests of honor at the swearing ceremony, she also lost no
time in banning liquor and non vegetarian food in the three ’holy’ cities and to back it up she is now
giving a ‘cow tilt’ to MPs economy by giving primacy to establishing Goshala (Cow sheds)(Feb 2004)
Many a previous RSS-VHP campaigns around giving the status of mother to cow went un responded
so far. With Sadhvi Uma finally the ‘Cow mother’ is getting a new place in Indian society. In a society
where the young mothers are facing increasing deprivations ‘Cow mother’ will be given the place of
honor in the second Laboratory of Hindu Rashtra, Madhya Pradesh.
Why is cow a holy animal, why has she to be given a place above other animals which are equally if
not more useful is a long story. Overall cow is the major emotional symbol of the upper caste
Hindutva politics, next only to Lord Ram. Lord Ram has been milked heavily for electoral purposes,
Ram Janmbhumi-campaign was acknowledged even by Advani as having given a fillip in the politics,
and now its cow’s turn to swell the quantum of the electoral milk for this politics.
11
One recalls, just a couple of years ago Prof. D.N. Jha a historian from Delhi university had been
experiencing the nightmares of ‘threats to life’ from anonymous callers who were trying to prevail
upon him not to go ahead with the publication of his well researched work, ‘Holy Cow: Beef in Indian
Dietary traditions’. It is a work of serious scholarship based on authentic sources in tune with
methods of scientific research in History. The book demonstrates that contrary to the popular beliefs
even today large number of Indians, the indigenous people in particular and many other
communities in general consume beef unmindful of the dictates of the Hindutva forces who confer
the status of mother to her. Currently 72 communities in Kerala-not all of them untouchable
perhaps-prefer beef to the expensive mutton and the Hindutva forces are trying to prevail upon
them also to stop eating the same.
Jha breaks the myth that Muslim rulers introduced beef eating in India. Much before the advent of
Islam in India beef had been associated with Indian dietary practices. Also that it is not tenable to
hold that dietary habits are a mark of community identity.
A survey of ancient Indian scriptures, especially Vedas shows that amongst the nomadic, pastoral
Aryans, who settled here, animal sacrifice was a dominant feature of theirs’ till the emergence of
settled agriculture. Cattle were the major property during this phase and they offered the same to
propitiate the gods. Wealth was equated with ownership of the cattle. Many a gods like Indra and
Agni are described to be having especial preferences for different types of flesh-Indra had weakness
for bull’s meat and Agni for bulls’ and cows’. It is recorded that the Maruts and the Asvins were also
offered cows. In Vedas there is a mention of around 250 animals out of which at least 50 were
supposed to be fit for sacrifice. In Mahabharata there is a mention of a king named Rantideva who
achieved great fame by distributing food grains and beef to Brahmins. Taittiriya Brahman
categorically tells us: ’Verily the cow is food’ (atho annam via gauh) and Yajnavalkya’s insistence on
eating the tender (amsala) flesh of the cow is well known. Even later Brahminical texts provide the
evidence for eating beef.
In therapeutic section of Charak Samhita (pages 86-87) flesh of cow is prescribed as a medicine for
various diseases. It is also prescribed for making soup. It is emphatically advised as a cure for
irregular fever, consumption, and emaciation. The fat of the cow is recommended for debility and
rheumatism.
With the rise of agricultural economy the massive changes occurring in the society changed the
perceptions of people at large. At the time there were ritualistic practices, with which Brahmins
were identified. Even Manusmriti did not prohibit the consumption of beef. Buddha attacked these
practices, which involved the sacrifices. There were sacrifices, which involved 500 Oxen, 500 male
calves, 500 female calves and 500 sheep to be tied to the sacrificial pole for slaughter. Buddha
pointed out that aswamedh, purusmedha, vajapeya sacrifices did not produce good results.
According to a story in Digha Nikaya, when Buddha was touring Magadha, a Brahmin called
Kutadanta was preparing for a sacrifice with 700 bulls and 700 goats. Buddha intervened and
stopped him. His rejection of animal sacrifice and emphasis on non-injury to animals assumed a new
significance in the context of new agriculture, which required cattle.
The emphasis on non-violence by Buddha was not blind or rigid. He did taste beef and it is well
known that he died due to eating pork. Emperor Ashok after converting to Buddhism did not turn to
vegetarianism. He restricted the number of animals to be killed for the royal kitchen.
12
So where do matters change and how did cow become a symbol of faith, reverence and assumed
the status of ‘mother hood’. Over a period of time mainly after the emergence of Buddhism or
rather as an accompaniment of the Brahminical attack on the Buddhism, the practices started
changing. The threat posed by Buddhism to Brahminical value system was too severe. In response to
low caste slipping away from the grip of Brahminism, the battle was taken at all the levels. At
philosophical level Shankar reasserted the supremacy of Brahminical values, at political level King
Pushyamitra Shung ensured the physical attack on Buddhist monks, at the level of symbols King
Shashank got the Bodhi tree destroyed. One of the arsenals of rise of Buddhism was the protection
of cattle wealth, which was ideally, needed for the agricultural economy. In a way while Brahminism
‘succeeded’ in banishing Buddhism from India but it had to also to transform itself from the ‘animal
sacrifice’ state to the one which could be in tune with the times while preserving their own interests.
It is here that this ideology took up cow as a symbol of their ideological march. But unlike Buddha
whose pronouncements were based on reason, the counteraction of Brahminical ideology took the
form of a blind faith based assertion. So while Buddha’s Non-Violence was for the preservation of
animal wealth for the social and compassionate reasons the counter was based purely on
symbolism.The followers of Brahmincal ideology accuse Buddha for ‘weakening’ India due to his
doctrine of non-violence. But he was not a cow worshipper or vegetarian in the current Brahmincal
sense.
Despite the gradual rigidification of Brahminical ‘cow as mother’ stance, large sections of low castes
continued the practice of beef eating. The followers of Buddhism continued to eat flesh including
beef. Since Brahmanism is the dominant religious tradition, Babur the first Mughal emperor in his
will to his son Humayun, in deference to these notions, advised his son Humayun to respect the Cow
and avoid cow slaughter. The issue came back with the construction of Hindutva ideology and
politics in response to the rising Indian national movement, and asserted the demand for ban on
cow slaughter. In post independence India RSS repeatedly raised this issue as a mass campaign but
without any response to its call till 1980s.
While one must respect the sentiments of those who worship cow and regard her as their mother,
but to initiate the state sponsored step to promote these emotional symbolisms is travesty of
democracy. Madhya Pradesh correctly needs Bijali, Sadak Pani. Cow, bullocks and buffalos do need a
tender caring; the ecology has to be respected. But can it take precedence over human problems?
As such there is no tussle between communities as for as dietary habits and respect for other’s
tradition and faiths are concerned. While adhering to one’s own faith, one should be tolerant to
others faiths and beliefs. The measures as being initiated by the Sadhvi do smack of imposition of
her own belief systems on the state as a whole and that too at the expense of state exchequer.
******
(3) The Dilemma of Cow Slaughter in India By Anshul Kumar Pandey
21 January, 2012
“Hindus commit no sin, if they cannot prevent cow slaughter at the hands of Muslims, and they do
sin grievously when in order to save the cow, they quarrel with the Muslims.” -Mahatma Gandhi
13
The Madhya Pradesh government’s recently passed ‘GauVadh Pratishedh (Sanshodhan) Act 2012’ is
a ridiculous piece of legislation and should be thoroughly criticized and debunked for its innate
communal overtones. As a piece of legislation, it has set up new standards of intellectual and
legislative bankruptcy of the political class of Madhya Pradesh and has exposed its obsession with
injecting communal poison into the society.
It is not for the first time that such an act has been passed in any state in India . Such poorly
conceived but equally ridiculous rules and regulations prohibiting cow slaughter exist in other states
too, such as Maharashtra, Orissa, Jharkhand etc. However, it is in the BJP ruled states that an
attempt, to give communal policies a legislative facade, is being made. This exposes the larger
conspiracy to turn these states into hotspots of communalism inside and under a secular country.
Meanwhile, the so called secular parties of the country have chosen to act like mute spectators to
this entire drama and have turned a blind eye to this whole issue.
Commenting upon the preposterousness of such an act, Javed Anand, co-editor of the online
magazine ‘Communalism Combat’, opined: “Under its new law, a humble head constable upwards,
“any person authorized by a competent authority” has the power to enter, inspect and search any
premises “where he has a reason to believe that an offence has been, is being or is likely to be
committed and take necessary action.”
“In a state where as often as not the police functions as the private militia of the Saffron
Brotherhood, who is to determine, and on what basis, whether a chunk of meat stored in the fridge
or simmering on the burner comes from a Buffalo (not prohibited) or from a cow or its progeny?” (1)
It is clear from the ambiguous and vague wording of this new act that this piece of legislation is not
specifically designed and enacted to curb cow slaughter, but is a tool to harass the minority
community, particularly the Muslims, and establish Hindu supremacy in the state. It is ironic that for
the devotees of a religion that has long held the tradition of ‘bali’ (sacrifice of any animal, even a
cow) at the altar of a deity to please it, cow slaughter by members of a different religious community
should whip up such public outcry. This not only shows the double standards of those advocating a
ban against cow slaughter, but also shows the sheer illogical will in a failure to recognize that beef
forms an important part in the food chain of the nature and that constitutionally too, slaughter of a
cow cannot be prohibited even under section 256 of the IPC.
HISTORICAL ROOTS OF COW PROTECTIONSIM
For such a ridiculous piece of legislation could have entered the hallowed halls of a state legislature
and come out unscathed in the form of a law, points to a strong historical precedent on the whole
issue. Indeed, historically, the cow has been upheld as a holy animal and has been worshipped by
eminent national leaders from Swami DayanandSaraswati to Mahatma Gandhi. Apparently, the
firebrand Maharatta nationalist and orator, BalGangadharTilak, got so perturbed by the issue that he
bellowed in exasperation to a bewildered crowd “Kill me but spare the cow!”
In his magnum opus on ancient India, “The Wonder That Was India ”, the celebrated Indologist, Mr.
A.L.Basham, while commenting upon the Political life and thought of the state writes:
“In later times, the lives of many animals were protected by law, especially, that of the cow. The
story of the Chola king who ordered the execution of his own son for the accidental killing of the calf
14
is certainly a legend, and we need not believe that Kumarapala (c. 1143-1172), the Jaina king of the
Caulukya dynasty of Gujarat, so strictly enforced non violence that heavy fines were inflicted on
people who killed fleas, but these stories show the climate of opinion in medieval India. In the later
period, the wanton killing of a cow was among the most serious of crimes.” (2)
However, raising some ambiguity over the contention that it was strictly forbidden to slaughter cows
in ancient India, Mr. Basham writes:
“The inviobility of the cow was of slow growth. Though, there seems to have been some feeling
against the killing of cows even in Vedic times. Ashoka did not forbid the slaughter of cattle, and
oxen, at any rate, was killed for food even later. But the ARTHASHASTRA refers to the existence of
herds of aged, diseased and sterile cattle and it therefore appears that even before the Christian era
they were normally allowed to die a natural death at least in some parts of the country. The same
work suggests that those who kill cattle should be put to death but from the context it is clear that
this prescription applies only to killers of beasts stolen from the royal herds.” (3)
In modern India, cow slaughter as a political issue first propped up in the early 1880s in the Punjab,
where the members of the Kuki tribe tried to extract political dividends by flaring up communal
tension in the area. However, violence soon broke out and the British authorities intervened to
restore law and order and peace was again established. But cow slaughter as a strong political issue
had marked its debut.
Swami Dayanand Saraswati, who, through his Arya Samaj, sought to eradicate the ills of Hinduism by
abolishing child marriage, idol worship, polytheism etc., threw his weight behind the cow protection
movement by establishing various cow protection committees in various parts of the country which
whipped up communal tension between the rival communities and finally culminated in the
communal riots of 1893 which started from Mau in Azamgarh, but soon spread over various parts of
the country.
Delving further into the politics of Cow Protectionism, Sekhar Bandopadhyay, professor at Victoria
University of Wellington, New Zealand, in his book “From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern
India” writes:
“Extremist politics and Hindu revivalism – the impact of cow killing riots in North India, for example –
by reinforcing the social fault lines further facilitated Muslim mobilization. The Hindu bhadralok in
Bengal often looked down upon the Muslims with contempt. The Hindu ‘jatras’ or rural theatrical
performances often indulged in vilification of Muslim historical persona, which was not very lightly
taken by the anjumans or the mullahs. The cumulative effect of all these factors was the
accumulation of social tension which ultimately culminated in Communal Violence.” (4)
For a Muslim, beef presented a cheap source of nutrition and diet, cheaper than say, goat meat.
However, with the growing objections of the Hindu majority, beef not only became a symbolic
gesture of asserting independence, but it also took the form of an icon of Muslim cultural identity. It
was a tool of rebellion against the oppression perpetrated by the Hindu majority and in it the
Muslim community began to see their method of asserting their rights and religious practices.
