Barking cows do bite

Aimė Cėsaire once remarked: we have been lied to. We have been terribly deceived. Hitler is not dead. When you read those reports of lynching of black boys and the rape of their sisters in the South, how can you believe that Hitler is dead?

Had Cėsaire been alive today and read the report of lynching in Dadri, he would have said: Forget Hitler, the guy was certainly not the sort who used to visit his neighbours’ houses, savour cookies from there and return the next day armed with crowbars and sticks trying to sniff around refrigerators for any meaty smell.

Of course, Hitler’s men too relied on rumours; the rumours that they themselves spread: their pet targets were the Jews and they spread the canard that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood for the Passover ritual. Our Hitler clones however are more bothered about cows than kids. If it were missing/maimed/murdered kids that could get them their goats they should have vented their ire at those spurious Godmen like Dash or Jaspal Sing or Asaram Bapu whose hobbies in the recent past included rapes, child molestations, and a litany of other crimes of which their followers feel justly proud and elated.

But our cowherds are wiser and certainly very ‘cowrageus.’ They believe in climbing on fallen trees and pulling off a stunt or two. Nobody can accuse them of cowardice. They were merely a hundred odd people armed with no rocket propelled grenades or missiles but mere clubs and sticks that took on the combined might of Akhlaq, the dreaded dad of an Air-force officer, his wife, a son and a daughter.  And they managed to finish off the fifty odd year old man, reduce his son to pulp, molest his daughter, and force the police to send the sample of meat kept in the dead man’s refrigerator for an autopsy even before their victim’s body turned colour.  Fortune always favours the brave and in Narendra Damodar Modi’s India, it is only a willing slave of the ‘cowrageous.’     

Doubters might raise their hackles. Justice Markandey Katju, for example, said cow is a mere animal hinting at how it is less of a beast than its two legged cousins armed with clubs and crowbars. Others came up with stories of how ancient Indian saints like Valmiki and modern ones like Vivekananda were not averse to the gastronomic delights of bovine meat. To be precise, they say, Vivekananda even encouraged meat consumption saying that it was a true antidote against the emasculation of Hindus. For him it was actually part of the ‘3B’ solution: Beef, Bicep and Bhagavat Gita.

But doubters have little room in Modi’s modern India. They would better do to brush up their sketchy knowledge of our right wing’s infatuation with cows. Authorities on this vexed issue might be dime a dozen, but for the moment I feel like recommending no other name as more authentic than our blessed BJP spokesman MJ Akbar’s. In his family saga cum autobiography titled Blood Brothers, the journalist turned congressman turned BJP spokesperson, delves a bit deep into the politics of cow-slaughter. According to him cow became such a prickly issue in India only after Swami Dyananda Saraswathi used it as a ruse to further his divisive agenda. But even then, the author says, not all cows were equally sacred to the followers of Dayananda Saraswati. He says the Swamy’s followers were quite unruffled and least bothered when the British rulers in India led cows to the blocks. However, their righteous rage couldn’t brook it when starving Muslims sought to satisfy their hunger with the leftover meat of the British.

Reading Akbar between the lines, one understands how Swamy’s followers had real reasons for their selective rage: Swamy attributed the degeneration of Hindus to five ‘M’s: Mamsa (meat) Madya(liqueur), Meen (fish) , Mudra (idols), and Maithuna (sex). Akbar ironically notes there was another ‘M’ which the Swami had in mind but never mentioned: Muslims.

The reason why the Hindutva brigade often uses cow as a ruse to take on Muslims lies here. Neither the admissions of the likes of Katju that they too eat beef, nor the fact that the majority of the world does so, nor even the more blatant fact that many Hindutva adherents themselves consume it with relish is going to make cow less of an issue as long as this mindset persists.

Similarly, the issue is unlikely to be resolved even if all Muslims cease to consume beef and everything resembling beef. Akbar in his saga informs us that Bahadur Shah was the first Indian ruler to initiate the banning of beef taking into account the sentiments of his Hindu subjects. But how would have the poet emperor dealt with/foreseen the sentiments of those whose love for bovines is nothing but an inverse form hatred for people who do not fall within the hallowed radius of Chaturvarnya?

To be sure, it was not only Muslims who fell prey to the caste Hindu’s fatal bovine sympathies. Untouchables handling the carcasses of cows were many a time accused of deliberately killing cows to obtain their hides. The victim of a cowrage that erupted in Najafgarh near Delhi, last year was a poor truck driver called Sankar. His charge on that ill-fated day was to ferry the carcasses of a couple of dead cows. The irate locals who thought he was a Muslim abattoir worker fell on him and within moments added a human carcass to his loaded truck.

 Whether cow is holy or not is not what is at stake. The fact that cow is a good mascot in the election is what counts. For a dispensation that has so utterly failed the expectations of people who invested their hopes with them, who are busy promoting corporate agendas detrimental to the country and its people cow is indeed a handy emoticon to brandish in order to camouflage their failings and buttress their eroding credibility.

(Dr. Umer O Thasneem teaches English at Calicut University. The views expressed here are personal. He may be contacted at uotasnm@yahoo.com)