Much like the busy streets of our cities, cows have now taken over the news. The shameful Dadri lynching incident, in which a Muslim man was killed for allegedly consuming beef, has been turned into a political blame-game with the usual suspects trying to capitalise on grief and tragedy for political gain.
In the cacophony of juvenile back-and-forth among the who’s who of India’s political spectrum, writer Devdutt Pattanaik’s measured authorial voice on the topic comes as a breath of fresh air. In an opinion column for The Hindu, Pattanaik bemoans the hijacking of the cow and her “aggressive conversion into a symbol for a religious orthodoxy” that demands a place in a “secular nation state”. He calls these elements the “go-raksha brigade”.
Pattanaik on why go-raksha vigilantes prefer to ban beef and violently police its consumption:
...it gives people power. It allows them to terrorise and dominate Muslims and liberals. It gives them global attention and makes them the focus of a controversy-hungry media....So, all the talk about the economic reasons for saving cows, and the importance of cow milk, cow urine and cow dung are just a rationalisation for that one single goal: to dominate and reclaim masculinity, following the perceived emasculation by the Muslims, the British and now the liberals.
On the 1980 Shah Bano case, Congress’ minority appeasement, and history repeating itself:
...the then Congress government tried to appease the Muslim orthodoxy in the Shah Bano case by diluting even a Supreme Court judgment that gave maintenance rights to divorced Muslim women, but did not bother to appease the Hindutva sampradaya in the Roop Kanwar sati case when the court declared sati a crime and not a religious act. In these cases, women were simply symbols in a fight where religious orthodoxy was demanding its place in a secular nation state. Now, it is the turn of the cow to be that symbol.
On the rise of Hindutva:
It comes from institutionalised paranoia: a belief that innocent Hindi-speaking rural Bharat needs rescuing from an evil English-speaking India that favours Nehru, from the liberals who equate Hinduism only with casteism...When the banning of radical literature does not meet with the same outrage as the banning of Wendy Doniger’s Hindus: An Alternative History, a section of the population starts feeling that they are alone, isolated and rejected, by the people who claim to be fair and just and liberal.
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