15
Throughout the playing out of this communal propaganda, the reaction of the so called secular
parties, most importantly The Congress provided an insight into the religious sentimentality
associated with the issue of cow slaughter. According to Mr. Bandopadhyay:
“…in its 1888 session, Congress passed a rule that no resolution would be accepted if an
overwhelming majority of Hindu or Muslim delegates objected to it ….But these symbolic gestures
did not remove the apprehension of the Muslims, while the crucial silence of the Congress during
the cow killing riots of 1893 added further to such misgivings. Congress was not directly involved in
the Cow protection movement, nor did it sympathize with this cause; but by speaking against it, they
felt, they might lose the support of the Hindu constituency. Its silence was misinterpreted – for
legitimate reasons – as concurrence; and as John McLane has shown, Muslim participation in
Congress sessions began to decline rather dramatically after 1893. Yet there was no major congress
endeavor to bring the Muslims back into its fold.” (5)
These words would have still rung true had Mr. Bandopadhyay would have been writing about the
present policies of secular parties like the Congress in the context of cow slaughter even today. One
may even go as far as to add, that the secular parties of the country bear as much responsibility for
the communalization of Indian polity as much as the communal forces, because of their inability to
properly demonstrate to the Indian public, the dangers of Communalization, right from their very
origin.
COMBATING THE COMMUNAL SCOURGE
One can then conclusively argue that the recently passed Madhya Pradesh bill banning cow
slaughter is not an isolated act of communal bias, but is a small part in the larger scheme of things to
divide the polity of this country on the basis of religion.
The propensity of the hyper religious audience is such that the reason and rationality of a particular
argument finds itself in a cul-de-sac surrounded by angry chants of tradition and culture. No debate
should take place. Dissent should be quelled. Every logic should be scuttled in the name of faith and
belief. Anyone who tries to differ and argue is branded as a heretic and his/her actions are labeled as
sacrilegious. An attempt, then, is made to steer the whole discourse into a majority vs. minority
issue and to exclude the many in the name of the most. Such reasoning is already expected as this
logically crippled and adrenaline pumped audience proceeds to prepare a lethal cocktail of the
nationalistic, the religious and the majoritarian. Even nationalism comes to be defined to mean
majoritarianism and the domain of ‘we’ is then split into ‘us’ and ‘they’. Religion is then used more
as an instrument of hatred and propaganda, rather than a positive force of tolerance and
compassion. Faith vanishes and the only purpose of religion remains to act like a torchbearer of
majoritarian identity in order to gain a share in the spoils collected through vitiating the political
spectrum. This is the religious right’s ideal nation. This is their dream come true.
But while this may be a dream for a considerably large proportion of the country, it can only be
humbly described as a terrible nightmare which would serve as a precursor to doom for secular
bhadralok scattered throughout the country. The need of the moment is to rise up to the occasion
and make the people of the country aware about such perfidious legislation being passed by the
ultra-religious forces and to combat the scourge of communalism. The time is over when we could
16
have chucked such laws out of the window labeling them as acts of insanity. Aggressive secularism is
the way forward.
NOTES
(1) Javed Anand, “Using the Cow”, Indian Express, January 5, 2012
(2) A.L.Basham, The State: Political Life and Thought in “The Wonder that was India”, Picador India,
pp. 120
(3) A.L.Basham, Op.Cit. pp.196
(4) SekharBandopadhyay, Early Nationalism in “From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India
”, Orient Blackswan, pp.269
(5) SekharBandopadhyay, Op.Cit. pp.234
Anshul Kumar Pandey is a student of Zakir Husain Delhi College pursuing his bachelors in Political
Science from University of Delhi. He can be contacted atanshulkumarpandey@gmail.com .
******
(4) Hindutva Politics and The Holy Cow: The politics of the holy cow
By Manoj Joshi
4th February 2012
It should be no surprise that in India, the cow and politics go hand in hand.
The Sangh Parivar’s first move to mobilise the ‘masses’ came through the anti-cow slaughter
movement of 1966.
The vehicle was the then newly created Vishwa Hindu Parishad. But, the movement did not yield any
political dividend, despite the unexpected, or really unanticipated, attack on Parliament in 1967 by
thousands of sadhus demanding a ban on cow slaughter.
Holy cow
In recent times we have been once again witnessing an effort to use the gentle bovine as a political
vehicle by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Last month, the party’s manifestos for the state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and
Uttarakhand featured issues relating to the cow.
Last week the UP election manifesto of the BJP promised a free cow for every below poverty line
(BPL) family.
17
As Mail Today correspondent Piyush Srivastava pointed out, this would involve, at a minimum, a cost
of Rs 56,000 crore to the state exchequer, since there are 5.60 crore BPL families in the state, and
the going rate for cows ranges from Rs 10,000-Rs 20,000.
That will be approximately 33 per cent of the total state budget (Rs 1,69,416 crore in 2011-12).
And the BJP is offering an additional subsidy of Rs 750 per month for a cow and Rs 500 for a buffalo
to small and medium farmers which would add another Rs 17,000 crore to the bill.
According to the National Sample Survey Organisation, 43 per cent of the rural households in the
state are landless.
No doubt most of them belong to the BPL category who are barely able to feed and shelter
themselves; now they will also get a cow to shelter and to feed. Not to be outdone, the party’s
Uttarakhand unit’s manifesto came up with even more far-reaching proposals.
If re-elected, the BJP would encourage the production of filtered Gau Mootra (cow’s urine) in the
state.
Besides the usual development issues, the manifesto flagged the promotion of cow products and
cow reverence in the state.
As the State unit in-charge and national general secretary Thawarchand Gehlot explained, cow’s
urine would be filtered and cleaned to produce a drink called ‘ark’ which would have various
benefits including curing cancer and injuries.
The Sangh Parivar has long promoted the use of cow’s urine and dung as medicine
Cow’s urine would also form the basis of medicines for treating eye and ear diseases, as well as
toothpaste, deter- gents and aftershave.
Of course, the urine would also be used for conventional requirements such as fertilisers. There is
nothing new in all this.
The Sangh Parivar has long promoted the use of cow’s urine and dung as medicine.
In 2010, two leading newspapers reported that an institution which was affiliated to the Rashtriya
Swyamsevak Sangh had got a US patent for an anti-cancer drug extracted from cow’s urine.
Apparently the institution, Go Vigyan Anusandhan Kendra, had earlier received patents for other
‘bio’ enhancers and anti-cancer drugs. The item also noted that the ‘drug’ had been tested on three
patients, hardly the norm for clinical trials.
A hilarious sidelight to this is that the Parivar kooks claim that the virtues of the cow are limited to
Indian breeds.
Some claim that the milk of foreign hybrids may even be toxic.
18
In a ‘learned’ article written in the Sangh Parivar journal Organiser in August 2009, Vaidya Kulamarva
Jayakrishna laid out the various advantages of cow’s milk-it was nutritive, good for the eyes, brain
and heart, it promoted immunity and could alleviate a variety of illnesses.
But, he noted, ‘We have to understand that these properties have been explained in the context of
desi or indigenous breed of cow and not the hybrid ones which are the major source of milk to us
today.’
Cow slaughter and cow protection have been a vehicle of the Hindutva movement from the outset.
The Sangh Parivar’s first move to mobilise the ‘masses’ came through the anti-cow slaughter
movement of 1966.
Prior to the use of the Babri Masjid for the Ram Temple agitation, the Parivar had hoped to use an
agitation calling for the ban of cow slaughter as its political vehicle.
This issue is still doing the rounds. In December, Madhya Pradesh’s new anti-cow slaughter bill
received presidential assent. Under the new bill, the existing anti-cow slaughter law was reinforced
by enhancing the punishment for killing cows and transporting beef to up to seven years’
imprisonment.
The Act also gave officials draconian powers of search and arrest and, worse, put the burden of
proof on the accused. Immediately after the bill became law, there were a spate of attacks on the
Muslim community by Bajrang Dal activists.
This was not unexpected, since the purpose of the law was, indeed, as much to harass them as to
promote ‘cow reverence’ as a means of consolidating the Hindu community behind the BJP.
Mr Chouhan is a canny and able chief minister.
Significantly, what his bill did was to amend an Act penalising cow slaughter passed when Uma
Bharti was the chief minister.
He is probably using the issue to cement his position with the kooks who dominate the higher
echelons of the Sangh Parivar. With Modi’s PM candidacy running into a roadblock of opposition,
Chouhan is clearly positioning himself as an alternative. Pasts Hindus do not actually worship the
cow.
The bovine, however, has had a major role in Indian mythology, religious ritual, sentiment and
everyday life. The five products of milk, curd, ghee, urine and dung form part of religious ritual.
There is no revulsion to the urine or the dung of a cow. On the other hand, Indians will swear by the
virtues of ghee and the value of milk and curd in their diet. Poets sing of the beauty of godhuli, the
sight of the evening sun’s rays piercing the dust raised by cows coming back home from pasture.
The dung of the cow is mixed with straw to make patties which are the basic fuel in many
households, and dung is also mixed with clay and used to coat the plaster of the walls of a mudshack.
19
When I was a child living in Almora, in the 1950s, the grandmothers of the house would often
sprinkle cow’s urine on the sheets soiled by bed-wetting children.
They said that it was the best thing available for removing the bad odour which would not go away
with an ordinary washing. It was a primitive remedy, but life was like that-no electricity, little or no
milk, eggs, sugar, or antibiotics, even for middle class families.
Given the semi-literate and cynical plane upon which politics operates in this country, it would be
useless to argue that the role of the cow has actually evolved over time and that one of the most
sacred texts of the Hindus, the Rig Veda, even speaks of cow sacrifice and beef eating.
I can understand why my grandmothers did what they did.
The burden of tradition was heavy on them. In a primitive economy, the cow did play a big role in
the lives of ordinary folk.
Religion sanctified it and practice, such as the use of cow dung for fuel, cemented it. Cows remain an
important part of Indian life even today, but not on the plane that the Parivar wants them to be.
But my memories are of an era when smallpox and TB were big killers, and penicillin had just about
arrived in India; a lot has changed since.
But it would be worthwhile exploring just what it is that is impelling the BJP to hark back to that era
and beyond in its quest for political moksha.
SourceURL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2096310/MANOJ-JOSHI-Thepolitics-holy-cow.html#ixzz1lX7wTHPw
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(5) ‘Holy’ Cow And ‘Unholy’ Dalit by S. Anand
There are some protagonists of Hinduism who say that Hinduism is a very adaptable religion, that it
can adjust itself to everything and absorb anything. I do not think many people would regard such a
capacity in a religion as a virtue to be proud of, just as no one would think highly of a child because it
has developed the capacity to eat dung, and digest it. But that is another matter. It is quite true that
Hinduism can adjust itself... can absorb many things. The beef-eating Hinduism (or strictly speaking
Brahminism which is the proper name of Hinduism in its earlier stage) absorbed the non-violence
theory of Buddhism and became a religion of vegetarianism. But there is one thing which Hinduism
has never been able to do – namely to adjust itself to absorb the Untouchables or to remove the bar
of Untouchability.
– BR Ambedkar
The dalits account for 165 million of India’s one billion-plus human population. The population of
cows is pegged at 206 million. There are more cows than dalits in India. The cows, therefore, have
more rights than dalits. For instance, you can kill dalits before thousands of witnesses and get away
with it. But the imagined murder of a cow will not be suffered. The state promotes the drinking of
cow urine and dung, while dalits are forced to eat the shit and piss of caste Hindus.
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Ambedkar was, perhaps, ironically, aware of the literalness of his metaphor. Hindus have proved
that they can not only eat dung and piss but digest it too. However, while he was right about what
Brahminic Hinduism could not ever absorb, what he perhaps did not reckon with was that latter-day
dalits would be forced to eat the shit and piss of caste Hindus.
In Untouchables or The Children of India’s Ghetto, published posthumously like many of his other
works, Ambedkar devotes two sections to highlight the practice of untouchability in his time through
newspaper sources from the 1920s and 1930s. Close to 50 reports, culled from a variety of sources,
from The Times of India to Hindi publications such as Jivan, Milap and Pratap, are cited in an effort to
convince the reader that various forms of untouchability were indeed in practice.
However, not one of these mentions that the dalit-untouchables were forced to consume human
excreta. Not one talks about dalits being lynched by a Hindu mob for skinning a cow.
Brahminic Hinduism has always yoked together practices that are at such odds with each other that
the meaning of one is to be found in the meaninglessness of the other. While it is the brahmin who
ritualistically excludes himself from the rest of the caste heap and indulgently renders himself
untouchable, it is the dalit – whose touch of labour informs perhaps everything that is consumed
and used by society – who is condemned to be untouchable.
The brahmin, to protect his untouchableness, has to render others untouchable. Such a play of
contradictions that binds the brahminical social order is as historical as it is contemporary. In such a
binary, the ridiculous and the unimaginable jostle with each other; the claim to superiority and merit
of the one depends on the making inferior of the other. The ridiculous easily invites sarcasm, even
critique by rational-scientific voices that unwittingly participate in the ridiculous, but the
unimaginable defies words, language – it demands outrage but forces aphasia.
