India, the Cow, and Religious-Nationalism
By: Allison J. Van Tilborgh
Tags: Religion, Politics, World, Food, Culture

India, the Cow, and Religious-Nationalism

How the veneration of cattle has promoted islamophobia.

Hinduism, and India in general, has become widely associated with the veneration of cows, with many in Western countries believing India to be a vegetarian country. But this belief, to some extent, has been publicly engineered by special interests and political forces.

Somewhat similar to the United States, India is going through a religious nationalist movement with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the helm. This post-colonial revival has motivated many to produce new national mythologies, including those related to the vegetarian history of Hinduism and the religious landscape of India as a whole.

Unlike in the West, vegetarianism has not necessarily been motivated by concerns over animal welfare but informed by tradition and caste structure. Food has become a potent religio-political force that has excluded some and pushed others into power positions.

To better understand how vegetarianism became such an overwhelming force, let us go back several thousand years to the early years of Hinduism. The Indo-Aryan groups that migrated to the Indus River Valley region around 1800–1500 BCE brought with them many rituals, including fire sacrifice.

The Vedas are rich with examples connoting cow sacrifice and the use of animal products such as milk, butter, and ghee. In one example, the Hindu god Indra reveals a preference for bulls (Rigveda X.28.3c) while Agni prefers a barren cow (Rigveda VIII.43.11). From these two examples, it can also be seen that male and female cattle were both included in the sacrificial process. As with other familiar forms of Ancient animal sacrifice, the emphasis rested on the careful process of ritual.

The emergence of Upanishadic thought (in about 800 BC to 200 BC) directly challenged many of the rituals involved in fire sacrifice at large, though not culminating in a clear-cut vegetarian version of religious practice like Buddhism and Jainism which date to relatively the same period.

In future Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Laws of Manu, the texts are riddled with apparent contradictions in terms of meat consumption. Manu says (V.28–30),

“The eater who daily even devours those destined to be his food, commits no sin; for the Creator himself created both the eaters and those who are to be eaten.”

This line of thinking suggests that the divine role of certain animals is to be consumed by other creatures. Within the human species, an analog exists in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna encourages Arjuna to fulfill his castely role as a warrior, even if it means killing his family members.

This positive sanction to consume animal flesh is contradicted by other law books of the same period, including the Yajnavalkya (100–300 CE) which simultaneously prohibits cow slaughter but mentions Brahmins that eat cow meat. Indeed, in most recorded cases of cow consumption, it is the priests that participate.

Today, there is little of the historical ambiguity surrounding what certain castes should and should not eat. One New York Times article writes,

“The Hindu caste system is structured around food. Food choices signify degrees of purity and pollution — meat, especially beef, is polluting and triggers base instincts”.

In addition to being a mode of religiosity, meat consumption in India has deep political implications. It has been used to distinguish castes within Hinduism, but also promote religious nationalism. The cow sits at center stage.

In at least 20 Indian states (out of 29), cow slaughter has been banned (New York Times; Saving the Cows, Starving the Children). About 80% of Indians consider themselves Hindu, about one-third of them practicing some degree of vegetarianism (New York Times; Indian Beef Workers Fight to Bring Back Bull Market).

Though the most common form of vegetarianism found in India mostly abstains from animal flesh, much of the modern Indian food tradition is centered around dairy products, which sustains a massive factory farming industry.

These corporations use traditional stories associated with Hinduism to sell their products, including the popular story of Krishna stealing butter and the earth being created from an ocean of milk (Yamini Narayanan). Though male cows are seen as sacred, the highest degrees of veneration are applied to the female cows who ‘selflessly’ perform their duty of producing milk, even if it means sacrificing her body and her child (Yamini Narayanan). According to the USDA (2017), India is the world’s leading producer of milk.

This Hindu-operated dairy industry has received considerable backlash from famous strict vegetarian Hindus such as Mahatma Gandhi who once said,

“I shudder when I see [the dairy farms] and ask myself how we can say anything to our Muslim friends so long as we do not refrain from such terrible violence. We are so intensely selfish that we feel no shame in milking the cow to the last drop.”

In another speech he said,

“What is really needed for protecting the cow is that the Hindus themselves should care for her, since they, too, kill her… if we are serious about cow-protection, we must put our own house in order.”

In addition to being the world’s leading dairy producer, India is also the world’s largest meat producer, with a substantial history of meat-packing, particularly in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh which has a substantial Muslim population.

Muslims consume meat at a higher rate than Hindus and have been famously pushed into the meat-packing industry, manufacturing meat products for the rest of India and the world. Their largest export is flash-frozen water buffalo, which in 2015 represented a $5 billion industry (New York Times; Buffalo Meat Industry Facing Government Shutdowns in India).

With the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu-nationalist revival has broken out across the country, with cows becoming a key symbol. Since Prime Minister Modi took office in 2014, he has instituted many more restrictions on meat-packing, which some Muslims claim to be restrictions on Muslims altogether.

In one interview, the wife of a Muslim who works in the buffalo-slaughter factories said,

“We are scared of this Hindu government. The meat business is predominantly run by Muslims. What does this step mean? That they want to drive us out. To render us jobless, or drive us out” (New York Times; Modi’s Push for a Hindu Revival Imperils India’s Meat Industry).

Others see this as less of an expression of islamophobia than a move to protect the environment. The beef industry accounts for the largest portion of animal-related greenhouse gases. In theory, removing the meat-packing industry should reduce the number of cow-related emissions.

Unfortunately, the dairy industry and the meat-packing industry are necessarily closely related. You cannot have an endless supply of dairy without a near-endless supply of baby cows, half of which will not be able to produce milk (to learn more, read Feminism, The Dairy Industry, and the Evils of Vegetarianism). Many of these cows have become beasts of burden or simply roamed the fields, still producing the harmful methane that contributed to the staggering greenhouse gases which are killing the environment.

When examining the historical roots of Hinduism alongside this modern nationalist movement centered around the cow, one has to question the motivations of such legislation.

Hindus have always consumed meat or animal products, and within India, they have particularly eaten from the cow. Should the veneration of the cow be seen as a step in the direction of ending animal cruelty, or have political forces turned this narrative on its head, using the symbol of the cow as a tool of division between high-caste Hindus and minority groups such as Muslims?

The historical roots of vegetarianism in Hinduism are diverse and can offer examples of how religion evolves over the stretch of thousands of years. Animal products are very central to our personal identities and certainly our religious identities. This is a prime case where food becomes political, and how the political can shut out minority groups whether by accident or design.