prasad1
Active member
The cow has been converted aggressively into a symbol for a religious orthodoxy demanding its place in a secular nation state.
If you love cows and care for them, you have three choices:
Choice A: Build goshalas or cow shelters where the animals can be taken care of. But this is an expensive proposition. There is heavy investment and no returns whatsoever, despite all the talk of the great medicinal value of cow urine and cow dung.
Choice B: Ban beef, stop farmers from selling cows and bulls to butchers, outlaw the culling of cattle, punish cow smugglers, declare all slaughter houses illegal, lynch people who eat beef, and justify all this using complex arguments. This results in a large number of cows (which can no longer give milk) and bulls or oxen (that are too weak to be draught animals), being abandoned to simply wander the streets eating garbage and plastic or just starving to death since Choice A is unavailable. It also destroys industries and creates widespread unemployment.
Choice C: Build local slaughterhouses near farms so that commercially unviable cattle can be humanely culled nearby, without their having to endure great suffering while being transported in horrible conditions to distant slaughterhouses. This controversial suggestion was made by none other than N.S. Ramaswamy, founder-director of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and noted animal rights activist.
Guess which is the preferred option of the rising multitude of go-raksha vigilantes? Not A, as it is too expensive and tedious, and involves too much work. Not C, because we are conditioned to believe that violence can do no good. So it is Option B, which has the advantage in that 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. It is this rather than cow protection that the go-rakshaks really seek.
There is no love for cows in the go-raksha brigade — an idea systematically and meticulously unravelled in the essay ‘Why is the Cow a Political Animal?’ by Sopan Joshi, a Research Fellow at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, published in Yahoo! in May this year. It is all about power, a yearning to dominate. 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.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/holy-cow-unholy-violence/article7727157.ece?homepage=true