Demonstrative of this dichotomy, we see in New Delhi, India’s human resource development
minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, proudly asserting the legitimacy invested upon the use of cow’s urine
for therapeutic purposes by the United States patent authorities, while in Thinniam, an obscure
village in Lalgudi taluq, Tiruchirapalli district, Tamil Nadu, two dalits are forced to eat dried human
shit.
The state and the brahminical social order play equally proactive roles in both cases – promoting
cow urine drinking among caste Hindus, and in forcing human shit and piss down dalit throats. The
bizarre patenting of cow-urine therapy elicited three kinds of reactions: sniggers from the
‘secularists’ who were amused, at best; a sense of pride from a mostly-Hindutvaised Brahmindominated media fraternity, among whom there could be several members who practice cow-urine
therapy; and sheer indifference. How-ever, Thinniam went unnoticed, uncommented upon.
On 21 May this year, a caste-Hindu thevar family in Thinniam branded two dalits, Murugesan and
Ramasamy, with hot iron rods and forced them to feed dried human excreta to each other. After
local activists of the Dalit Panthers Movement heard about the incident on 30 May, they informed a
human rights activist-lawyer and sometime in mid-June a press conference was organised where the
dalits presented their testimonies. The mainstream media in India, which has almost no dalit
members, ignored it.
21
About a month and a half later, the media splashed the news that the United States Patent and
Trade Office had granted Patent No 6410059 to an "Indian innovation which has proved that cow’s
urine can make antibiotics, anti-fungal agents and also anti-cancer drugs more effective" (The Hindu
4 July 2002). The product, cow-urine distillate (CUD), was the result of a joint enterprise by the
centrally funded Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s
Go-Vigyan Anusandhan Kendra (cow science research centre) in Nagpur.
Seems Murli Manohar Joshi, union minister for science and technology as well, notorious for
introducing ‘vedic astrology’ and reviving Sanskrit courses in universities, had asked the Centre for
Science and Industrial Research in 1999 to investigate the chemical properties of cow’s urine.
According to The Indian Express (4 July 2002), 10 lakh rupees were spent over three years by the
Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants at Lucknow to establish that "certain compounds
in cow urine, when used in combination with certain antibiotics like the commonly used antituberculosis drug rifampicin, can help kill more bacteria than a single application of the antibiotic".
In Tamil Nadu, the Thinniam incident did not make any impression on the government, media, civil
society or the mainstream intelligentsia. Most newspapers and television channels did not report it
and those that did, like The Hindu, ran shy of seeming scatological and referred to it as simply "a
heinous incident". This neglect led to another Thinniam. On 7 September, Sankan, a dalit, was
drinking tea with a friend at a shop in Goundampatti, Nilakottai taluq, Dindigul district when he was
attacked by six caste Hindus. He was verbally abused and beaten up, after which an off-duty
constable urinated in his mouth. Sankan had earned the wrath of the caste Hindu gounder
community because he had aggressively pursued his right to a piece of land of which he had been
cheated.
Today in the village, even the dalits appear angry with Sankan because the caste Hindus are
threatening the entire community with social boycott. Peace in a village can be maintained as long
as the dalits accept oppression and learn to digest urine.
The profanity of the sacred Before ‘discovering’ the medicinal values of cow-urine and dung, the
brahmins, during the vedic and immediate post-vedic period, ate the meat of all kinds of animals
(see Indian Food by KT Achaya, 1998).
As evident from brahminic texts such as the Satpathatha Brahmana and the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad, beef was in fact a favourite food in vedic times.
Following the powerful discourse of spiritual democracy that Buddhism unleashed, brahmins were
forced to give up beef and their cults of animal sacrifice. As the dalit-bahujan writer, Kancha Ilaiah,
points out in God as Political Philosopher, "Though the use of animal power had been discovered,
the killing of animals in the yajnas prevented their practical implementation". With the coming to
power of the Buddhist king Asoka in the third century BCE, whose edicts proscribed the killing of
animals for sacrifice (however, not necessarily for food), the brahmins not only gave up beef but
slowly turned vegetarian and remained so in a post-Buddhist society; in a reversal, those who
continued to, and were forced to, consume beef, specifically the meat of the dead cow – not in a
grand sacrificial manner, but as ordinary food – were labelled untouchables. They became the
‘broken people’, literally "dalit", falling outside the pale of the fourfold varna system to which all
caste Hindus belong.
22
According to this theory of the origin of untouchability that Ambedkar formulates, the broken
people were the pre-untouchables of the ‘primitive society’. To paraphrase him: During the frequent
wars between the ‘settled tribesmen’ and the ‘nomadic tribes’, those who were separated from
their communities came to constitute the ‘broken men’; these were then captured and used by the
agriculture-bound settled community to protect the villages from the invading nomads.
Though there was no ritual untouchability imposed on the broken people, they were to live
segregated from the main village. It was a time where there was no taboo on cow’s meat and it was
consumed by all.
After the brahmins made the cow a sacred animal and made beef-eating a sacrilege, the broken
people continued to consume beef. The broken people were not to own any wealth, land or cattle.
They could not kill a cow for its meat because they did not own any. But why were they allowed to
eat beef when the brahmins and non-brahmins had given it up? Because eating the dead cow’s meat
was not a crime; killing a cow was. They could also not imitate the savarnas in giving up beef-eating,
because they "could not afford it. The flesh of the dead cow was their principal sustenance. Without
it they would starve. In the second place, carrying the dead cow had become an obligation though
originally it was a privilege. As they could not escape carrying the dead cow they did not mind using
the flesh as food in the manner in which they were doing previously".
(Ambedkar, Untouchables: Who They Were and Why They Became Untouchables, Volume 7 of
Writings and Speeches, 1990) Having given up the most edible and nutritious part of the cow, and
forcing the outcastes to consume the same, the brahminic caste Hindus began sacralising the cow,
specifically the humped zebu breed found in the Subcontinent, which finds mention in the Rig veda
and is common on Indus Valley Civilisation seals. The black buffalo was not endowed with any such
sanctity in spite of its more nutritive milk. They also sacralised and consumed every product and byproduct of the cow – milk, ghee, curd, dung and urine – substitutions for the real thing, beef. They
mixed these five ingredients to make panchgavya, assigned it therapeutic value, and ascribed a place
for it in the purity-pollution binary.
Hence the Manusmriti, a post-Buddhist text dated around the second century CE, ordains that "a
twice-born man so deluded that he has drunk liquor should drink boiling-hot cow’s urine, water,
milk, clarified butter, or liquid cow dung until he dies"(chapter 11, verses 91-92). Another verse
decrees: to make up for the crime of "stealing raw or uncooked food, a carriage, a bed, the cleansing
is swallowing the five cow-products" (Chapter 11, verse 166, from the translation by Wendy Doniger,
Penguin, 1991).
Several Hindu temples, such as the one at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, serve panchgavya and cow’s
urine as prasadam (divine offering) for a price. Cow’s urine has since remained ‘sacred’ and Murli
Manohar Joshi, while announcing the patent achievement, recalled with pride the contemporaneity
of it: "When I was young and went to Chennai on an educational tour, I saw people drinking cow’s
urine straight from the source. Everybody thought it was dirty.
Today, I realise that all traditional practices from ancient Indian medicine have a strong scientific
base" (The Indian Express, 4 July 2002).
23
And today, that a patent on cow-urine therapy is being bestowed by the largest consumer of beef in
the world does not bother the rightwing Hindu fundamentalist Sangh Parivar or Joshi. The brahmins
and brahminic Hindus (dwijas – twice born) have been consuming cow’s urine and other waste for
centuries and continue to do so. The bovine becomes divine – Kamadhenu, gau-maata (the cow as
the mother) – but the dalit-untouchables are rendered subhuman.
Ambedkar says, "In Manu, there is also a provision for getting rid of defilement by transmission –
namely by touching the cow or looking at the sun after sipping water". Meaning, a dwija, defiled by
the sight or touch of a dalit-untouchable, has simply to touch a cow to be cleansed. The pollution
caused by touching the wrong human being can be nullified by touching the right animal. Hindus
believe that some 330 million gods and goddesses reside in the bowels of the cow. Yet, when a cow
dies, caste Hindus would stay away. Touching the dead cow and burying it are jobs assigned to the
dalit-untouchables.
And yet, today we witness in India an episode that against this backdrop defies explanation. In
Dulina, Jhajjar district, Haryana, two hours from the capital, New Delhi, five dalits were lynched by a
mob on 15 October. The dalits were reportedly sighted skinning a cow, but the local Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) rumour mill, in collusion with the police, spread the word that the dalits had
slaughtered the cow (The Indian Express 17-18 October).
Within three hours, a mob – of four to five thousand according to the police – gathered near the
police station where the dalits were sheltered, pulled them out, burnt two of the them alive and
lynched the other three with stones and sharp implements. At least 50 police personnel, three subdivisional magistrates, the deputy superintendent of police of Jhajjar and Bahadurgarh and the block
development officer watched the carnage. It was the last day of the Dussehra festivities, and the
Sangh Parivar of which the VHP is a member – which has been working overtime to raise the
consciousness of Hindus on issues bovine – found it easy to mobilise villagers from the surrounding
areas to "avenge the killing of the cow-killers".
A post-mortem report of the cow was ordered by the superintendent of police, Mohammad Akil,
and a case filed against the dead dalits under the Cow Slaughter Act 1960. It was reasoned by the SP
that if the post-mortem proved that the cow was alive before the dalits skinned it, "it will show how
the mob got emotional when they saw an act like this". The priest of the local temple, Mahendra
Parmanand, was quoted as saying: "If they can kill our mother then what if we kill our brothers who
kill her". The cow, Kamadhenu, is the mother being referred to. And we need to console ourselves:
at least in death a brahmin priest was referring to the dalits as brothers. The VHP justified the killings
saying, "According to Hindu shastras a cow’s life is very important".
Here is a country where the imagined murder of a cow can cause more outrage than the death of a
human being. Again, the root of such attitudes lies in ancient brahminic injunctions. After the
brahmins gave up beef-eating, cow-slaughter was made a punishable crime and equated with the
killing of the brahmin, the ultimate crime. According to the scholar of Hinduism, DR Bhandarkar: We
have got the incontrovertible evidence of inscriptions to show that early in the 5th century AD killing
a cow was looked upon as an offence of the deepest turpitude, turpitude as deep as that involved in
murdering a Brahman. We have thus a copperplate inscription dated 465 AD and referring itself to
the reign of Skandagupta of the Imperial Gupta dynasty. It registers a grant and ends with a verse
saying: ‘Whosoever will transgress this grant that has been assigned (shall become as guilty as) the
24
slayer of a cow, the slayer of a spiritual preceptor (or) the slayer of a Brahman’… A still earlier record
[412 AD] placing go-hatya [cow-slaughter] on the same footing as brahma-hatya [brahmin-killing] is
that of Chandragupta II, grandfather of Skandagupta… (Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Culture
1940, quoted in Ambedkar 1948).
Commenting on Bhandarkar, Ambedkar notes: "The law made by the Gupta emperors was intended
to prevent those who killed cows. It did not apply to the Broken Men. For they did not kill the cow.
They ate only the dead cow". Ambedkar, probably, did not reckon with how the law against cow
killing could become an excuse to lynch dalits. He also perhaps did not know that one day cow-urine
therapy would make its way to the US patent office, that India would have a law that prohibits cowslaughter (Cow Slaughter Act 1960), and dalits would be lynched for dealing with the hide of a dead
cow, or that dalits would be forced to eat shit and piss. What is unfolding against the dalits in India is
something that even the Gupta period, ‘the golden age of Hinduism’, would not have witnessed or
justified.
The Thinniam ‘rebellion’ In Thinniam, what was Murugesan and Ramasamy’s crime? They beat the
thappu – a traditional leather drum used by dalits – and went about the village announcing that
Rajalakshmi Subramani and her husband Subramani had cheated their friend Karuppiah of 2000
rupees. About two and a half years ago, Karuppiah had paid 5000 rupees to Rajalakshmi who was
then the president of the village panchayat (citizens council) – though her husband Subramani, a
former schoolteacher, was the de facto president – for a house under a government scheme for his
sister. Karuppiah’s sister was never allowed to occupy the house, and despite repeated requests,
neither was the house allotted nor the money refunded. Eventually, Subramani returned 3000
rupees but Karuppiah insisted on the whole sum. When Subramani refused to pay up, Karuppiah
decided to tell everyone in the village how he had been cheated. Murugesan and Ramasamy
accompanied Karuppiah as he went around the village with his thappu. Inebriated, and thus made
bold, they declared that they would no longer render their traditional caste-based service as
vettiyans (a dalit sub-community involved in burial ground work) to the caste Hindus if they did not
get the money back from Subramani. In the villagers’ words, "They got drunk and made some noises
they would otherwise not make".
Learning of this, Subramani summoned Karuppiah the next morning on 20 May. The entire family
beat up Karuppiah, who then quietly returned home and left the village the same night. He rarely
spends time in Thinniam these days.
