Beef ban imposes cow-belt culture
4 April 2015 4:13 AM IST
Typically, swear words tell us more about those who speak them than those towards whom they are targeted. Swearing is most effective when the target understands it. Unless the abuser and the target share common ground abuses fall flat – just like the four-letter words that brown cosmopolitan reading yuppies shoot at lesser brown folk. To perturb someone by the dig is the essence. When certain kinds of Hindus (especially those with a portable religion that is non-localized and increasingly contextual) conceptualize subcontinental homegrown Muslims, at some level they want to believe that these Muslims are wayward Hindus.
This “ex-Hindu” conception is something that has some currency among the brown Muslims themselves. In this, they share a conceptual commonality. Unless a conceptual commonality is shared, the digs, the marking out of differences, don’t work. Without a conception of the status of cows as either holy or meat, the beef bans fails. The beef ban is not so much aimed at the protection of bovine species but to remind certain citizens of the Indian Union a simple thing – which religious community is the boss.
Cows and beef do not have such religious baggage in many areas and don’t fit into the same contested conceptual space. This is precisely why, there has been no concerted effort by holy-cow-lovers to actively lecture about the “horridness” of beef consumption or to push beef-ban in areas like Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Meghalaya, etc. The natives of these areas largely do not share the contested status of cow. Those whose political memories go back to before the age of Google might remember George Gilbert Swell, an erstwhile Member of Parliament from Meghalaya. The late George Gilbert Swell in a sterling speech in Parliament talked about his people, who were not part of any Hindu-Muslim binary but for whom beef was a food as good as any other. He talked about the cow-belt and the non-cow belt. He was saying this in a House that is run by a constitution that encourages the state to take necessary steps to single out cows for protection. Whose principles are these? Clearly not Swell’s or his people’s.
All the eloquence about ‘unity in diversity’ notwithstanding, some of the diverse are necessarily silenced, and the list of the silenced is increasingly becoming predictable. Thankfully, not all diversities have been domesticated enough to be featured at the Mumbai airport or suburban malls for yuppie Indian consumption. Some communities retain unique attributes of diversity beyond the ‘Dilli Haat’ type of art, craft and cuisine. Any serious concerted push of banning beef in these areas would fail miserably. But more importantly, the lack of push in these areas also demonstrates what lies behind the beef-ban: of having finally “won” in a contest of communities that started before the partition. These areas which remain diverse were simply not part of any such contest. No wonder, just before 1937, when Burma was separated from British India and made a separate crown colony, London was in two minds about where to place what is colloquially called the “north-east”.
England seriously considered the proposal of making the seven sisters a part of Burma. What would Delhi then think of the Naga or Manipur nationality questions is an interesting thought experiment to be conducted in private. When aliens become citizens by fiat, that shows up in ‘egregious’ errors in election manifestos nearly 80 years later – as was the case of the latest Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) manifesto terming people from North-east as ‘immigrants’.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP went to the people with a manifesto that stated that the government will develop “the necessary legal framework to protect cow and its progeny”.States like Tamil Nadu, Telengana, Kerala, West Bengal, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Tripura and Sikkim gave the BJP and its beef-ban manifesto a thrashing at the Lok Sabha polls. On March 30 2015, Indian Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said “Cow slaughter cannot be accepted in this country”. He also promised the gathering that the present government will try their best for a nationwide beef ban. Either the above states do not belong to the country Rajnath Singh is talking about or he doesn’t care about the democratic will of the people, as expressed in the Lok Sabha elections.
Non-BJP states must study such statements from New Delhi with care and understand the farce that underlies the Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani conception of ‘cooperative federalism”. The multi-headed hydra of homogeneity has many faces – some are about beef ban, some are about the cosmo-liberal “idea of India” and so forth. On a recent flight on New Delhi sarkar’s Air India, general passengers were served eggless cake and onion-less paneer puffs (when people with whatever special dietary issues can chose to have eggless, onion-less meals served on board). His Holiness Rajnath Singh will not stop at beef, or at any non-vegetarian food, for that matter. first they came for the beef. And I have an ugly suspicion that there is more to come. IPA
This “ex-Hindu” conception is something that has some currency among the brown Muslims themselves. In this, they share a conceptual commonality. Unless a conceptual commonality is shared, the digs, the marking out of differences, don’t work. Without a conception of the status of cows as either holy or meat, the beef bans fails. The beef ban is not so much aimed at the protection of bovine species but to remind certain citizens of the Indian Union a simple thing – which religious community is the boss.
Cows and beef do not have such religious baggage in many areas and don’t fit into the same contested conceptual space. This is precisely why, there has been no concerted effort by holy-cow-lovers to actively lecture about the “horridness” of beef consumption or to push beef-ban in areas like Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, Meghalaya, etc. The natives of these areas largely do not share the contested status of cow. Those whose political memories go back to before the age of Google might remember George Gilbert Swell, an erstwhile Member of Parliament from Meghalaya. The late George Gilbert Swell in a sterling speech in Parliament talked about his people, who were not part of any Hindu-Muslim binary but for whom beef was a food as good as any other. He talked about the cow-belt and the non-cow belt. He was saying this in a House that is run by a constitution that encourages the state to take necessary steps to single out cows for protection. Whose principles are these? Clearly not Swell’s or his people’s.
All the eloquence about ‘unity in diversity’ notwithstanding, some of the diverse are necessarily silenced, and the list of the silenced is increasingly becoming predictable. Thankfully, not all diversities have been domesticated enough to be featured at the Mumbai airport or suburban malls for yuppie Indian consumption. Some communities retain unique attributes of diversity beyond the ‘Dilli Haat’ type of art, craft and cuisine. Any serious concerted push of banning beef in these areas would fail miserably. But more importantly, the lack of push in these areas also demonstrates what lies behind the beef-ban: of having finally “won” in a contest of communities that started before the partition. These areas which remain diverse were simply not part of any such contest. No wonder, just before 1937, when Burma was separated from British India and made a separate crown colony, London was in two minds about where to place what is colloquially called the “north-east”.
England seriously considered the proposal of making the seven sisters a part of Burma. What would Delhi then think of the Naga or Manipur nationality questions is an interesting thought experiment to be conducted in private. When aliens become citizens by fiat, that shows up in ‘egregious’ errors in election manifestos nearly 80 years later – as was the case of the latest Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) manifesto terming people from North-east as ‘immigrants’.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP went to the people with a manifesto that stated that the government will develop “the necessary legal framework to protect cow and its progeny”.States like Tamil Nadu, Telengana, Kerala, West Bengal, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Tripura and Sikkim gave the BJP and its beef-ban manifesto a thrashing at the Lok Sabha polls. On March 30 2015, Indian Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said “Cow slaughter cannot be accepted in this country”. He also promised the gathering that the present government will try their best for a nationwide beef ban. Either the above states do not belong to the country Rajnath Singh is talking about or he doesn’t care about the democratic will of the people, as expressed in the Lok Sabha elections.
Non-BJP states must study such statements from New Delhi with care and understand the farce that underlies the Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani conception of ‘cooperative federalism”. The multi-headed hydra of homogeneity has many faces – some are about beef ban, some are about the cosmo-liberal “idea of India” and so forth. On a recent flight on New Delhi sarkar’s Air India, general passengers were served eggless cake and onion-less paneer puffs (when people with whatever special dietary issues can chose to have eggless, onion-less meals served on board). His Holiness Rajnath Singh will not stop at beef, or at any non-vegetarian food, for that matter. first they came for the beef. And I have an ugly suspicion that there is more to come. IPA
Next Story
