COW SLAUGHTER IS MAINLY BULL

UPDATE 

The recent lynching of a poor Muslim at Bisada near Dadri for allegedly possessing beef has been justified as being a matter of religious passion but it also transpires that the poor family got the beef from butchers who kill stray cattle that makes the meat very cheap. Religious sentiments had earlier triggered the meat ban imposed during the Jain festivities though the Bombay High Court passed an interim order lifting the ban imposed by a municipal corporation. The Jains then came to the Supreme Court where Justices Thakur and Kurian bluntly told them "a meat ban cannot be forced down citizens' throats... be tolerant to diversity."

Although there is nothing remotely spiritual in the things people eat beef has become a red rag igniting unprecedented communal fury.The bigots need to however understand that there is much more to beef than just sentiment. The image of `Gaomata’... the white `Mother Cow’ with soulful eyes ... is beloved to many Hindus but the RSS, BJP and other opponents of cow slaughter would be shocked to know that cows account for only 12% of all the bovines in India. They are not also the main producers of milk because female buffaloes account for 66% of India’s milch cattle that produce over 75% of the milk.

The recent 19^th Livestock Census of India, 2012 also shows that India’s cows and other female bovines are in no great danger. This census shows that their numbers increased by 7.16% to 216 million since the previous census of 2007. It is the males of the species that are threatened as their numbers declined by 18.6% to 84 million in the same period. As male bovines today account for just 30% of the cattle population it clearly shows that it is the bulls and not cows that are being butchered.

Cattle are a huge economic asset to almost every rural family and the meat industry including bovines, sheep, goats, pigs and poultry put money into the pockets of nearly every rural household and they will suffer great economic loss if the India’s legislators ban or restrict the slaughter and sale of meat products. Some 40% of the value of livestock comes from meat. Beef, that costs a third of mutton, is also the poor man’s protein and is consumed by some 200 million Dalits and other tribal communities. Religious ideologues do not understand that there will be a strong political backlash if religious sentiments take precedence over economic realities. Anyone familiar with rural India knows that while there are many Muslims in the meat business the majority are Hindu.

The census clearly shows that two-thirds of India’s cattle are female. This is because the value of male bovines that used to be valuable as draft animals or for meat is declining very rapidly. Few people are aware that it is male animals (or birds) that are mostly used for meat as the females are more valuable as breeders and for milk or eggs. If males are not being used for ploughing or transport they are only useful for their meat or hides. This gender imbalance is increasing rapidly and a recent report from the Central Institute of Agricultural Engineering Bhopal shows that the share of draught animals for farm power on Indian farms declined from 44% in 1971-72 to a shocking 4% in 2012-13 as tractors and electric and diesel pumps had replaced them. Bullock carts are now rare in many rural areas.

The census data shows that millions of male animals have been quietly culled. Male buffaloes declined 17.8% to 16 million while females increased 7.99% to 92 million. There are therefore nearly 6 female buffaloes to every male. It is only in the states where beef is being eaten that this gender imbalance is less pronounced. Paradoxically, the keepers of India’s cattle themselves perpetuate the worst cruelties against cattle. As the females are valuable and the males are worthless but they need food and fodder that costs over Rs. 100 a day. They are therefore killed for meat where it is allowed but in other states they are callously driven away to be devoured by dogs or wild animals.

Several million pregnant female bovines are brought into Indian cities for fresh milk. Half the calves they deliver are males that are an economic liability so they are callously killed as soon as the milking steadies. They are not humanely slaughtered but are usually tied in the sun to slowly die of thirst and hunger. Meat from stray cattle are the cheapest meat in India. The state wise data shows that that economic compulsions outweigh religious sentiment in almost all urban and rural areas despite claims to the contrary.

India also has a serious problem with roughly 80 million old and unproductive cattle that are callously driven away until they die of hunger or illness. They do not harmlessly forage on barren land but, driven by hunger, raid productive farms and face the wrath of farmers who mercilessly beat and even kill them. They are a huge economic liability that takes food and economic opportunities away from millions of needy people. India’s 299 million cattle also need roughly 30 million hectares for their grazing as well as an equal amount of additional land for their fodder requirements. This is a huge chunk out of India’s 190 million hectares of cropped land. If states legislate against beef consumption if will add many more unproductive cattle demanding land that is not available.

There is no Hindu scripture that is opposed to the eating of meat or even beef. In fact Indra, the tawny bearded supreme Vedic god, was specifically offered the best sides of beef. The Vedas, Mahabharat, Ramayana, Shastras and other ancient texts all endorse eating meat and beef was even specified as the daan, or offering, reserved for Brahmins.   