The following day, a sober and terrified Murugesan and Ramasamy went to Subramani’s house to
apologise. There, obscenities were hurled at them using their caste name – parayar (dalit) bastards –
and Murugesan was kicked. If the temporary lapse of a drink or two could make them go around the
village speaking disrespectfully of the thevars, Subramani and Rajalakshmi had methods that would
make them acknowledge the realities that are permanent.
Rajalakshmi handed a hot iron rod to her husband Subramani, who branded Murugesan on his left
hand, above his elbow, on his neck in three places and below the left ear in two places. Ramasamy
was branded above his left knee and on his left wrist. Then Subramani gave them a thappu and
ordered them to go around the village, this time to announce that what they had tom-tommed was
not true. After making a round of the village, they returned to Subramani’s house where they found
25
dried human excreta in a winnow. Subramani reasoned that the parayans would come to their
senses only if they ate shit.
When they protested, Subramani threatened to brand them again. Murugesan put the dried shit
into Ramasamy’s mouth and Ramasamy fed it to Murugesan. The hands that beat the drum of
rebellion were made to feed shit to the mouths that articulated protest. Subramani then accused
them of damaging the thappu and made them pay 50 rupees each as compensation.
Many weeks later, the district collector offered the victims 6650 rupees and some rice and kerosene
as a ‘rehabilitative measure’. The Lalgudi police went through the routine of filing weak cases under
the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Scheduled Castes Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act
1989, known commonly as the Dalit Act. On Karuppiah’s complaint, the police registered cases
against six caste Hindus under sections 341 (‘causing hurt voluntarily’), 323 (‘wrongful restraint’),
355 of IPC (‘intent to dishonour a person’) and 3(1)(x) of the Dalit Act.
The IPC sections can lead to a simple imprisonment of up to two years and a fine. Section 3(1)(x) of
the Dalit Act is a favourite with the police according to dalit activists and lawyers. Irrespective of the
crime – rape, burning down a dalit house, stripping and parading a dalit naked or abusing a dalit in
public –the police tends to book everything under 3(1)(x) that deals with "intentional insult or
intimidation with intent to humiliate him in any place in full view of the public". Under this section,
punishment is minimal and a compensation of 25,000 rupees is to be provided on conviction, which
rarely happens.
The police did add charges under Section 3(1)(i) of the Dalit Act and sections 324 and 325 of the IPC
when Murugesan and Ramasamy, who were forced to eat human shit, filed a separate complaint. As
per Section 3(1)(i), "it is punishable if anyone forces a member of the SC [scheduled castes] or the ST
[scheduled tribes] to drink or eat any inedible or obnoxious substance". If it can be proved in a court
of law that a dalit was indeed forced to eat an obnoxious substance, the state pays him or her
25,000 rupees or more "depending on the nature of the gravity of the offence". Clearly, the Dalit
Act, formulated in 1989, has this clause because such practices were prevalent in India. The law in
itself was an acknowledgement of, and a response to, an existing, established reality.
The incidents of Thinniam and Nilakottai are of course not unprecedented. In 2001, at Prichatur, 75
km from Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, caste-Hindu men paraded a dalit youth, Murugesh, in a
procession and forced him to drink his own urine for "the crime of relieving himself in the presence
of the upper castes" (Deccan Chronicle 30 August 2001).
Also in 2001, caste Hindu landlords from Chanaiyan-bandh village in West Champaran, Bihar, tied
Dasai Manjhi, a dalit, to a pole, shaved his head and urinated in his mouth. But it was the dalit who
landed in jail "for felling the timber of his landlord" (The Times of India 11 July 2001).
Lalit Yadav, a minister in the Bihar state government, held a truck driver Deenanath Baitha and
cleaner Karoo Ram, dalits both, captive for over a month in June-July 2000. The minister and his
cousin removed the fingernails of the driver and made him drink urine.
Lalit Yadav was dropped from the ministry but remains a free man today.
26
Again in Bihar, in September 2000, Saraswati Devi, a dalit woman was paraded naked on charges of
witchcraft in Pakri-Pakohi, Karja block, Muzaffarpur district. A dozen persons tortured her and forced
her to swallow human excreta. After Devi lodged a complaint, police visited the village but failed to
‘nab’ the accused.
The spirit of rebellion
The forced consumption of dried shit in Thinniam was preceded by a moment of ‘rebellion’ on the
part of three dalits. Some commentators in Tamil Nadu have sought to locate the expression of such
protest in the consumption of alcohol. According to them, it was alcohol that enabled the dalits to
transgress the social boundaries that they knew would be impossible to break otherwise. It appears
that to speak out against oppression and injustice, Karuppiah, Murugesan and Ramaswamy could
not be sober. Such a line of argument seeks social-therapeutic values in alcohol.
Murugesan and Ramasamy went to apologise to the thevars, but the message that the thevars sent
is that even the excuse of a drink cannot justify resistance. If dalit transgression is seen as arising
from ‘drunken behaviour’ in the night, and is to be forgiven by the oppressor the next day when the
dalits go to seek pardon, the assumption informing the episode is that a meaningful rebellion cannot
be sustained. A reading that presumes that dalit protest cannot be articulated when the dalits are
sober undermines both the potential of dalit agency and the possibilities of any long-term liberation
agenda since ventilation of a grievance when drunk need not be seen as resistance. This is not to
make a moral argument against drinking, or in this case dalits drinking; if the gandhian position
against alcohol is loaded with brahminic morality, so is an argument that seeks to essentialise a
drinking culture with dalit lifestyle.
There are other problems with reading too much into the aspect of alcohol-stimulation. In India,
when drains filled with human excreta and other wastes get clogged, sanitation workers are
required to enter them bodily. Invariably, these workers belong to a particular local community of
dalits; in Tamil Nadu, it is the arundhatiyars or sakkiliyars. Exposed to noxious waste clad in nothing
but a komanam, a loincloth, for long stretches of time, it is not surprising that the influence of
alcohol becomes necessary for the municipality worker. The drinking in the arundhatiyar’s case only
enables him to continue to do his work; alcohol does not give him rebellious ideas.
The same is true for dalits employed in the mortuaries of government hospitals.
Brahminising the shudra The brahmins might have been the progenitors of the caste ideology and
the group that invested sacrality on cow dung, urine etc but today this ideology has percolated to
the dalit. It is a fact that the ‘most-backward’ shudras (members of the lowest tier of the four-tier
Hindu varna system) such as vanniars or thevars, and eventhe dalits, in a Tamil Nadu village have
imbibed the practice of cleansing one’s home using gomayam (cow urine) after a death or ahead of a
religious ceremony. It is on this ‘common sense’ that the Hindutva lobby cashes in while seeking a
patent. Such brahminisation of the shudras has a telling effect on the dalits. Much of the physical
violence on dalits in rural India is perpetrated by the shudra castes. Though this does not absolve the
brahmin of a role in such violence – the brahmin historically has never had to get physical to defend
his rights or others’ rights, but has had the privilege of letting others slug it out and watching the fun
from a safe distance – we need to be alive to how it is on the basis of assumed caste superiority that
the thevar in Thinniam or the gounder in Nilakottai makes a dalit eat shit or drink piss.
27
The shudra-thevar does not act in the name of Hinduism or as a Hindu; he acts as a thevar, or more
specifically invoking his subcaste identity as a piramalai kallar. It is the ‘social nausea’to use
Ambedkar’s phrase – of the dalit that makes the shudra react with such intolerance to any dalit
assertion. This nausea is expressed in the form of caste. While the mainstream media and the
‘secularists’ run shy of such instances of caste-based aggressions, they find it much easier to focus
on episodes of violence where the obvious faces of Hindutva Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal,
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Shiv Sena, Bharatiya Janata Party– are involved. These outfits
are seen as representatives of a militant form of pan-Indian Hinduism from which the secular
brigade– that otherwise indulges in caste – seeks to distance itself, not realising its own role in
creating and sustaining these social monsters.
In Thinniam, where no such Hindutva outfit was involved, and where Subramani and his family had
no significant affiliation to any political party, the aggression was simply a result of a thevarsupremacism. Subramani and his family do not identify themselves as ‘Hindu’ nor do they act in the
name of ‘Hinduism’. If they did, the RSS-type Hindus would distance themselves from such ‘caste
Hinduism’ more forcefully than the secularist Hindus would.
For instance, the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch chief, S Gurumurthy, viewed the VHP-Narendra Modi
actions in Gujarat as un-Hindu and even ‘Islamic’. In his perverse understanding of the carnage in
Gujarat, ‘Hinduism is getting Islamised’ (Outlook 23 September 2002). Ezhavas in Kerala, gounders in
Tamil Nadu or jats in Haryana do not victimise dalits to defend ‘Hinduism’ as much as they do to
secure their caste supremacy. And when the dalits of Meenakshipuram (in Tirunelveli district of
Tamil Nadu) famously embraced Islam in 1981, they did it not to escape Hinduism, to which they
anyway did not belong, but to liberate themselves from the oppression of the thevars. The Hindutva
groups descended on the area, and on Tamil Nadu in general, only after the Meenakshipuram
conversion.
The assertion of caste supremacy by the shudra groups is today being increasingly expressed
through Hindutva outlets like the VHP and Bajrang Dal – as seen from the experience that the
targets of Hindutva are invariably the dalits and Muslims. In fact, Hindutva, as we have seen it since
the 1990s, is basically an organised, pan-Indian expression of casteism to which even ‘Dravidian’
parties like the DMK and shudra outfits like the Telugu Desam Party lend legitimacy. A casteism
backed by brahmins and other upper castes but acted out by the shudras.
Research and Analysis Wing
If the harassment of dalits has a pattern, so does the effort to formalise the practice of caste Hindus
drinking cow-urine and dung.
There was much groundwork done before Joshi could make his announcement about the patent.
Already 200 cow urine therapy centres have been established in 18 Indian states, most of them in
Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The target is 10,000 such centres. The Cow Urine Therapy and
Research Institute set up in Indore claims that cow’s urine can cure diabetes, blood pressure, acidity,
asthma, psoriasis, eczema, AIDS, piles, prostate problems, arthritis and migraine. This gau-mutra
(cow urine) distillate is already being sold across the counter as ‘Kamadhenu Ark’. There is even a
‘Gaumutra Hospital’ in Lucknow.
28
The Gujarat government has in place a ‘Gau Seva Ayog’ that hopes to improve cow reverence and
promote the benefits of its various excretions. Last year, it talked about a "cow dung and urine
revolution".
Gujarat truly is a laboratory for Hindutva. According to a news report, cow urine is already being sold
in 200 outlets in Indore. In Jaipur, Rajasthan, the rightwing Hindu fundamentalist RSS runs the Gau
Seva Sangh, which claims to have at hand the one element that will guarantee protection against the
horrors of nuclear radiation: cow dung. Cover the roof of your house or better still, lather yourself
with cow dung as a protective shield. At the Krishi Expo 2002, an agricultural fair held in June in New
Delhi, there was a stall where every product – tea, toothpaste, hair oil, porridge, tonics, fertilisers,
insecticides, ‘beauty’ soap, shampoo, incense sticks – was manufactured from panchgavya. The
producer was the Kanpur Gaushala Society.
In December 2000, a ‘National Workshop on Scientific Dimensions of Gauseva’ was held in Indore.
According to the official report on the seminar, "Cow was given the status of mother and
worshipped and honoured by celebrating festivals and religious functions. The present society is
based on science. Now people need information and data based on research. Most of the tested
practices of cow therapy, Panchgavya, Agnihotra and milk miracles are rejected as myth or
mythological adventures". It concludes, "It is therefore necessary to blend science, spiritually [sic]
and wisdom". Such a blending has resulted in the patent for CUD. More recently, the National
Commission for Cattle, constituted in September 2001 when Jayendra Saraswati of the Kanchi
Sankara Math threatened a fast unto death over the "neglect of the country’s cow population", in its
report running into 1500 pages and four volumes, suggested the constitution of a Central Rapid
Protection Force to control cow slaughter; the amendment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act
(POTA) to detain gangs who smuggle cows; the prohibition of cross-breeding with imported cattle;
demanded the scrapping of the subsidy on tractors and mechanical appliances for agriculture and
encouraging instead the use of bullocks, the constitution of a permanent National Development
Commission on Cows, and the introduction of the "panchgavya therapy" (Milli Gazette 15 August
2002).
Almost in anticipation of the NCC’s recommendations, the patent for CUD and other related
developments, the RSS launched a ‘Rashtriya Jagran Abhiyan’ in 2001 to awaken ‘national
consciousness’. One of the pamphlets that was issued for the exercise was The Protection of Cow
Clan, which contained these ideas: ghee made from cow’s milk saves the environment from atomic
radiation; the sound of a cow’s lowing automatically cures many mental disabilities and diseases;
cow’s urine contains copper which turns to gold on entering the human body; cow dung and urine
are the best cures for stomach diseases, heart diseases, kidney ailments and tuberculosis; the urine
of a virgin cow is the best; foreign cows lack the properties which Indian cows have; the Hindu gotra
system applies to the cow-clan too.
