The author is a Delhi based journalist
For nearly a century and a half, the cow wasn’t just a cow but an incendiary political issue, which periodically ignited many a communal conflagration all around India. Underlying the acrimony was the demand asking Muslims to eschew beef-eating in respect for the religious sentiments of Hindus, who considered the cow holy. It tacitly assumed a monolithic Hindu community united in its veneration of the cow and the need to save her from the Muslim butcher’s cleaver.
This assumption stands challenged in Hyderabad, not by Muslims, but by assertive lower-caste Hindus who were contemptuously treated and referred to as Untouchables and who now have adopted the nomenclature of Dalit (oppressed) for defining their identity. On April 15, Dalit students organised a beef festival at Hyderabad’s Osmania University, where 2,000 of them publicly partook of the savoury beef biryani even as a singer belted the song: “Beef is the secret of my energy.”
This demonstration of defiance was in support of their demand to have beef included on the hostel’s menu. Their logic was — beef is taboo for high caste Hindus, not the Dalits, sections of other backward castes, Muslims and Christians, whose diet includes beef. In excluding it from the menu, the university, they said, is guilty of showing an unjustifiable predilection for the religious sensitivity of high caste Hindus. At one stroke was thus shattered the myth of the Hindu community being a monolith.
The precursor to the dietary defiance of April 15 was the beef festival organised at Hyderabad’s English and Foreign Languages University last year. But it was abandoned as high caste Hindu students poured urine over the beef dish. Surely, the beef bug has afflicted Delhi’s Jawaharlal University (JNU) as well. In response to the state of Madhya Pradesh imposing a seven-year imprisonment for cow slaughter and shockingly placing the onus on the accused to prove his innocence, a band of students have organised the JNU Beef-Pork Eating Campaign. They want eateries on the campus to serve beef and pork. Could this not create a piquant situation for Muslims, for whom pork is prohibited?
To find the answer to this question, as to also understand the ideological underpinning of the beef festival, I called Professor Kancha Ilaiah, who’s considered the moving spirit behind the dietary defiance. He said in his recent address to JNU students that he had asked the Muslims among them whether they were opposed to the serving of pork in a shared dining space. The response, Ilaiah claimed, was unanimously in the negative. Yet you do wonder whether he’d have received a similar response had he posed the same question to the students of Aligarh Muslim University, where Islamic groups are not known for being tolerant of deviances of any kind.
Since pork hasn’t fuelled the current food controversy, Professor Ilaiah switched to elucidating upon the beef festival: “Beef has been wrongly projected as Islamic and Christian food. Those who are opposed to the consumption of beef can’t interfere with the cultural practices of others. Once the beef issue is resolved in the public space, communal riots in India will go down by 50-60 percent.”
Those in Pakistan who have lived through the horrifying decade preceding the partition are likely to find the negation of the sacredness of the cow immensely surprising, for it was this the Hindu often invoked to demand a ban on cow slaughter. However, several modern historians such as DN Jha, the author of The Myth of the Holy Cow, have culled a wide array of evidence from ancient texts to claim that the cow wasn’t considered sacred in India, and her meat was widely consumed not only by those on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy but also by Brahmins who presided over elaborate cattle sacrifices to propitiate the gods. It was in the 4th-5th century BCE that the cow began to be considered holy. An inscription dated 465 CE equates the killing of a cow with the killing of a Brahmin, who even today sits atop the caste hierarchy because of his priestly status.
Perhaps this period witnessed a change in the popular perception about the cow because of the growing importance of animal husbandry as settled agriculture expanded exponentially. In the new socio-economic context, the Brahmin could have been alienated from the people had he insisted on elaborate animal sacrifices of the past, more so as their main principal rival, the Buddhist monk, was opposed to senseless, large-scale killing of animals, including the kine, but allowed eating of meat subject to certain conditions. In the intense competition between the Buddhist and Brahmin, says BR Ambedkar, a Dalit icon who’s considered the father of the Indian Constitution, the latter managed to establish supremacy through his decision to turn vegetarian. Such conjectures apart, at the advent of Islam in the subcontinent, the cow had become sacred for caste Hindus, in contrast to the untouchables who were allowed to eat the flesh of a dead cow.
But the use of the cow for political mobilisation began in the late 19th century, as Hindu groups espousing her protection mushroomed. Following the verdict of the North-Western Provinces High Court declaring that the cow wasn’t sacred, the movement acquired shades of vigilantism, leading to communal riots in several parts of India in 1893. In fact, riots over the cow became a recurring feature through the succeeding decades.
This reverence found expression in the Constituent Assembly (CA), where a few members demanded prohibition on cow slaughter to be included in the Fundamental Rights of the Constitution. It was at the insistence of Ambedkar that cow protection was incorporated as a Directive Principle of State Policy, which isn’t mandatory for the government to implement. Thus, Article 48 says that for organising agriculture and animal husbandry on scientific lines, the state should take steps to prohibit “slaughter of cows and other milch and draught animals”.
In an excellent academic paper, Shraddha Chigateri says the language of Article 48 was a rational gloss imparted to what was decidedly a matter of faith. It was precisely the point a Muslim CA member, Syed Sa’adulla, made during the cow debate, saying he wouldn’t mind if the Hindu members were to say that “this is part of our religion…The cow should be protected from slaughter.” But economic arguments, he said, created suspicion that the “ingrained Hindu feeling against cow-slaughter is being satisfied by the backdoor.” Nevertheless, as Chigateri shows, the SC through its many verdicts upheld the ban on the slaughter of cows of all ages, allowing the killing of buffaloes and bulls only “after they ceased to be capable of yielding milk or breeding or working as draught animals”. Even this exception the SC did away with in 2005 — state governments can now ban slaughter of cattle, irrespective of their age and utility.
Against this backdrop, you could as well think of the beef festival at Osmania University as India’s Rosa Parks moment. She triggered the historic black civil rights movement through her refusal to obey the bus driver who wanted her to vacate her seat for a white passenger. Perhaps the Dalit students of Hyderabad have taken a similar, decisive step for transforming the Indian mindscape. http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\04\27\story_27-4-2012_pg3_2
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