The sentiment against beef is essentially political and not religious. There had been no problem with beef eating till 1870. It was soon to become a defining icon of Hindu and Muslim identity. Cow protection became a religious statement when the first movement to protect the cow was started by the Sikh Kuka (Namdhari) sect in 1870. In 1882, Dayanand Saraswati founded the Gorakshini Sabha that challenged beef eating provoking a series of communal riots in the 1880’s and 1890’s. These led to further communal clashes where many were killed in Azamgarh in 1893, Ayodhya in 1912 and Shahabad in 1917. Beef eating thus quickly moved from being a matter of diet to an icon of Hindu versus Muslim identity. Hindu chauvinism could however also make the ban on beef into an symbol of Brahmin tyranny over Dalits for whom beef is their main protein source. There is a strong religious sentiment but politicians as well as officials, and intellectuals need to consider this complex subject before rushing into hasty legislation.

About 40% of the economic value of livestock is from the sale of meat. If the sale of meat or beef is banned the livelihoods of some 100 million of India's poorest mainly rural families will be devastated. They already face problems with GM seeds and a widespread drought and this may tip lakhs of them into suicides.

Please share this mail with all your friends so that it reaches the religious bigots and make them reconsider the full impact of banning beef.

SHIVAJI – FROM MORTAL HERO TO POLITICAL ICON

Irate Shiv Sainiks had violently protested a book by James Laine called `Shivaji - Hindu King in Islamic India’ - and had it banned. The agitators were outraged that the book had dared to say that there had been some speculation suggesting that a certain Dadoji may have been Shivaji’s biological father and had vandalized the prestigious Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. It is most unlikely that the Shiv Sainiks would have read the little book though the agitation gave unexpected fame to a small scholarly work that would otherwise have faded into oblivion.

Shivaji, who was the first Hindu ruler to successfully challenge the Mughal Empire, had become an iconic love and hate figure for most Hindus and Indian Muslims. Those who do plough through the text will however find that it very objectively records the great differences between the accounts written by Hindu and Mughal sources during Shivaji’s lifetime in the 17^th century and the later glorified accounts in Maharashtra. The book extols Shivaji’s heroic feats about the killing and beheading of Afzal Khan, the daring raid on Shaista Khan’s fortified camp, the loot of Surat, Shivaji’s escape from Agra and the conquest of Simhagad etc. Shivaji’s audacious courage in daring to humble the hitherto invincible Mughals instantly made him a great Hindu hero at a time when Hindu’s had no hero role models to emulate except for those of mythology.  

The contemporary accounts however contain several inconvenient facts that do not fit in with later accounts that sought to glorify Shivaji’s life notably that Shivaji’s father Maloji loyally served as a Jagirdar of Muslim Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar and was a devotee of a Sufi saint after whom he named his two sons Shah and Sharif. His tomb at Ellora looks like a Muslim tomb.

Shivaji began his career as an Adil Shahi jagirdar of Pune and like his father and grandfather before him served, allied or opposed the Muslim rulers of Ahmadnagar, Berar, Golconda, Bijapur and Agra as and when it was expedient. Shivaji had gone to Agra in the hope of being made a Mughal Amir but rebelled when the emperor Aurangzeb did not give him the rank that he felt he deserved. Shivaji’s sons Sambhaji and Rajaram both married their daughters to Mughal nobles. Marathas fought in Muslim armies and there were many Muslims in the Maratha armies. These clearly show that Maratha opposition to the Mughals was political and not at all religious.

Shivaji was born in February 1639 at the hill fort of Shivneri, and hardly knew his father Shahji who abandoned his mother Jijabai soon after he was born. Shahji was in the service of Adil Shah of Bijapur including a long stint as governor at Bangalore. Jijabai named him Shivaji after the local goddess Shivai and not the Hindu deity Shiva as many assume. Jijabai, of the Jadhav clan, was also of a better caste than her husband who was a Bhonsle of a farming caste that is not listed among the ninety-six high caste Maratha families. Shahji sent his trusted lieutenant Dadoji Konndev Kulkarni, a Brahmin, to look after Jijabai and Shivaji. He was a warrior and swordsman and was Shivaji’s guardian, teacher and mentor.

Shivaji’s rise did not have the support of all Marathi speakers and there was no concept of a Maratha nation. His main supporters, the Mavlis, were simple hill people opposed by the aristocratic Maratha sardars like the Nimbalkars, Deshpande’s, Ghorpandes, Moreys who he had to kill before he could establish his kingdom. Shivaji however needed a high caste that the heads of other Maratha clans could respect. The local Brahmins refused to perform the rites of kingship on a non Kshatriya so he imported two Brahmins from Benares who dutifully organized a huge ceremony in June 1674. Marathi was not yet widely known as a written language and most accounts were in the state language of Persian. The early Marathi accounts were also so Persianised as to make them difficult to understand today.

