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Herd Mentality -Himanshu Upadhyaya
-CaravanMagazine.in

How political rhetoric has drowned out the economic realities of cattle-slaughter bans

In mid August, news broke that more than 200 cows had starved to death in a shelter in Chhattisgarh owned by a Bharatiya Janata Party leader named Harish Verma. After the reports appeared, Verma protested that he had not received funds that the government had promised him for the shelter.

But the irony could not have been starker. The BJP has long been opposed to cow slaughter, and the central government as well as the state governments that it heads have clamped down on it. The years since 2014, when the party came to power at the centre, have seen an escalation of tensions around the issue, and multiple incidents of people lynched on suspicion of possessing beef. Yet, in Chhattisgarh, one of the party’s own leaders had allowed cows under his care to die prolonged, agonising deaths.

The incident highlighted the deep tension in India between the economics and politics of protecting cows, as well as other cattle, such as buffalo. Over the decades, numerous leaders and groups have sought to promote the cause, urging that even old and unviable cattle be protected from slaughter. They have argued that cattle should be housed and cared for in shelters. But the economic viability of this solution has never been fully analysed. Despite this lacuna, events over the past century suggest that political rhetoric has drowned out the economic realities of the issue.

Though not much historical research has been conducted on this topic, what little work has been done has suggested that cow slaughter was common in the country in the nineteenth century. In their 2002 book The British Origin of Cow Slaughter, the scholars Dharampal and TM Mukundan conjectured that “probably, every district in India had one or more slaughter house, which also carried out cow slaughter, by about 1840.” (The authors’ sources for making such a claim are relatively thin, however, and they do not look more closely at the social and economic history of cattle slaughter in India.)

Though the conception of the cow as a sacred animal dates back more than two millennia, in their 2012 book A Concise History of Modern India, the historians Barbara D Metcalf and Thomas R Metcalf note that the active use of it as a symbol for political mobilisation began only in the 1860s. According to the authors, the first group to do this was not a Hindu one but a Sikh one—the Kuka, or Namdhari, sect of Punjab. Hindu mobilisation around the issue began only about a decade later, in 1882, after the Hindu leader Dayananda Saraswati of the Arya Samaj published a text, Gaukarunanidhi, containing an emotional appeal for cow protection, or gau raksha. Soon after the publication of this text, he established the first branch of the cow-protection organisation, the Gaurakshini Sabha, in Punjab. Surprisingly, given the pitched emotional appeals that many Hindus make today, Dayananda Saraswati argued a case for cow protection on economic grounds rather than spiritual ones. But the spiritual symbolism, too, was developing simultaneously—posters from this period contain the now-popular depiction of the body of the cow as an abode of 33 crore gods and goddesses from the Hindu pantheon.

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