It is not as if only the Sangh Parivar is a proponent of the sacred and therapeutic values of cow urine
and dung. In Upleta, Rajkot district, Gujarat, 700 woman workers of the Congress protested the
Bharatiya Janata Party’s ‘Gaurav Yatra’ (tour of pride) by ‘cleansing’ the 1.5-km stretch traversed by
the BJP chief minister Narendra Modi’s chariot with cow urine.
Jhajjar was merely the culmination of all these events in the ‘cow-belt’, as the plains of north India
are somewhat derisively called.
29
For every Saraswati Devi who is branded a witch and forced to consume shit, there is an Ulpeta-like
celebration of the ‘properties’ of the cow’s excreta. India is equally the land where a prime minister
(Morarji Desai) boasted of drinking eight ounces of his own urine every morning and where Sankan
of Nilakottai is forced to drink the urine of caste Hindus for asking for a piece of a land that he has a
right to. A land where state-sponsored consumption of cow urine and dung complements the state’s
indifference to force-feeding of dalits with shit and piss.
Responding to the Thinniam incident, Monica Vincent, a Chennai-based lawyer, recalls Nelson
Mandela’s words in Long Walk to Freedom, "At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire." But
how does one react to shit like this? In the context of legalised and state-sponsored racism –
apartheid in South Africa – Mandela talked of fighting fire with fire; but can the dalits of India fight
shit with shit?
(This article first appeared in Himal. Author’s note: I thank Sivapriya for comments and suggestions
on an earlier draft, and Ravikumar for discussing various points in the essay. Editorial note:
Capitalisation style reflects author’s preferences.)
(6) Holy Cow! Who Moved My Meat by Divya Rajagopal,
ET Bureau Jan 6, 2012
Indians eat more beef than any other meat. Beef consumption in India is double the combined
consumption of meat and chicken, India is also the third largest exporter of beef, but the BJP led
Madhya Pradesh government is not happy about its people eating the most favourite meat.
The recent bill enacted by the MP government criminalises the consumption of beef. The Gau-Vansh
Vadh Pratishedh (Sanshodhan) Vidheyak (Madhya Pradesh prohibition of slaughter of cow-progeny
Bill) can prosecute any person found slaughtering a cow or even transporting the calf for the
purpose of slaughter. Anyone found guilty of this act would face seven years of imprisonment and a
minimum fine of Rs.5000. The Karnataka government in 2010 passed the ‘Prevention of Slaughter
and Preservation of Cattle Bill’ and Gujarat this year passed the Animal Preservation (Amended) Act,
both these bills criminalised cow slaughter. (The names of the bills benevolently say about banning
the slaughter or protecting the cow, but in reality they ban the food habits and harass the entire
community that eat the beef or involve in its production).
In the name of protecting ‘religious beliefs’, BJP many believe has encroached upon the fundamental
rights of the people.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation UN (FAO) report titled Livestock Information,
Sector Analysis and Policy Branch says the largest consumed meat in India is beef. The per capita
consumption of beef in India is 26 lakh tonnes, as compared to 6 lakh tonnes of mutton and 14 lakh
tonnes of pork. It is clearly the common choice of meat for the Indian population. In fact after
meeting the local consumption, a United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) data says
India exports 1.28 million tonnes of beef, making it the third largest exporter in the world.
“The constitution of India gives us the right to eat any kind of food; BJP is taking away people’s right
to food through this law. They are not only targeting Muslims with this bill, but also the large tribal
population of the state”, says Dr Jilukara Srinivas Postdoctoral fellow, University of Hyderabad.
30
For example the tribal population of Madhya Pradesh is 13 million, and beef always has been an
important part of the tribal food culture. In Spite of the large section of the population consuming
this meat, the bill received a Presidential nod.
Cow as the holy animal of Hindus has always been a disputed belief. D N Jha in his book ‘The Myth of
the Holy Cow’ explains this misrepresentation of cow’s holiness. Rigveda has references of cow
being one of the most commonly consumed food item among the Brahmins. The practice of cow
slaughter was an integral part of the Aryan cult. Jha writes cow and bull meat was one of the
favourite delicacies of the Hindu deity Indra.
“Most Indians eat beef, and Indians mostly eat beef. The principled non eaters of beef are a minority
in India”, says Chittibabu Padavala a Dalit Marxist scholar.
The BJP has tried to justify such bills in the name of animal rights, but if it indeed wants to protect
the rights of the animal, why protect only cow. “If animal rights is the argument, why not take care
of them at our respective homes, and why not also protect snakes, goats and other animals that
need help”, says Ram Puniyani, Member of All India Secular Forum. “This law is inhuman, and denies
the right of food to a large section of beef eating population,” says Puniyani. “This is yet another
tactic to harass the Muslim and tribal population in MP, and saffronise the state”.
But what is appalling is secularists have remained silent over this issue. Padvala thinks that the lack
of outrage over this ban is also because fight against Hindutva is led by individuals who are less likely
to eat beef at their homes. He says the upper caste leadership never took the long standing
suggestion by dalit activist Kancha Illaiah for organising beef eating by dalits and Muslims to
combate Hindutva and assert their own distinctive culture.
(7) Cow in Contemporary Political Chessboard Ram Puniyani
Karnataka BJP Government has passed “Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of
Cattle Bill 2010” (June 2010). There has been a strong opposition to this move from the civil society.
Some of social activists point out that this piece of legislation is “communal in intent and anti-farmer
in consequence”. There have been series of meetings to express the concern of people, especially
those of dalits and farmers to this legislation. Some of them said that implementation of the bill in its
present form will deprive citizens the freedom to choose their food. Mr. Girish Karnad the noted film
personality asked “As long as their choice of food is not affecting others, why its consumption should
be prohibited?” Others pointed out that the bill is trying to polarize the majority and minority
communities through this bill. It was also pointed out that Gujarat, where such a law already exists,
was a leading beef exporter in the country. The points made also indicated that the controversial
anti-cow slaughter Bill, if implemented, would discourage farmers from rearing cattle and will lead
to a shortage of milk.
It is not the first time that the debate around Cow slaughter bills, beef eating is taking place. When
BJP led NDA was in power it went to the extent of appointing a committee to go into the matter and
the committee concluded that cow protection should be made fundamental right and there is a
need to constitute Central Rapid Protection Force to prevent cow slaughter, and also to invoke POTA
to detain those smuggling cows! The Cow obsession of BJP is a part of deeper agenda of targeting
31
Muslim minorities as they want to Brahminize the society by creating situations where beef eating
becomes a taboo for large sections of society.
Needless to say beef is amongst the cheapest sources of proteins for the poor, especially dalits and
adivasis. Till just a couple of decades ago there were many communities who were preferring beef to
other expensive protein rich food. At the same time the minorities, Muslims and Christians, for
whom, beef is neither a taboo nor a compulsion, are being looked down on this pretext. Large
propaganda campaigns are on through which minorities are being demonized around the issue of
beef eating and cow slaughter. One recalls the incident of Jhajjer where 5 dalits were done to death
on the suspicion of killing a cow and VHP’s Acharya Giriraj Kishore justified the event as saying that
cow is so sacred for Hindus that killing of dalits does not matter. Similarly, Sheikh Rahman a cattle
trader was killed in Orissa on the cooked up charge of selling cows for slaughter.
The ‘Cow’ seems to be the next emotive chariot which probably is being projected after the decline
in the fervor for Ram Temple issue. One has no problems in respecting animals of one’s choice, but
the fear is this is/will be further used as the issue to divide the communities. In our plural democratic
society how can faith of section of one religious community dictate the policies of the state?
As such most of the propaganda that beef eating was brought to India by Muslims is a mere hog
wash. Most of the serious researches into the sacred Hindu book, Vedas, show that Beef eating was
a norm in Vedic times. Researches and studies by Mahmahopadhya Bharat Ratna Pandurang Waman
Kane’s ‘Bhartiya Dharmgrantho Ka Itihas’ (History of Hindu Holy books), Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, “Did The
Hindus Never Eat Beef?” in “The Untouchables Who were they and Why they became Untouchables
(Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches vol.l7 (Government of Maharashtra, Mumbai
1990, first edition 1948 pp 323-328) and the contemporary Historian, D.N. Jha, The Myth of Holy
Cow, all point out that beef was popular food in Vedic times. Swami Viveknand emphasizes the same
point in a different way. While addressing a meeting at Shakespeare club, Pasedena, Californian, USA
(Feb 2, 1900) he declared, “You will be astonished if I tell you that, according to old ceremonials, he
is not a good Hindu, who does not eat beef. On certain occasions he must sacrifice a bull and eat it.
(Vivekanand, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekanand, Vol 3, Calcutta, Advait Ashram, 1997)
Similarly the major ideologue of Hindutva, Savarkar said that there is nothing sacred about cow, it is
a useful animal.
After the advent of agricultural society, rise of Jainism and Buddhism the concept of non-violence
came up in different forms and later after 8th century Brahmanism projected Cow as its icon. Since
then Cow is the projected as sacred, as ‘mother’ and gradually large sections of Hindus started
regarding her so. In deference to the sentiments of Hindus, most Muslims Kings prohibited cow
slaughter. Babur in his will to Humayun writes, “Son, this Nation Hindusthan has different Religions.
Thank Allah for giving us this Kingdom. We should remove all the differences from our heart and do
justice to each community according to its customs. Avoid cow-slaughter to win over the hearts of
the people of this land and to incorporate the people in the matters of administration. Don’t damage
the places of worship and temples, which fall in the boundaries of our rule.”
Since the rise of communal streams during freedom movement the communalists have been
resorting to all the tricks to rouse emotions around matters of faith. So killing pig and putting it in
the mosque & cow slaughter issue have been resorted to times and over again. It was during
freedom movement itself that we see that the apostle of peace and non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi,
32
a total vegetarian offering beef to his Muslim guest. A story goes that when one of his Muslim
friends’ son from South Africa visited him in Sevagram Ashram, it happened to be the festive day of
Bakr Id. Gandhi offered beef to the boy, the boy in turn refused to eat beef saying that he will not
have any non vegetarian food in the Ashram as the Ashram practices non violence. What a touching
sentiment on both the sides. Respect others’ practices!
Today with the rise of communalism we need to recount the examples set by Gandhi in matters
pertaining to community relations and the efforts to demonize and communalize by resorting to
such symbolisms of cow or Ram Temple should be put aside to focus on the issues of living in peace
and harmony in a plural society.
****
(8) Cow’s Urine as Medicine: Faith’s leap into blind Alleys Ram
Puniyani
Recently the BJP ruled Uttarakhand Government (Feb 2008) has announced that it will procure cow’s
urine, on the pattern similar to the procurement of milk by dairies, refine it and sell it to Ayurvedic
pharmacies. Other BJP ruled Governments are also working on similar lines.
Cow has been having a central place in the political symbolism of RSS combine. The place of this
symbolism may be only next to Lord Ram. On these premises, so far cow has been projected as
mother. In its major campaign against minorities’ right since 1950s, BJP predecessor Bharatiya
Jansangh, had undertaken a nationwide, Desh Dharm ka nata Hai Gau Hamari mata hai (Cow is
related to us through our religion and nation as mother) and also Janm Janm Ka Nata hai Gau hamari
Mata hai (Cow is our mother in our every birth). Since Muslims, one does not know why Christians
were not targeted for it, are not prohibited from eating beef and since many a butcher belong to
Kasai (butchers) occupation, this fact has been used to demonize the Muslim community. We
worship cows, they eat, they butcher cows! This has been used to rouse the sentiments of majority
community time and over again.
With Uma Bharati becoming the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh (2005) for a brief while, she
introduced cow based economy, funds for Goshalas (cow sheds) were given from Government
treasury, and her official residence became the first such Goshala. Cow based economy aimed at
promoting cow products as the core of economy. The present effort now transcends the earlier
efforts as faith is being transformed into blind faith. The Government’s move to collect urine, to
procure it, refine it and sell it as a medicine defies all the logic of science and medicine. It is
converting the political symbolism into health related prescription which is fraught with dangers.
As such urine is a product excreted through kidneys and contains the waste metabolites. It can also
contain the bacteria, bovine tuberculosis for example, and other harmful germs and metabolic
products. The biochemical studies of urine have clearly shown its composition. There are some who
claim magic healing powers of drinking one’s own urine, called Shivambhu, the most famous
consumer of the same was Morarji Desai. Some claim that it contains antibodies which act against
the harmful diseases affecting our body, but analytically and biochemical it has not been proven so
far. Physiologically kidneys do not let the antibodies pass out of the body as the molecular weight of
33
antibodies is much more than the pore of the kidney membrane. Of course when kidney is damaged,
these antibodies can pass out, not when the cow is healthy.
