rediff.com: Amberish K Diwanji on the holy cow


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November 15, 2002

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Amberish K Diwanji

Holy cow!

The cow is in the news. One of the parties of the Right has demanded that the cow be made India's national animal, in place of the tiger. It does seem to be a strange demand at a time when the Hindu Right wants to portray Hindus as a tough and aggressive race: the cow hardly symbolizes ferocity.

First, there was the case of five dalits killed by a mob simply because they were skinning a dead cow. After the gruesome murders, there were news reports of some fanatical Hindus demanding that skinning of dead cows be stopped and that dead cows be cremated. Some self-styled Hindu leader said the cow is 'our mother', and did we skin our mother when she died?

Of course there is no answer as to who in impoverished India, where about 40 per cent of the people are still illiterate and don't get two square meals a day, will pay for this 'cremation' [the country has some 200 million bovine creatures; at a conservative estimate, that is at least 60 million cows, since cows and bulls outnumber buffaloes in India].

All this overload of news on the cow only confirms one of the worst fears: that India now possesses a set of self-styled Hindu protectors, whose single point agenda is to make India a Hindu version of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia; to convert India into a country where matters of religion dominate all spheres of life, where rational thinking is at a discount, where in the name of God and Hindu religion, the worst aspects are bowed to, and where even laughable demands in the name of religion are actually considered perfectly normal, if only because they echo the sentiment of some crazy person. And the cow has become a weapon in their arsenal.

The Hindus' reverence for the cow today is a relic of his past. It made sense then, it makes absolutely no sense today, and it is tragic that after entering the 21st century, that even as the world progresses, huge sections of our population not just think along mediaeval lines, but also want the rest of us to follow suit.

Let us look at the role of the cow. The cow was, in ancient times, the most important animal for Indians, combining multiple roles. The cow gave milk, could plough the fields (though bulls were preferred for that), could pull the cart (again, bulls were preferred), and her dung was useful in the fields as fertilizer and for fuel. All of these are done today also. Not surprisingly, the cow then and now occupies a premier place in the household and it made no sense to eat beef since a cow alive was worth its weight in gold. Killing a cow was a grave offence, since that could impoverish a family.

Similarly, in the West, the horse became an extremely important animal: it carried persons on its back; it ploughed fields and pulled carriages, and its dung was used as fuel and fertilizer. It did not, however, provide milk to humans. No wonder, excluding a few communities, horsemeat was never part of the dining table since a living horse is far more useful than dead meat. And in England a few centuries ago, stealing a horse meant the death penalty.

But the similarities end there. No community anywhere worships the horse, even though the value of the horse was priceless. But ancient Hindus made the cow a part of Hindu religion and rituals, so much so that millions of Hindus, tragically, treat the cow better than they do fellow humans of the so-called lower castes. The cow is called the mother and holy, and how this affected the Hindu psyche is worth studying (the Chinese farmers depend on water buffaloes, but they don't worship the buffalo!).

Perhaps it is time we Hindus ask ourselves whether our reverence for the cow has not crossed all sane limits, and whether it makes sense to continue it. Today, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cows roam the streets of our cities and villages, hungry, uncared for, in conditions so pitiable that if she is indeed a mother, then clearly we are ungrateful children. Some years ago, a post-mortem of a cow's stomach revealed six kilograms of plastic, an outcome of foraging in garbage dumps for food. These cows wander on the streets, simply waiting to die, thrown out by their former owners simply because in old age they are of little use. They go hungry, are beaten and hustled away; for them living is a fate worse than death.

Technology is making the cow redundant, save for dairy purposes. Even here, the buffalo today is part of most dairy set-ups rather than the cow. No doubt the cow remains useful, especially for poor farmers and rural households, playing multiple roles. But using cows and bulls today to plough fields and pull carts only indicates the backwardness of Indian farmers and the lack of infrastructure in rural areas; it does not show a reverence for the cow.

Let us realize that India cannot go into the future holding on to baggage of the past. This is not to say that cows should be killed, but just that as and when they die, let their deaths not become an issue for discord. The buffalo is just as useful, but is there any dispute about skinning a dead buffalo? If cow milk sustains millions (today, more often than not it is buffalo that provide the milk), so does the leather industry, which employs 2.5 million people and is worth about Rs 100 million. Let those who demand that cows cannot be skinned provide gainful employment to all those affected.

Tragically, the holy cow has become the unholy symbol of Hindu intolerance and bigotry, a weapon against those who may not share the same level of pious reverence for the cow.

Last, Hindus may do well to ask themselves that if instead of the cow they had revered the horse, whether India's history have been different. After all, conquering armies always marched on horseback, not cowback!

Good God! Thou ate beef? --- Varsha Bhosle

Amberish K Diwanji

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