Contemporary records show that Shivaji was a Shaivite and a devotee of the goddess Bhavani who like Durga and Kali needed constant blood sacrifices of buffaloes, goats and fowl. He was a follower of the non Brahmin Tukaram and records also show that he also went to the tombs of several Sufi Pirs. After Shivaji’s death the rule of his sons did not last very long and his son Sambhaji wrested the throne from Shivaji’s second wife (out of seven) named Soyarabai, regent for the ten year old Rajaram. Sambhaji had no compunctions about killing Soyarabai and several important Maratha supporters. Sambhaji however ruled for just nine years and the Maratha Empire passed into the hands of their Brahmin prime ministers who moved the capital from Raigadh, near Mahableshwar, to Satara.

Many Brahmin priests and scribes were now patronized who, while glorifying Shivaji’s memory, began to alter and Brahminise the eventful records of his life. The legends about Shivaji were now made to resemble the mythical heroes like Ram and Krishna. Parmananda’s popular Sivabharata even alludes to his conception through a visit to his mother Jijabai by the god Vishnu. 

The early accounts of Shivaji’s escape from Agra record that he dressed as a sadhu and went to Benares before quickly returning to his kingdom. In the Brahminised later accounts he reverentially travels to other the holy places like Hardwar, Prayag, Ayodhya and Gaya as well. The killing of Afzal khan was glorified as a fight between good and evil and the battle becomes a narrative of a growing Hindu identity in opposition to oppressive Islam. Afzal Khan was portrayed as the stereotyped evil Muslim who kills cows, destroys temples and disrespects Brahmins and Hindu deities. Brahmins like Mahapati and Chitnis begin to now spread the idea that Shivaji was an ardent devotee of Rama, Vishnu and Marut (Hanuman) and was a vegetarian according to a new devotional cult of Vithoba of Pandharpur.

The 19^th century was marked by the arrival of the British who installed a puppet raja at Satara in 1818 and assumed sovereign control in 1848. Grant Duff wrote his `History of the Marathas’ that portrayed Shivaji as a plunderer and freebooter. It was to stir most Maharashtrians to condemn it. They began to call Shivaji `Father of the Nation’. Shivaji’s story was now portrayed as a Hindu, and later an Indian, rebellion against foreigners whether Muslim or Christian.

Liberal British education however also resulted in an internal rebellion with some socialist writers attacking the Brahmin domination of religion and customs during the earlier century. He rejoiced in Shivaji’s low caste origins claiming that he was descended from India’s original warriors who had been suppressed turn by turn by Aryan (Brahmin), Turk and European usurpers. They claimed that all Shudra and groups labelled as low caste were really members of a great pre Aryan nobility.

Gangadhar Tilak sought to reject all British efforts to intrude into Hindu life. He started the Ganesh Chaturti festival in 1903 to compete with the Muslim Muharram processions. It was hugely successful quickly making a minor elephant headed deity Ganesh into a popular icon in every Indian home. These festivals were seen as being both anti Muslim and anti British and Tilak was twice imprisoned for sedition. The theme with many variations was then taken up by Annie Besant, Gokhle, Lajpat Rai and others and there was now a babble of voices of many writers  notably Tagore, Rajwade, Mandal and others who used the icon of Shivaji to promote their views on Indian nationalism and a Maharashtrian sub nationalism. Veer Savarkar’s book `Hindutva’ was to add a virulent note to the debate.

Many inconvenient facts were however suppressed. Few know that Shivaji had seven wives or that he had an unhappy family life. There is little evidence that he was interested in religion or was a follower of Bhakti saints nor any evidence that he was hostile to Muslims even if he had fought against many Muslim political enemies. He was clearly determined to build his own kingdom but the idea of creating a Hindu or Maratha nation does not seem to have been his mission.

Over the centuries, several hundred writers manipulated the traditions about the heroic Shivaji to illuminate their own points of view. The historic non Brahmin military hero became, turn by turn, a virtuous spiritual model according to Brahmin standards, an enemy of Islam, a ruthless freebooter according to the British, a low caste hero among socialist thinkers and then the maker of a Maharashtrian and later a pan Indian identity. Each political agenda developed their own virtual scriptures and generated heated anger against anyone who dared to blaspheme their strongly held beliefs. They wanted to believe that the story of Shivaji was immutable and unchanging and their beliefs became almost as rigid as religious dogma. But the record shows how the facts of Shivaji’s life were manipulated over time.