Murali Manohar Joshi, who as MHRD minister initiated the introduction of faith based disciplines like
Astrology, Paurohuitya (Ritualism) also diverted some of the funds for doing cow research. One CSIR
lab went to the extent of obtaining a patent on a pharmaceutical composition containing cow urine
distillate and an antibiotic. Another CSIR lab, in collaboration with a NGO undertook a study to see
the effectiveness of cow urine in cancer treatment. Our own ayurveda does not mention any
medicinal use of cow urine. Ayurveda as such has lot of valuable empirical observations which can
be deepened by rooting them on firmer rational grounds but that is shrouded in mystery and faith
and any questioning of it meets angry protesters, who claim their faith is under threat. Baba Ramdev
does claim that his ‘Ramdevsim’ is scientific but forgets that the basic premise of science is peer
review, facing the questions and a constant transcendence of inadequacies in our knowledge
system. The faith based enterprise of Ramdev is too individualistic, too much dipped in faith and has
too little to offer on rational grounds. Same is the method of cow medicine, too much faith, and that
too of blind variety, too much assertion and zero scientific research. One will like to explore the
veterinary sciences to see if there is something drastically right in cow’s excreta in contrast to the
excreta of bullock or buffalo or a dog for that matter. Also one does recall the claims of the section
that cow dung has purifying effect. Impurity brought in by the shudras touching of water was
undone by mixing cow dung with the water touched by a dalit.
The basic difference between medical sciences, empiricism, and grandma’s medicine needs to be
understood before state Government investing and promoting cow excreta, urine, for human
consumption and application. Mercifully one has not heard so far of such efforts to promote cow
dung. The present effort by the BJP government is an extension of RSS combine’s cow politics. It is
totally against the understanding of modern medicinal sciences and also has no mention in the
traditional wisdom gained over a period of time. In a way it is the translation of RSS combine’s
political understanding in to the arena of application to human society. In some Islamic countries, on
similar lines, state sponsored research to undertake the study on djinns to solve the energy problem.
As per mythology djinns are supposed to be infinite source of energy so why bother about oil and
electricity when these blessed beings can solve our problems for good. Surely these will also prevent
the wars which are taking place in the globe for controlling the energy reserves. And not on a very
different track, Christian right is asserting creation science to oppose the theory of evolution.
These efforts have no rational and scientific basis, something which our constitution ordains us to
follow in the public domain. Social auditing of efforts, which affect human health are mandatory,
control by bodies sanctioning the drugs and other medicinal means are an absolute must for public
safety, all the claims of politics notwithstanding.
As such enough of politics has been woven around cow. Many a Mughal kings in deference to these
sentiments, to respect the feeling of the section of society, advised against cow slaughter. Babar in
his will writes to his son Humayun to avoid the slaughter of cows.
In Hindutva politics also there are many streams. While Savarkar called cow as a useful animal, the
other sections ignited the emotions against Muslims around cow. Irrespective of that many a poor
Hindus and Adivasi did consume beef. Incidentally it is amongst the cheapest source of protein for
the poor. Many a surveys showed that a vast number of Indian communities consume beef. RSS
34
combine’s propaganda went on to assert that Muslims are violent and one of the reasons is that
they consume beef. This is so much against the psychological understanding of the human mind and
the violence. While one knows that beef is a staple diet in major parts of the World, one also knows
and modern psychological theories demonstrate that violence does not emerge from diet but from
social and political situations. Beef can surely build muscle power in conjunction with proper
exercises, but violence is in the mind.
Undoubtedly one should respect those regarding cow as their mother. RSS combines’ many
followers devote their lives organizing fodder and other supports for Guashalas. Some of them, the
upholders of Cow as mother, non violence, go to the extent of justifying violence against dalits on
the ground that they were skinning a dead cow as happened in the killings of dalits in Gohana. This
cow urine in the pharmacy shops defies all the logic and faith and is directly a threat to health of
people of the society. Faith can take such dangerous turns is to be seen to be believed
****
(9) Using the cow by Javed Anand
Jan 05 2012
If you are a resident of Madhya Pradesh, Muslim and poor, nowhere close to the class of nawabs
who can pay for murg musallam or mutton raan, watch your pot! The BJP government, led by Chief
Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, has just armed itself with a big danda ostensibly to protect the holy
cow and its progeny. But, make no mistake, it’s a stick to beat you with.
To save your skin, turn vegetarian or get out of the state. Better still, go to court. Veganism,
remember, is not an option in the land of gau rakshaks: that might be construed as turning your back
on what the gau mata has on offer — doodh, dahi, desi ghee and more.
In case you missed the news, the MP government’s Gau-Vansh Vadh Pratishedh (Sanshodhan) Act
has just received the presidential nod. Punishment for slaughtering the cow or its progeny,
transporting them to slaughter and storing beef, under the more-Hindu-than-thou legislation, will be
severe: up to seven years in jail.
Eating beef has been a contentious issue in the country for long. A few years ago, Professor D.N. Jha,
an eminent historian, argued in his book that in ancient India Hindus loved their cow and ate it too.
For Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the Hindu Mahasabha leader who gave us the “Hindutva” concept,
the cow was merely a “useful animal”, but by no means a sacred animal.
But for the Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayanand Saraswati, it was indeed Holy Cow. The Arya Samaj
endorsed cow worship even though it rejected idol worship and polytheism. To Mahatma Gandhi,
the cow was “a poem of pity”. He too worshipped it.
India has had a long history of agitation for cow protection, no doubt. Today, laws prohibiting cow
slaughter are in force in several parts of the country. This column is not about their rationale, but the
severe punishment stipulated in the new enactment in MP.
35
A comparison with other states shows that there is no bar, or limited restriction, on beef
consumption in Bihar, West Bengal, the northeastern states — Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram,
Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura — and Kerala. Where prohibitory laws are in place, the
punishment for offenders varies from six months in Maharashtra to two years in Orissa. Some of the
stringent provisions are in states which are, or have been, under BJP rule: Gujarat, Karnataka,
Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand.
Look at it from another angle: check out the Indian Penal Code. For example, Section 295 of IPC says
that for “whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship”, the prescribed punishment is
imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years, or with a fine, or both. Could this mean
that the punishment for destroying the Babri mosque is two years while the punishment for
slaughtering a cow, or keeping beef at home or a hotel (in MP) is up to seven years?
Cow protection laws may be justified on religious grounds. But the provision of stringent
punishments in BJP-ruled states clearly points to the communal dimension. This is starkly evident in
the case of BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh. Under its new law, a humble head constable upwards, “or
any person authorised by a competent authority”, has the power to enter, inspect and search any
premises “where he has reason to believe that an offence has been, is being, or is likely to be
committed and take necessary action”.
Is likely to be committed? You do not need a particularly fertile imagination to recognise the
numerous possibilities in this draconian and insidious provision to harass, intimidate, implicate,
detain, arrest or prosecute a targeted section of citizens. In a state where as often as not the police
function as the private militia of the Saffron Brotherhood, who is to determine, and on what basis,
whether a chunk of meat stored in the fridge or simmering on the burner comes from a buffalo (not
prohibited) or from a cow or its progeny?
The low-profile chief minister of MP is wilier than we think. Having successfully sold the idea that
here is a man whose sole concern is aspirational politics — bijli, sadak, pani — Chouhan has been
cannily pursuing the politics of Hindutva Plus. Because he chooses to operate below the media
radar, the country remains blissfully ignorant of his relentless Hinduisation of MP society.
Consider the deeds of the MP government as enumerated by the Bhopal-based journalist and
secular activist, L.S. Herdenia, in a report last year:
Chouhan publicly enjoins government employees to take an active part in RSS activities; several
government schemes are named after Hindu rituals and ceremonies; the Bhopal police chief issued a
“secret” circular to all police stations in 2010, directing them to collect all kind of information from
Christian institutions under their jurisdiction.
In early 2007, surya namaskar was made mandatory in government schools. In 2009, the
government declared that students would have to recite a Sanskrit hymn, the Bhojan Mantra, before
partaking of their government-funded midday meals. In April 2011, Chouhan announced that Gita
Saar (Essence of the Gita) would henceforth be compulsorily taught to all students. And many land
allotments have been made to various saffron organisations; one of them was struck down by the
Supreme Court in 2011.
36
Add the latest draconian enactment on cow slaughter to the above and you get a complete picture
of the agenda at work in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh: target Muslims with cow slaughter, Christians
with “forced conversions”.
The writer is general secretary, Muslims for Secular Democracy and co-editor, ‘Communalism
Combat’, express@expressindia.com
****
(10) Tribute to the holy cow by By Jawed Naqvi
Thursday, 08 Jul, 2010
India’s absence from the ongoing world championship in which a political pariah like North Korea
was able to make history by scoring a goal was of a piece with an even more embarrassing show in
1992.
That year the same lot of people — rightwing Hindus that pushed the law to protect the cow in the
southern state of Karnataka — had travelled to Ayodhya to raze a 16th-century mosque. Many saw it
as a frustrated response by pseudo nationalists at not getting even a single medal in the Summer
Olympics held in Barcelona earlier that year.
When the zealots, represented in parliament by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), tore down the
mosque they said it was their revenge on Mughal Emperor Babar who they claimed had destroyed a
Hindu shrine to build the Babri Masjid. Babar would have frowned not only on the events in Ayodhya
but would have found the BJP’s efforts in Karnataka a bit cynical.
In his will to Humayun, Babar wrote: “Son, this nation Hindustan has different religions. Thank Allah
for giving us this kingdom. We should remove all the differences from our heart and do justice to
each community according to its customs. Avoid cow-slaughter to win over the hearts of the people
of this land and to incorporate the people in the matters of administration. Don’t damage the places
of worship and temples, which fall in the boundaries of our rule.”
There can be of course many good reasons to avoid as opposed to banning the consumption of beef.
A leading heart doctor at a specialist clinic in Delhi insists that if he had his way he would add
cholesterol-reducing statins to the city’s municipal water supply, such is the tendency of the South
Asian gene to accumulate lethal levels of lipid in the body.
It is another matter that the dairy culture of milk, butter and ghee prevalent in the regions
surrounding Delhi is just as harmful for its high cholesterol content. (Lord Krishna, born in
neighbouring Mathura, as the legend goes, used to steal butter and there is so much music — both
thumris and bhajans, including a beautiful song by K.L. Saigal — celebrating this aspect of the deity
when he was a child!)
Of course if they were to follow the doctor’s instructions on healthy eating, most Indians would
starve, as there is not enough of the good food going around. That’s perhaps why former Lok Sabha
speaker G.G. Swell, an MP from the tribal state of Meghalaya, protested strongly when Prime
Minister Vajpayee, during his 13-day tenure in 1996, introduced a ban on cow slaughter as one of his
37
government’s priority objectives. It takes courage to question the axiom of the holy cow, but the
alternative before Swell was to see his people starve to death.
It was not the first time that the debate around cow slaughter bills and beef eating took place. When
a subsequent BJP-led government was in power it went to the extent of appointing a committee to
go into the matter and the committee concluded that cow protection should be made a
fundamental right and there was a need to constitute a Central Rapid Protection Force to prevent
cow slaughter, and also to invoke Pota (the now repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act) to detain
those smuggling cows!
Of course to stop the smuggling of cows is well nigh impossible and there is this instructive story
from a Pakistani diplomat who used to have his many Indian friends in splits. In one of their
meetings that India’s Border Security Force (BSF) and Pakistani Rangers had in Islamabad, the Indian
side complained how large volumes of heroin were being smuggled from across the border.
How was that possible with the fence in place, they were asked by Rana Chander Singh, Pakistan’s
minister dealing with the smuggling issue. Why of course there was this occasional bag of heroin
that was found stuck on the fence. The drug was being tossed across the border, came the BSF’s
reply. If so, then how come the Indians had never found a cow that got stuck on the fence, guffawed
Chander Singh.
The implication was that if smuggling was happening — cattle, drugs or whisky — it could be
possible only with the complicity of the security forces that controlled the gates of the fence. In this
situation the buck never stopped.
“The cow obsession of BJP is a part of deeper agenda of targeting Muslim minorities as they want to
Brahminise society by creating situations where beef eating becomes taboo for large sections of
society,” says Prof Ram Puniyani, a liberal ideologue.
Beef, he says, is amongst the cheapest sources of proteins for the poor, especially Dalits and
Adivasis. Till just a couple of decades ago there were many communities who preferred beef to
other expensive, protein-rich food. At the same time the minorities, Muslims and Christians, for
whom, beef is neither a taboo nor a compulsion, are being looked down on this pretext. Large
propaganda campaigns are on through which minorities are being demonised around the issue of
beef eating and cow slaughter.
That food habits should be our personal choice was best summed up by the poet Mirza Ghalib. He
told a British magistrate how he was a half-Muslim, that though he drank wine he did not eat pork.
A scion of the ruling family of Sharjah offered me another vignette. It so happened that the emirate,
the third largest state of UAE, was losing its once flourishing hotel business to Dubai. Everyone who
came to watch a cricket fixture in Sharjah would check into hotels in the neighbouring emirate.
The reason soon became obvious. Sharjah, under heavy financial obligations to Saudi Arabia, had
cracked down on alcohol and had banned its consumption even in five-star hotels. Yet the breakfast
tables would be piled with pork ham and sausages, forbidden in Islam.
