India's beef ban belies reality and history

At seven in the morning, on a day that dawned with overcast skies, the beef stalls at the central Connemara market in the south Indian city of Trivandrum, has already sold most of the meat. The three beef sellers there announce their products to me. At the Fresh Beef stall, with national tri-colour flags stuck on the windows, as if to carve out their own space in India, the owner expresses absolute shock and disbelief about the lynching of a 50-year-old man in a Greater Noida village bordering New Delhi. In the city newspaper Kerala Kaumudi the news from that village far away is the lead story on page one headlined: 'Middle aged man lynched on suspicion of eating beef'.
This sense of outrage expressed by the beef seller and the headlines of Kaumudi shows the ideological distance that separates south Indian states from the north where loony Hindu groups are trying to enforce a total national ban on beef eating around the country. All south Indian states allow the selling and eating of beef like the north eastern states, while all Hindi heartland states have banned cow beef, apart from West Bengal. Kerala is mostly likely the highest domestic consumer of beef, since all communities apart from high caste Hindus enjoy beef, especially the irresistible, beef olathiyathu (beef fried with coconut slices) and chilly beef which is part of the menu of most non-veg hotels.
The prohibition of meat and food comes under the Directive Principles of State Policy under Article 48 of the Constitution and so each state government can decide on the issue which the central government cannot overrun. India produces close to 4 million tones of beef out of which half is consumed domestically. Most of this is water buffalo meat.
Two days before the lynching in Greater Noida, protests had broken out in the Muslim dominated region of Kashmir bordering Pakistan following a court order to enforce beef ban. India is now riven along the cow question: Should cows, considered a holy animal by high caste Hindus in north India, be allowed to be slaughtered for meat? This has been a simmering volcano of an issue in India through the ages, off and on bringing the country to the edge of tension as it has been happening after the Modi government came to power.
Embellished by myth, championed by various rulers, honoured and worshipped by the Brahmanical classes in north India, held aloft by the loony Right as if it was a scimitar, the innocent cow today threatens to shred apart the social fabric of the country and the relationship between the big majority Hindu community and the minority Muslim, Christians, tribal communities and populations in the North East.
All states ruled by the BJP have banned beef, the latest being Maharashtra which to add insult to injury of the minorities added a jail term of 5 years if found in possession of beef. In direct contrast, the Congress-led Siddharamiah government of Karnataka, lifted the ban on beef soon after it came to power two years back.
The battle for the cow in India is not a health issue, but a majoritarian attempt to thrust its beliefs on the country, something seen by the minorities as an attempt to break the secular fabric and then eventually reduce the minorities to an insignificant political cluster. The cow is also being used as a symbol to enforce Hindu unity or a culturally homogenous population which will stand by the BJP always. Unfortunately apart from the higher castes, the middle and lower segments of Hindus have no opposition to cow beef. The issue is ancient. Baber, the founder of the Mughal empire saw this diversity in beliefs quite early and wrote in 1529 to his son Humayun, in one of his testaments:
"The realm of Hindustan is full of diverse creeds. Praise be to God, the Righteous, the Glorious, the Highest, that He had granted unto you the Empire of it. It is but proper that you, with heart cleansed of all religious bigotry, should dispense justice according to the tenets of each community. And in particular refrain from the sacrifice of cow, for that way lies the conquest of the hearts of the people of Hindustan; and the subjects of the realm will, through royal favour, be devoted to you."
But rather ironically, Ashoka the great unifying emperor did not ban the slaughter of cows. This divergence of views has made the elevation of the cow as a nationalists project a rather onerous task over the centuries.
D. Kosambi in his classic book Ancient India wrote: "A modern orthodox Hindu would place beef-eating on the same level as cannibalism, whereas Vedic Brahmins had fattened upon a steady diet of sacrificed beef".
Well known critic Pankaj Mishra in his review of D.N. Jha's 'The Myth of the Holy Cow' wrote in The Guardian in 2012: "For these Hindus(the newly emergent middle class Hindus), the cause for banning slaughter became a badge of identity, part of their quest for political power in post-colonial India. Educated Muslims felt excluded from, even scorned by, these Hindu notions of the Indian past; and they developed their own separatist fantasies."
So the idea of using the cow as a unifier for this diverse country is not exactly new. Since the BJP assumed power the cow has again been identified as a potent symbol to show minorities their place. But many of them also realise that no one wants to farm cows and cow milk and leather (businesses controlled by high caste Hindus) will become a rarity.
So India, high ranking producer of milk, will have to depend on buffalo milk alone as the cow is no longer viable for farmers if it cannot be sold for slaughter. If unwanted cows roam the cities and towns of north, not just blocking traffic but unaware of its status as divine symbol and easy meat for Right rhetoric, and also posing larger questions about the concept of nationhood, it is because of this sudden reimposition of the animal as a symbol of majoritarian aggression.
Most of all what pulls down the Hindu nationalist campaign is the theological confusion about the cow, all the way from Vedic times. This agenda or the cow as a holy animal does not stand the test of rigorous research. D.N. Jha exposes the truth in his book Myth of the Holy Cow: Animal sacrifices were very common, the most important of them being the famous asvamedha and rajasuya. These and several other major sacrifices involved the killing of animals including cattle, which constituted the chief form of the wealth of the early Aryans. Not surprisingly, they prayed for cattle and sacrificed them to propitiate their gods.
The Vedic deities had no marked dietary preferences. Milk, butter, barley, oxen, goats and sheep were their usual food, though some of them seem to have had their special preferences. Indra had a special liking for bulls.
The Maruts and the asvins were also offered cows. The Vedas mention about 250 animals out of which at least 50 were deemed fit for sacrifice, by implication for divine as well as human consumption. The Taittiriya Brahmana categorically tells us: Verily the cow is food(atho annam vai gauh) and Yajnavalkya's insistence on eating the tender (amsala) flesh of the cow is well known."
Faced with such evidence it is almost impossible to obliterate beef from the sparse eating tables of the country. The prices of meat are exorbitant placing it out of the reach of the poor. This suites the position of the BJP which also aggressively propagates vegetarianism which is in turn enmeshed within its concept of purity both of soul and body.
But in Trivandrum's Fresh Beef Stall, such thoughts are far away from the mind of the butcher. "This lone cow (pointing out the head to me as proof that it is cow) which was slaughtered today will be sold by 10am," he tells confidently. For him, like many farmers across the country, cow is survival. That very notion and way of life is under threat.

Fact box
> Under the distribution of legislative powers between the Union of India and States under Article 246(3) of the Constitution, the preservation of cattle is a matter on which the legislature of the States has exclusive powers.
> Except 5 states all the others states have legislations on slaughter. The five States are Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland and one Union Territory i.e. Lakshadweep.
> Total number of registered slaughter houses in India - 2294 (as of March 2012)
> States with maximum number of slaughter houses - Rajasthan (514), Maharashtra (336), UP (285), Andhra Pradesh (185) and Kerala (154)