Don’t use the cow to create schisms
livelihoods of tens of thousands.
BJP MP Subramaniam Swamy has introduced a bill seeking the death penalty for those convicted for cow slaughter. It is particularly unfortunate that Swamy invoked Mahatma Gandhi while seeking capital punishment for those who kill a cow in this proposed law. No doubt Gandhi was deeply devoted to the cow. Gandhi said he would ‘defend its worship against the whole world’, that cow worship is central to Hinduism, and even that she is superior to our biological mothers. But he stoutly opposed a legal ban on cow slaughter. ‘I have been long pledged to serve the cow but how can my religion also be the religion of the rest of the Indians? It will mean coercion against those Indians who are not Hindus’. To therefore appeal to Gandhi while advocating a nationwide ban on cow slaughter with death for those who defy the ban is disingenuous and unjust.
The gentle cow is no doubt beloved to millions of Indians. But the campaign today that claims to defend her has nothing to do with love of any kind. The cow is just recruited as another highly emotive symbol to beat down India’s minorities into submission and fear. Other symbols are a grand Ram temple to replace a medieval mosque, charges that Muslim men are sexual pillagers, serial divorcers, reproductively irresponsible , allegations of their sympathy for terror, demands for curtailments in Muslim personal law, and claims of runaway Christian evangelism.
In this environment permissive of hate speech and violence, both the Muslim and the Dalit have been demonised as the cow-killing ‘other’, and vigilante attacks and extortion targeting have become common. The lynch mobbing of an ageing impoverished Muslim dairy farmer in Alwar is only the latest of these outrages, followed predictably by denials and victim blaming by politicians and police officials. With bigotry sanctioned from the top, this placid pastoral animal is being used today to pit one Indian against another.
Too much blood has flowed already.