38
So I asked the ruler’s close relative about the logic behind serving pork while banning alcohol in
hotels, particularly when it was driving away customers. “The reason is very simple my friend,” said
the sheikh with a wink. “Pork is not as tempting as alcohol.” There is a lot for the government in
Karnataka to learn in the edicts of Babar, from the wry humour of Chander Singh and from the ready
wit of Ghalib. Let it learn the art of winning medals in international sports. Let it find a healthy way
to feed its poor. That should be a good tribute to the holy cow, and a possible way to protect it.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
****
(11) What a hypocrisy, gau mata! Assault on food habits by A.J.Philip
LAST fortnight, former Prime Minister and Janata Dal (Secular) leader H.D. Deve Gowda and a team
of his party MPs and MLAs met President Pratibha Patil and requested her not to give assent to the
‘Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill, 2010’, passed by the State
Assembly by voice vote. They told the President that the Bill has dangerous implications for the
whole farming community and it was an attack on the food habits of a large section of the people,
including Dalits, Muslims and Christians.
It is true that the Directive Principles of the Constitution authorise Central and state governments to
take steps for the protection of cattle. When the issue was debated in the Constituent Assembly,
some members wanted a specific ban on cow slaughter, once and for all. They were also the ones
who wanted the primacy of Hinduism spelt out in the Constitution. Jawaharlal Nehru and others of
his ilk opposed a total ban but they, eventually, had to make a compromise.
As a result, the Indian state is directed by the Directive Principles of the Constitution to discourage
the slaughter of draught and milch cattle. This is not legally binding upon the State but, like all
directive principles, the State is meant to enforce this principle over time. But in this particular case,
there is now near total ban on cow slaughter in all the states barring the Left-ruled Kerala and West
Bengal and some states in the Northeast like Nagaland and Meghalaya.
The southern state, too, was not an exception. The Karnataka Prevention of Cow Slaughter and
Cattle Preservation Act, 1964, was in force when the Bill was passed. So what was the need for a
new law? The Karnataka Government says the Bill is similar to the one in Gujarat, whose validity was
gone into by the Supreme Court. However, there is a fundamental difference between the Gujarat
law and the Karnataka Bill. While the relevant Acts in most of the states ban cow slaughter, the
Karnataka Government seeks to ban slaughter of all cattle, including male and female buffaloes.
Cow slaughter in India is taboo because of the religious sensibilities of some Hindus who worship the
cow and sentimentally see it as an embodiment of nurture, and therefore, as mother: gau mata. But
I am yet to come across anyone who worships buffalo, male or female, though it is the vehicle of
Yama, the god of death. Needless to say, the Bill will strike hard at the butchers, whose surnames do
not include such popular ones as Agarwal, Sharma or Yeddiyurappa.
39
A large section of the people, whose source of protein is animal meat, will be deprived of it once the
Bill gets the Presidential assent. India has the world’s largest bovine population and, yet, it lags
behind even smaller European nations likes the Netherlands and Switzerland in the production of
milk and manufacture of milk products like cheese and chocolate. The farmers of Karnataka will now
be forced to feed and maintain cattle, which have crossed their productive life.
Of course, Chief Minister B.S. Yeddiyurappa says cow’s urine has medicinal properties and cow-dung
is good manure. It is a well-known secret that earlier, the farmers could sell the cattle to the traders
who would "export" them to Kerala or would secretly slaughter them. By making the punishment for
the "crime" stringent and non-bailable, farmers will be forced to "maintain" such cattle. Ultimately,
the cattle will have the luxury of starvation.
Even in a city like New Delhi, it is not uncommon to find stray cattle moving on busy roads looking
for food. I have seen some "devout Hindus" feeding such cows with their leftover food like "roti".
But for sustenance, the cows and bullocks look for food in the dustbin. Even in Delhi, waste is not
segregated and put in separate biodegradable and non-biodegradable dustbins as in Europe or St.
Stephen’s College, Delhi.
So it won’t be a surprise if used needles and razor blades are found wrapped in rotten cauliflower
petals which the cow is forced to eat. Unfortunately, "mother cow" has not been blessed with
Yeddiyurappa’s intelligence to distinguish between good food and dangerous stuff. Small wonder
that postmortems conducted on cattle have shown their intestines choked with plastic bag.
This is the kind of fate that awaits the cattle in Karnataka once the Bill is cleared. Needless to say,
manufacture of leather products like shoes, belt, bags etc will also suffer a setback. If the
government is sincere in its profession, it should recall the Bill and include provisions in it under
which anybody who is found not feeding properly his cattle will invite stringent punishment. To be
fair to the Chief Minister, he has given "rational" and "economic" reasons for the ban -- it will
increase urine production.
Now, let us see how Yeddiyurappa and Company would have reacted if say, the Indian National
Muslim League demanded a ban on sale of liquor in the State. The League would be on as firm a
ground as the BJP is on the cow slaughter, for the Directive Principles enjoin Central and state
governments to promote prohibition. The party could also point out that in the BJP-ruled Gujarat,
prohibition has been in existence for long, though liquor is freely available, at a higher price, in the
black market in Gujarat.
There are hundred and one reasons for promoting prohibition, other than the Islamic injunction
against the consumption of liquor. Alcohol is bad. Women suffer terribly at the hands of alcoholic
husbands. Women in Andhra have fought against alcohol-sellers in the state. Mahatma Gandhi was
opposed to it. Millions of people are pauperised because of their addiction to liquor etc.
Barring a microscopic, negligible section of Muslims, the entire minority community would support
prohibition. Yet, why is not the BJP in Karnataka ready to introduce prohibition in the state? Of
course, it will have some difficulty in explaining its cozy relationship with Vijay Mallya, the liquor
magnate, whose United Breweries is operational in several countries, and who was elected to the
Rajya Sabha with the BJP’s tacit support.
40
Or, take another example. During the heydays of the late Sant Bhindranwale, some kind of a ban was
imposed on selling tobacco products in some areas in Punjab. Sikhs are opposed to smoking. A Sikh
may drink gallons of liquor but if a turbaned Sikh is seen smoking in public, he will know what mob
(read Sikh) fury is. All the arguments in support of prohibition can be used to demand a ban on
smoking. Smoking forces non-smokers to become passive smokers. So it is more dangerous than
drinking.
It is for this very reason that smoking in public places is banned in a city like Chandigarh. There are
increasing restrictions on smoking in public places like trains, buses, theatres, cinema halls,
restaurants etc. But there is no ban as such on smoking. Those who want to smoke can do so in the
privacy of their homes or in dedicated smoking cubicles as in some cinema halls. Health warnings,
public education and punitive taxation are the ways in which smoking is discouraged.
Smoking has not been criminalised or driven underground as has happened in Gujarat in the case of
drinking. Nowhere in the public campaign is mentioned that Sikhism is opposed to smoking.
Yeddiyurappa would surely say that cow slaughter is not comparable to the Muslim distaste for
drinking or the Sikh rejection of smoking. After all, cow is a mother for Hindus and that her murder,
therefore, is matricide.
Now listen to what Catholics say about abortion. They call it "murder in the womb". By what
reckoning do the Yeddiyurappas rank killing adult bovines as more offensive than killing human
foetuses in the womb? What kind of a state is that which promotes killing of foetuses and subsidises
it in a host of ways and discourages slaughter of even non-productive cattle?
I have seen in Bihar signboards that proclaim "Abortion for Rs.999 only" that reminds one about the
Bata shoe prices. Then there is the multinational agency Marie Stopes that advertises its abortion
services for those who want the "murders" committed in the privacy of air-conditioned rooms in
plush business areas. Why is the Karnataka government not outraged by such activities, particularly
when selective abortions have reduced the percentage of female population in the country? Men
outnumber women in all states except Kerala.
Muslims consider pig unholy. They can even go to ridiculous extent in their hatred for such products.
I recently wrote an article for a newspaper published from an Islamic nation. In the article I
mentioned that one of the terrorists who piloted an aircraft that hit the World Trade Centre in New
York was not religious as he had bacon and eggs for breakfast that day. The sub-editor thought
"bacon" was un-Islamic and substituted it with non-harmful "chicken". In the process, the purpose of
my mentioning "bacon" was defeated.
Will the Yeddiyurappas ban piggery because Muslims may support such a decision? Incidentally, pigs
are reared mostly by the Scheduled Castes. What about banning the killing of rats? There are
temples in the country where the rats are worshipped and are fed by the devotees. Or, take the case
of Jains. They are strictly vegetarian. They do not eat any roots, ruling out potato and onion as
edibles.
The Karnatka Chief Minister has reason to know the Jains pretty well. The Jain pilgrimage town of
Sravanabelagola is situated in the state. It was there, in the third century BC, that the first Emperor
41
of India, Chandragupta Maurya, embraced the Jain religion and died through a self-imposed fast to
the death. Twelve hundred years later, in AD 981, a Jain general commissioned the largest
monolithic statue in India, 60 feet high, on the top of the larger of the two hills, Vindhyagiri. It is the
Vatican of the Digambara, or Sky Clad Jains.
The Jains are so fastidious when it comes to eating. This is how William Darlymple describes a Jain
"Mataji" eating her food in his latest book Nine Lives: "The woman waited for her to nod, and then
with a long spoon she put a titbit of food into her cupped and waiting hands. Each morsel she then
turned over carefully with the thumb of her right hand, looking for a stray hair, or winged insect, or
ant, or any living creature which might have fallen into the strictly vegetarian food, so rendering it
impure".
It would be wholly unreasonable to expect non-Jains to adhere to the food habits of the Jains.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there any warrant for treating a community as pre-eminent or its
preferences as overriding. At this rate, it would not be long before non-vegetarian food would be
banned in the country.
At Kurukshetra in Congress-ruled Haryana, no non-vegetarian food is served in any of the hotels or
restaurants. A resident who enjoys non-vegetarian food occasionally has to go to Ambala to procure
it. Come to think of it, killing of even chicken is banned in a place where "millions" of soldiers of both
Pandavas and Kauravas were killed in the epic war! The second largest mass killing in human history
occurred when the Second World War was triggered by a vegetarian by the name of Adolf Hitler.
For want of space, I would not like to quote from the Hindu scriptures which suggest that beefeating was common in the Vedic period. There are countless temples where animal sacrifices are still
performed.
I will end this column with an anecdote. I travelled in Germany for 14 days in the company, among
others, of a senior journalist closely identified with the BJP. I found him eating beef throughout the
journey. But after a few months of our return, when the BJP protested against a beef-processing
company in Andhra Pradesh, he wrote a spirited article in defence of the holy cow. What a
hypocrisy, gau mata! (Courtesy: Indian Currents)
--The writer can be reached at ajphilip@gmail.com
*****
(12) M.P.: Path Way to Hindu Rashtra by Ram Puniyani
Recently (December 2011) M.P. Government’s Gau-Vansh Vadh Pratishedh (Sanshodhan) Act (Bill for
Protection of Cow Progeny) got the Presidential clearance. As per this act punishment for
slaughtering the cow or its progeny, transporting them to slaughter house, eating and storing beef,
is punishable with a fine of R 5000 and prison term up to seven years. States like Gujarat, Karnataka,
Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh already have laws against cow slaughter, while Orissa and Andhra
Pradesh permit the killing of cattle other than cows if the animals are not fit for any other purpose.
42
There are minimal restrictions in other states and none in Nagaland, Meghalaya, West Bengal and
Kerala. Surprisingly beef consumption in India is double the combined consumption of meat and
chicken, not only that India is also the third largest exporter of beef, As per the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization UN (FAO) report titled Livestock Information, Sector Analysis and Policy
Branch says the largest consumed meat in India is beef. The annual consumption of beef in India is
26 lakh tons, as compared to 6 lakh tons of mutton and 14 laky tons of pork.
While the right wing Hindutva parties make no bones about their assertion that a total ban on cow
slaughter is their aim, the Congress too has time and again played the cow protection card especially
in the north.
In BJP ruled or ruling states the legislations are tougher already, but the one in MP beats them all in
its ferociousness and potential for targeting minorities and Adivasis in particular. As per this Bill
anybody consuming or storing or intending to violate the law can be apprehended by head constable
upwards. The onus of proof is not on the prosecution but on the accused. It will have lot of logistical
problems to prove as to how does one say that the meat being consumed is not from cow but from
buffalo or other lesser animals? This draconian bill brought in the name of faith of Hindus is a direct
manipulation of the food habits of large section of poor Indian population, Adivasis, Dalits and
Minorities (Muslims and Christians) for whom this is an affordable source of proteins. It is also an
attempt to intimidate the Muslim minorities.
Through word of mouth propaganda, and the sustained campaign through literature, small
pamphlets etc., the perceptions like ‘cow is holy for Hindus, Muslims eat it, it’s an insult of Hindu
faith and that Muslims are violent because they eat non vegetarian food/beef’ has become part of
the ‘social common sense’. When BJP led NDA came to power at Centre for 13 days, in 1996, the
Government tried to pass the bill against cow slaughter. Cow has been part of the identity politics of
RSS affiliates, Hindu right, Hindutva in India. Even during freedom movement many a riots were
instigated around the issue of cow slaughter. This has been a part of propaganda, and Gau Raksha
Samitis (Cow Protection societies) are dime a dozen, which maintain Guashalas (Cow sheds). This is
done at social level by RSS affiliates and followers.
