Cow Protection

We have searched the Turk's religion, 

These teachers throw many thunderbolts,

Recklessly they display boundless pride, 

while explaining their own aims, they kill cows.

How can they kill the mother, 

whose milk they drink like that of a wet nurse?

The young and the old drink milk pudding, 

but these fools eat the cow's body.

These morons know nothing, they wander about in ignorance,

Without looking into one's heart, 

how can one reach paradise?

— Kabir

Although it hosts a number of minority religious communities, notably the Mahometans – about a fifth of the population -, Benares is the quintessentially Hindoo city. Accordingly – as the author's photographs on this page illustrate - its laneways and streets and river steps (ghats) abound with cows, sacred to the Hindoo. The author currently resides in Benares; the sight of cows wandering by as he sits in cafes and lassi houses and strolls the streets is one of the most conspicuous features of the experience. 

The cow is protected under Hindoo religious codes and in some places under civil law, although this is a matter of contemporary controversy. The sanctity of the cow in India is ancient, but in the Middle Ages, corresponding with the invasions of the beef-eating Mughuls, cow protection came to prominence as a touchstone of Hindoo religiosity. Then, during British rule, the Cow Protection Movement, started in 1892 by Swami Dayananda, famously agitated for an end to the slaughter and eating of cows, bringing the issue to the very forefront of Hindoo identity. Today, Hindoo nationalists are again vocal on the matter, and some state jurisdictions have recently banned the consumption of beef. Modern India is a nation where McDonald’s stores assure customers that their burgers are ‘100% Beef Free’. 

Cow protection, however, is, and always has been, perceived as an attack upon the rights of the Mahometans who have often responded angrily to restrictions on beef eating. When the British, conceding to Hindoo demands to some degree and seeking to regulate the matter, ordered that Mahometans would need to register for permission to slaughter cows, riots broke out all over northern India. Beef is explicitly mentioned in the Koran as a permitted food, and for Mahometans in Hindoostan beef-eating is an emblem of freedom from what they deem as Hindoo idolatry. Any restrictions on eating beef is seen as a direct assault upon the Mahometan faith. In a modern context, moreover, it is seen as an attack upon the rights of a minority religion in an ostensibly secular and multi-faith polity. 

This is a particularly volatile issue under the strongly Hindoo Prime Ministership of Mr. Modi (who, incidentally, the present author saw in person during his visit to the Ganges several days ago.) There has been renewed agitation for cow protection in recent times, to which Mr. Modi has given his tacit (unspoken) approval. This has outraged secular Leftists who are – as they are in the West - siding with and speaking for the Mahometans and the complaint of “Islamophobia”. The conservative Mr. Modi represents a resurgent Hindoo identity – but given the religious demographics of India this is necessarily at the expense of the Mahometans. It is said that Mr. Modi is the first truly Hindoo leader of this land in 500 years. First there were the Moghuls, then the British, and since independence the secular Leftists of the Congress Party have dominated. Mr. Modi is an advocate for a more Hindoo India and champions the nation’s Hindoo heritage. He is loved and loathed for the same. In any case, once again cow protection has become a symbolic issue, a dividing line in the struggle for India’s soul. 

While there are no doubt complexities to the issue, the present author is generally but cautiously sympathetic to the cause of the Hindoos in this case – or at least he resists the excesses of the relativism that now defines (and distorts) the (ever-outraged) political Left. The immutable fact is that Mother India is, if not officially a Hindoo nation, then most definitely a Hindoo majority one, and this – by the very nature of things - demands some recognition. Reality trumps ideology.

The Hindooness of India – ancient, primordial, autochthonous - is an inescapable reality and it is an impossible absurdity for India not to have a Hindoo identity. Hindooism is in the soil. Secular India is a contrivance. The principle involved here is that the rights of minority groups, though important, cannot be allowed to dissolve the identity of the dominant culture, or else – as we see in the cringing cultural sickness that besets the West today - a society descends very quickly into the churning quicksand of relativism. 

