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Sacred cows have been in politics for a long time. Actual sacred cows have been in India much longer. Now the two concepts have converged in that country.

Hindus venerated the cow for centuries. The cow was vital to agriculture in ancient times. Milk and butter (ghee) were dietary essentials as they are to this day. Cow dung was a natural fertilizer as well as a heat source and used as a building material. Cow urine was used as a natural fertilizer.

Cow sacrifice is noted in ancient Hindu scripture but somewhere along the way, the Hindus began to impute the cow with divine essence. The culture of a prosperous agriculture and a gentle religion was upset when the British glanced a covetous eye on India. In 1760, Robert Clive, a.k.a. Clive of India, established the first abattoir in India. Clive was a British soldier who founded the political and military rule of the East India Company. Up until 1760 cow slaughter, prostitution and wine drinking were illegal. Clive legalized all three. Indians to this day view his actions as a deliberate move to undermine the culture and destroy the successful agricultural system.

In the 20th century, Ghandi and Nehru promised to outlaw cow slaughter. They didn’t institute an outright ban, but cows are protected under the Indian Constitution. Article 48 states:

The State shall endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter, of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle

Fundamentalist Hindus (calling them born-again would be redundant) have long been advocating an end to cow slaughter. Many Indian states already banned the practice. Just recently another Indian state, Madhya Pradesh, passed a controversial law against cow slaughter. Muslims, who are traditionally in the meat business, charge the strict law is intended to persecute them. Many Indians will tell you Muslims in India show more interest in killing and eating beef than Muslims anywhere else. It’s seen as an in-you-face kind of thing. In 2010 a Muslim butcher brutally killed a cow in a fit of rage because the cow no longer provided milk. In retaliation Hindus attacked two mosques setting fire to one.

The law is strict. Premises may be raided if it is considered likely that slaughter of cows is to take place or if beef is to be stored or transported. The maximum sentence is seven years. It is the burden of the accused to prove the prosecution wrong.

Madhya Pradesh’s bill for ban on cow slaughter gets Presidential nod

In fulfillment of its commitment to protecting and conserving cow progeny the Bharatiya Janata Party, (BJP), ruled state government had passed the amendment Bill in Vidhan Sabha in 2010 to remove the flaws in the Madhya Pradesh Gauvansh Pratishedh Adhiniyam 2004. The Bill received Presidential assent on December 22, 2011. The Bill was forwarded to Union Home Ministry on September 3, 2010 for Presidential assent.

The Bill had also sought to obviate the difficulties and to make the provisions more stringent. With the enforcement of the amended Act now the responsibility of proving the prosecution wrong would lie with the accused in case of cow slaughter Similarly, now a guilty of cow slaughter would be liable to 7 years imprisonment instead of present 3 years and a minimum fine of Rs. 5,000 instead of Rs. 10,000, which may be increased by the court.

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Cow slaughter ban: Using ‘sensitivities’ to politically polarising ends works against democracy

Now, the issue of banning cow slaughter is not something recent. Nor is it solely the agenda of the Sangh Parivar or BJP-ruled states – for example, it was the Congress’ Digvijay Singh who, as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh in 2003, demanded a country-wide ban on cow slaughter.

The problem is how the political class deploys and seeks to use such religious/culturally-‘sensitive’ issues, across communities, converging or differing on proscribing something depending on assessments of resultant political capital. This is one of the facets of that underlying malaise of how politics is envisaged in India: as competitive identity management that actually engenders, if not entrenches, the sense of divided, polarised identities within the polity.
In that climate of polarisation, rational debate, where sensitivities can coexist with rights and liberties, is negated. ​

So is the law about the fulfillment of a longstanding religious/cultural prohibition or a modern day hatred? A mixture of both probably. The strictness of the law has jurists worried. We shall see what happens next.

It is truer in India than in other places, you are what you eat…or don’t eat.