United News reported last week that hundreds of Hindu God experts converged on New Delhi to press their demand for a law prohibiting the killing of cows in India. Not only would domestic production of beef be banned, but its importation as well. They submitted a petition to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and vowed to step up their campaign at another rally scheduled for Monday, followed by a nationwide protest campaign. The agitation coincides with the formation of a new political party, the “National Spiritual People’s Party,” whose flag shows a raised fist, and whose platform attacks secularism.
Hindu anti-beef agitation has a long and sorry history. There is conflicting evidence about the treatment of cows in ancient times, but after the Muslim occupation Hindu God experts became more fastidious about cow protection, as a way of asserting moral superiority over their grubby conquerors. Conversely, Indian Muslims placed a great emphasis on their Baqra Īd celebration, at which an animal (often a cow) is slaughtered to commemorate the sacrifice of Abraham, as a way of thumbing their noses at the Hindus.
In 1881, a Hindu treatise called Ocean of Mercy to the Cow generated widespread agitation over the issue. The following year a charitable foundation was established to feed India’s wandering cows, then numbering in the hundreds of millions, because so many of these “beloved” animals were allowed to die of starvation. No corresponding effort was made on behalf of India’s millions of impoverished humans.
Activists sought a declaration from India’s British rulers that the cow was a “sacred animal” that could not lawfully be killed, but the high court rejected that petition, which would certainly have caused trouble among the 25% of Indians who were Muslim. By 1893, mass demonstrations against cow-killing resulted in rioting from Bombay to Rangoon; 107 humans died in the argument over saving cows.
In the 20th century, the cow cause was taken up by no less a God expert than Mohandas Gandhi himself. In 1920, he told a crowd of Hindus that ‘I would not regard him a Hindu, who is not prepared to give his life to save a cow. Cow-protection is dearer to me than life itself. Were it the duty of a Muslim to kill a cow, as it is his to do his prayer of repentance, I would have told him, ‘I should have to fight with you also.’” Fighting with Muslims over cows is exactly what Hindus proceeded to do. More rioting broke out in 1924; over a hundred died at Kohat, and 4,000 had to be evacuated from the town.
Why cows?
When you see a cow, is “holy” the first thought that comes to mind? When I see a cow, my first thought is “Watch where you step.” To Gandhi, though, “The cow is a poem of pity. One reads pity in the gentle animal. She is the mother to millions of Indian mankind. Protection of the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God. The ancient seer, whoever he was, began with the cow. The appeal of the lower order of creation is all the more forcible because it is speechless.”
Why did the unnamed “ancient seer” hone in on cows? Why not sheep? Or trout? Or cabbage? They’re all lower orders of creation, too, and equally speechless. No logical explanation; just more purple prose:
The central fact of Hinduism however is cow-protection. Cow-protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution. It takes the human being beyond his species. A cow to me means the entire sub-human world. Man through the cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives … Protection of the cow means protection of the whole dumb creation of God … Cow-protection is the gift of Hinduism to the world …
Cow protection to me is definitely more than mere protection of the cow. The cow is merely a type for all that lives. Cow protection means protection of the weak, the helpless, the dumb and the deaf. Man becomes then not the lord master of all creation but he is a servant. The cow to me is a sermon on pity. …
The cow is the purest type of sub-human life. She pleads before us on behalf of the whole of the sub-human species for justice to it at the hands of man, the first among all that lives. She seems to speak to us through her eyes: ‘you are not appointed over us to kill us and eat our flesh or otherwise ill-treat us, but to be our friend and guardian.’ …
I worship it, and I shall defend its worship against the whole world …
I will not kill a cow for saving a human life, be it ever so precious.
Cow agitation, nurtured by “Great Soul” Gandhi at every turn, was a critical factor leading to the split-up of India and Pakistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, used to explain succinctly his objection to living in a Hindu-majority state: “The cows I want to eat, the Hindu stops me from killing. Every time a Hindu shakes hands with me, he has to wash his hands.” In 1939, Jinnah’s Muslim League published a report entitled Muslim Sufferings under Congress Rule, listing in grim detail more than 100 reports from Bihar, the United Provinces, and the Central Provinces of Muslims who were violently attacked, killed, or looted between July 1937 and August 1939, mostly due to their insufficient sympathy for cows. The very next year, the Muslim League adopted its “Pakistan Resolution,” demanding a separate homeland upon Indian independence. When partition came, a million humans died as a result.
At the opposite end of the spectrum was the agnostic Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s greatest leader. As mayor of Allahabad in 1923, he flatly rejected demands to ban cow slaughter in his city. As prime minister he did the same thing, upholding the rights of India’s non-Hindus against the oppression of the majority. When religious political parties were formed to unseat him, he methodically crushed them at the ballot box – even in what was then a largely illiterate India, the broad resonance of humanist values of “live and let live” could overwhelm the shrill cries of the God expert zealots. Unfortunately, those who followed Nehru in Indian government, including his own descendants, lacked his courage and common sense. India is drifting steadily toward God expert dominance, and was recently named as the second-worst country in the world in terms of hostility to religious minorities. The renewed demands for a ban on beef are one more step down that road.
I haven’t the slightest problem with anyone who chooses, for reasons of health, compassion, ecological consciousness, or even religion, not to kill cows or consume beef. Or pork. Or shrimp. Or alcohol. More power to them, because that leaves more for me. I don’t have a problem if they try to enourage others to follow their lead, as loudly as they want. When someone wants to pass a law preventing me from consuming these things, though, that’s a cow of a different color. These people are nuts, and the sooner the shield of political correctness is worn down so that respect for “holy men” pumping intolerant gibberish disappears, the better. Break out the grill and let the barbecue season begin!
Luis Granados
Proponents of the Tennessee bill disingenuously say they are simply trying to promote academic freedom. Evolution is just an unproven “theory,” they say, and other “theories” like that contained in the book of Genesis should be taught as well. In fact, evolution is a “theory” in the same sense that gravity is a “theory”: a coherent group of principles used to explain a class of phenomena. Like evolution, gravity hasn’t been conclusively proven in every case, and Isaac Newton was roundly condemned by the God experts of his day. I can only suggest that those who prefer divine revelation to observable fact should try stepping off a rooftop sometime. Read the rest of this entry »