While Ram Temple issue was the main point of onslaught on democracy, Cow issue has been always
on the stand-by so far. Gradually the intensity about cow protection and the myths built around cow
are becoming more intense. The MP Government’s Bill is yet another step in this direction. As such
MP Government has been communalizing the state by the religio-cultural mechanisms. There are
multiple ways to communalize the society. Identity based issues, are the major ones’. Communal
violence is the ghastly outcome of identity politics. In MP from last couple of years with the current
BJP Government, the slow and subtle Hinduisaion of state is in progress. Even the predecessor of
Shivraj Chauhan, Uma Bharati had converted her official residence in to a Gaushala for all practical
purposes. Lot of things have been started around the divinity of cow. Marketing of cow urine as a
medical remedy for diseases, chain of shops selling Cow urine drink and other products are on the
upswing in the state. In addition one sees that the state government has introduced Hindu ritual of
Surya Namaskar (worshipping the Sun God), Government has introduced Gita Sar (Essence of holy
Hindu book Gita) in the schools, introducing Bhojan Mantra (Hindu meal prayer) in schools, collected
information about Christians in the state, has introduced most of its welfare schemes in the name of
Hindu Gods- Goddesses. Like Ladli Laxmi for girl child welfare, Anna Prashan for Children’s nutrition
43
programs. Many an accused of Hindutva terror attacks were taking shelter in MP. Many a Kshmiri
students were harassed in MP. The capital city of Bhopal, founded by a Mughal Nawab Dost
Mohammand Khan is intended to be changed to Bhojpal after the Hindu King Raja Bhoj.
This silent communalization of state has escaped the notice of national media to some extent. Most
of these steps of the Government are not in tune with the spirit of Indian Constitution, which
respects the personal choices about faith and food and keeps the state policies away from the
religious veneer and content. The schemes started by the BJP Government are a sort of intimidation
to minorities and is pushing them to the status of second class citizens. In MP we are witnessing yet
another pattern for marching towards the goal of Hindu Nation, the gradual and sustained
intensification of anti minority policies in the name of promoting Hindu culture. This is unlike the
phenomenon in Gujarat where communalization was intensified through violence. The paradox in
MP is that all these practices showing intolerance to the sentiments and needs of minorities are
done while blowing the trumpet that Hinduism is the most tolerant religion
****
(13) Interview with D.N. Jha: ‘A political tool’ by AJOY ASHIRWAD
MAHAPRASHASTA
Interview with D.N. Jha, historian of ancient India and the author of ‘The Myth of the Holy Cow’.
IN his career spanning more than 25 years, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, an eminent historian of ancient
India, has dispelled many Hindutva myths. He has used ancient Indian literary and archaeological
sources to show that much of the Hindutva propaganda is based on false premises. His book The
Myth of the Holy Cow shows that beef has been a part of Indian dietary habits. He has worked
extensively on the material culture of ancient India and has done research on feudalism in early
medieval India, a topic his mentor, the historian R.S. Sharma, had so successfully handled. In the
context of the Madhya Pradesh government’s decision to implement an amended Act on cow
slaughter, which is termed “draconian” by many analysts, Jha speaks in detail about the myth of the
‘holy’ cow in Indian traditions and how the Sangh Parivar has managed to use it to communalise the
country. Excerpts from an interview:
Your book ‘The Myth of the Holy Cow’ dispels the impression that Muslims introduced beef-eating
in the Indian subcontinent. What were the most important sources you used to come to this
conclusion?
For over a century, the sanctity of the cow in India has been a matter of more than academic debate.
Hindu communalists and their fundamentalist organisations have been propagating that the killing
of the cow and eating its flesh were introduced in India by the followers of Islam, and accordingly,
they have stereotyped Muslims as beef-eaters. The best way to dispel this myth is to draw data from
Indian religious texts to show the prevalence of beef-eating in ancient India. Accordingly, I have used
evidence from Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain religious texts to show that our ancestors ate beef
much before Islam came to India.
44
Could you give us some examples of where cows were used for consumption and for sacrifices in
ancient India?
Animal sacrifice was very common in the Vedic period. In the agnadheya, which was a preparatory
rite preceding all public sacrifices, a cow was required to be killed. In the asvamedha, the most
important of public sacrifices, more than 600 animals and birds were killed and its finale was marked
by the sacrifice of 21 cows. In the gosava, an important component of public sacrifices like the
rajasuya and the vajapeya, a cow was offered to Maruts. The killing of animals, including cattle,
figures in several other yajnas as well.
In the Vedic texts and the Dharmashastras, there are also references to occasions when cows were
killed for consumption, and eating of beef was de rigeur. One later Vedic text unambiguously tells us
that “verily the cow is food”, and another refers to the sage Yajnavalkya’s stubborn insistence on
eating the tender flesh of the cow. The reception of a guest, according to Vedic and post-Vedic
normative texts, required the killing of a cow in his honour. Textual evidence also indicates that
Brahmins were fed the flesh of the cow in funerary rites. I have indicated only a small portion of
evidence, but ancient Indian texts provide copious references to the killing of the cow for sacrifice
and sustenance.
You have used a lot of ancient Indian sources to elaborate on this point. But have there been other
“Hindu sources” or literature in medieval India and modern India that elaborate on the material
use of the cow?
There is considerable evidence of the continuity of the beef-eating tradition in post-Vedic times.
Manusmriti (200 B.C.-A.D. 200), the most influential of the Dharmashastra texts, recalls the
legendary examples of the most virtuous Brahmins who ate ox-meat and dog-meat to escape
starvation. The Smriti of Yajnavalkya (A.D. 100-300) laid down that a learned Brahmin (shrotrya)
should be welcomed with a big ox or goat. It may be recalled that most of the characters in the
Mahabharata are meat-eaters, and not surprisingly, it refers to King Rantideva in whose kitchen
2,000 cows were butchered every day and their flesh, along with grains, was distributed among
Brahmins.
The sage Bharadvaja is said to have welcomed Rama by slaughtering a fatted calf in his honour.
What is found in religious or Dharmashastric texts is also reflected in secular literature. Early Indian
medical treatises speak of the therapeutic use of beef, and several authors of literary works
(Kalidasa, Bhavabhuti, Rajashekhara and Shriharsha, to name only a few) refer to the eating of beef.
How did the myth of the cow’s holiness come into existence in the Hindu psyche? Are there
incidents or periods in Indian history that establish the cow’s holiness as opposed to its material
use in ancient India? Were there parallel narratives in ancient India that saw the cow as a religious
and holy symbol of Hinduism?
It is often held by some scholars that the Vedic cow was sacred. Such an assertion is based on the
occurrence of the word aghnya (meaning, not to be slain) in the Atharvaveda. However, it has been
convincingly proved that if the Vedic cow was at all inviolable, it was so only when it belonged to a
Brahmin who received cows as a sacrificial fee (dakshina). Buddhism and Jainism opposed animal
45
sacrifice and the killing of cattle. But even their canonical works do not refer to the cow as a sacred
animal.
The sacred-cow concept developed much later. Lawgivers began to discourage beef-eating around
the middle of the first millennium when Indian society began to be gradually feudalised, leading to a
major socio-cultural transformation. This phase of transition, first described in the epic and Puranic
passages as Kaliyuga, saw many changes and modifications in social norms and customs. Brahminical
religious texts now began to speak of many earlier practices as forbidden in the Kaliyuga – practices
which came to be known as Kalivarjyas, and most of the relevant texts mention cow-killing as
forbidden in the Kaliyuga.
Cow-killing and eating of beef came to be increasingly associated with the proliferating untouchable
castes. It is, however, interesting that some of the Dharmashastra texts consider these acts as no
more than minor behavioural aberrations. Whatever be the Dharmashastric prescription, eating beef
by some people cannot be ruled out. As recently as the late 19th century, Swami Vivekananda was
alleged to have eaten beef during his stay in America. Similarly, in the early 20th century, Mahatma
Gandhi spoke of the hypocrisy of orthodox Hindus who “do not so much as hesitate or inquire when
during illness the doctor prescribes them beef tea”. Even today, 72 communities in Kerala – not all of
them untouchable perhaps – prefer beef to the expensive mutton, and the Hindutva forces are
persuading them to go easy on it.
A SCENE IN Bhopal. Nothing is done about the care of cows like these which are often found
rummaging through heaps of garbage for food.
In spite of all this, the development of the doctrine of non-violence in the Upanishadic thought, its
prominent presence in the Buddhist and Jain world views, and its centrality in the Vaishnava religion,
strengthened the idea of non-killing of animals: the cow became specially important and sacrosanct
because of its economic value in an agrarian society and because Brahmins received them as
dakshina and would not like them to be killed.
Since when did cow slaughter become a political issue in India? Has there been any historical
movement around this issue? Could you give us some examples of when the “manufactured
holiness” of the cow began to be used as a tool for political mobilisation?
The cow has tended to become a political instrument in the hands of rulers over time. The Mughal
emperors (for example, Babar, Akbar, Jahangir and Aurangzeb) are said to have imposed a restricted
ban on cow slaughter to accommodate the Jaina or Brahminical feeling of respect for and veneration
of the cow. Similarly Shivaji, sometimes viewed as an incarnation of God who descended on earth
for the deliverance of the cow and the Brahmin, is described as proclaiming: “We are Hindus and the
rightful lords of the realm. It is not proper for us to witness cow slaughter and the oppression of
Brahmanas.”
But the cow became a tool of mass political mobilisation when the organised Hindu cow-protection
movement, beginning with the Sikh Kuka (or Namdhari) sect in the Punjab around 1870 and later
strengthened by the foundation of the first Gorakshini Sabha in 1882 by Dayanananda Saraswati,
made this animal a symbol to unite a wide-ranging people, challenged the Muslim practice of
46
slaughter and provoked a series of communal riots in the 1880s and 1890s. Although attitudes to
cow-killing had been hardening even earlier, there was an intensification of the cow-protection
movement when in 1888 the North-Western Provinces High Court decreed that the cow was not a
sacred object. Not surprisingly, cow slaughter very often became the pretext for many Hindu-Muslim
riots – especially those in Azamgarh district in the year 1893 – in which more than 100 people were
killed in different parts of the country. Similarly, in 1912-1913 violence rocked Ayodhya, and a few
years later, in 1917, Shahabad witnessed a disastrous communal conflagration.
The killing of kine seems to have emerged again and again as a troublesome issue on the Indian
political scene even in independent India. In 1966, nearly two decades after Independence, almost
all Indian communal political parties and organisations joined hands in organising a massive
demonstration by several hundred thousand people in favour of a national ban on cow slaughter,
which culminated in a violent rioting in front of India’s Parliament House, resulting in the death of at
least eight persons and injury to many more. In April 1979, Acharya Vinoba Bhave, often supposed to
be the spiritual heir to Mahatma Gandhi, went on a hunger strike to pressure the Central
government to prohibit cow slaughter. Obscurantist and fundamentalist forces have converted the
cow into a communal identity of Hindus and they refuse to appreciate that the “sacred” cow was not
always all that sacred in the Vedic and subsequent Brahminical and non-Brahminical traditions and
that its flesh, along with other varieties of meat, was quite often a part of the haute cuisine in early
India.
Beef-eating is much more an accepted norm in south India than in north India. What could be the
reasons for this, since such acceptance and oppositions must have grown historically?
In some parts of south India beef-eating is common, but it is not possible to generalise. Most tribes,
Dalits and Muslims in different parts of the country, eat beef and so do the hill communities of
north-eastern India. But even here, it is not possible to generalise because most tribes in the
erstwhile south Bihar do not eat cow meat.
According to one estimate, 40 per cent of Hindus eat beef even today, even if we leave out the tribal
people, Muslims and Christians. Dalits all over India have been eating beef. It is the most economical
meat. The Madhya Pradesh government has recently banned not just cow slaughter but also the
consumption of beef. Many believe the ban is draconian. What is your view on the Act?
In my view no sane Indian would like to kill his cattle, and if he does he can be punished under the
law. Animal rights must be respected, but why a special status only to the cow? And if the Sangh
Parivar is serious about stopping cow slaughter, what has it done in the BJP-ruled States for the care
of cows which are often found bumbling between the luxurious limos of the privileged and the
pushcarts of the poor, causing traffic snarls in metros, and browsing on heaps of garbage, ranging
from inedible throw-outs to the stinking carrion.
It is preposterous to ban the slaughter of old, ailing and starving cows and to prohibit the
consumption of their flesh, which is poor man’s protein. The law to dictate dietary preferences is a
gross violation of personal freedom and is certainly draconian. Why not remind the Sangh Parivar
that its own ideologue of the Jan Sangh (now the BJP), K.R. Malkani, permitted without equivocation
the eating of the flesh of cows dying a natural death.
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What could be the implications of a resurgent anti-cow slaughter idiom in India? In most BJP-ruled
States, this issue has seen a lot of political mobilisation, with one of the priorities of the respective
governments being to bring an anti-cow slaughter Act as soon as they come to power.
The Sangh Parivar has communalised the politics of the country. The resurgent anti-cow slaughter
movement will only add fuel to the fire.
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