By all means, the ever-present shadow of overbearing chauvinism is to be avoided, but minorities are still minorities, and to suppose that they are ‘equals’ in a total sense is a dangerous abstraction. The necessary protection of minorities under law should not be at the expense of a strong and vibrant dominant culture. No society should indulge in self-harm in order to accommodate diversity. You do not shoot your foot off to make the lame equals. Diversity – religious, ethnic, linguistic – is always a negotiated balance of factors, but there is no sense in pretending that there is not, and should not be, a dominant player in the arrangement. Of course there is. And in multi-faith India, it is Hindooism. The Mahometans, the Sikhs, others, are minorities, and it is proper that they admit this and understand it is a fact of life. They remain partners in modern India, but by the sheer force of numbers – not to mention history – they can never be ‘equals’ in the total sense. 

Arguably, in any case, modern India has already conceded too much. This is the argument of the Hindoo advocates. As any Hindoo will remind you, independence surrendered a good third of India – the whole Indus valley and the Ganges delta, no less! – to the Mahometans by way of the east and west Pakistans. The entire rationale of those Muslim-only nations was that the Mahometans – like a peculiar species that needs its own special habitat - could not bear a shared identity. India, in contrast, settled on a multi-faith modernity, and very deliberately chose not to be ‘Hindoo’ in any official sense. Pakistan – an appalling mess from the beginning, to be frank - is an ‘Islamic Republic’ (of which there is not a single successful example anywhere in the world), but India, let us note, is not a ‘Hindoo Republic’. And nor – so this writer believes, insofar it is any of his business - should it be. But, for all of that, it remains a Hindoo majority nation, and this fact must mean something. 

The sanctity of the cow is the issue at hand. Is it too much to ask of the Mahometans that they eat mutton? Religious tensions rise whenever a cow wanders into the Muslim quarter of the city and duly disappears into the butcher shops. The present author has seen actual cases of this in Calcutta and elsewhere. Slaughtered cows, herded from the streets, are strung up in butcher’s shops in the laneways around the mosque. The Hindoos rightly see this as provocation and sacrilege. The Mahometan, in response, holds up his Koran and cries “Halal! Halal!” – beef is permitted by Allah! Maybe so, but it ignores the fact that, whatever the ideals of the secular nation might be, Islam is a minority faith living under the ecumenical umbrella of Hindoo hospitality. And where, in any case, does Allah say that beef-eating is required? Mahometans choose to eat beef. They need not. It is surely a matter of respect to their Hindoo compatriots and neighbours that they refrain from doing so. Would it hurt for Mahomatens to say, "The cow is sacred to you. Okay, we'll eat chicken."? No one is asking the Mahometans to become vegetarians, as good Hindoos are. The Hindoos understand that they are meat eaters. But the cow is sacred. 

The present author eats beef too – but not when he is in India. He is in a Hindoo majority nation. He modifies his behavior according to this fact. He doesn’t march into a McDonald’s and demand a quarter pounder as one of his inalienable human rights. Respect.Not to mention prudence. 

True, the author is a visitor to India, whereas Mahometan Indians are full citizens, which implies equality, but – once again – this “equality” is an abstraction that is, at best, an ideal rather than a reality, and it does not apply to all things or prevail in all domains, except as an approximation. Any member of any minority in any polity knows this as a fact of existence, which is merely to say we do not and cannot ever live in an ideal world. All the mischief of life consists in refusing to acknowledge this. The most dangerous people in the world are those who want to force abstractions upon the gritty facts of life. The rights of a minority do not negate the right of a majority to maintain a living culture. Whatever ideals of “equality” and other abstractions we entertain, minorities must always adjust to the legitimate dominance of a majority, if not in theory, certainly in practice.

Mahometans deserve to be equal partners in modern India, but they need to appreciate that Hindooism was here long before the arrival of Islam and that Hindoo spirituality - to which the sanctity of the cow is emblematic - is the very essence of the land. This is nowhere more apparent than in the sacred city of Benares. Is the Ganga sacred to Islam? We have reached an impasse in Indian history at which a responsibility falls upon the Mahometans to recognise the reality of Hindoo India and to accommodate it to the potentially (but tragically unfulfilled) universalism of the Islamic spiritual perspective. 

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black