Holy Cow!

In India’s Uttar Pradesh, believe it or not, cow attacks are becoming increasingly common. That’s because of a ban on cow slaughter which has led to a huge rise in the cattle population.

Hindus consider the cow holy, but until recently many farmers took their old cows to slaughterhouses. 

"We used to sell our cows once they stopped giving milk or were no longer fit for ploughing fields. That was our back-up plan for hard times", says one paddy farmer. 

But Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party-led government have cracked down heavily on cow slaughter in keeping with their right-wing Hindu agenda – the practice is now illegal in 18 states, including Uttar Pradesh. 

In UP, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a hardline BJP leader himself, shut down allegedly illegal slaughterhouses after coming to power in 2017 – even though this is a huge business in his state, which is a major exporter of buffalo meat. 

Cattle traders, many of them Muslims or Dalits (formerly untouchables, who are at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy), have even been attacked and killed by vigilantes often linked to the BJP or local right-wing groups. 

Cow vigilante violence which is the use of physical force in the name of "cow protection" is on the increase. Since 2014, mob attacks targeting mostly illegal cow smugglers, but in some cases even licensed cow traders, have become prominent. 

The cow vigilante groups see themselves as preventing theft, protecting the cow or upholding the law in an Indian state which bans cow slaughter. 

According to data analytics site India Spend, 45 people were killed in 120 cases of cow-related violence reported across India between 2012 and 2018. The highest number of violent incidents were recorded in the state of Uttar Pradesh, with 19 verified incidents of cow-related violence resulting in 11 deaths. 

These days, farmers simply abandon old and unproductive cows. 

These homeless cattle are often seen roaming the villages and towns in UP, where farmers and locals say they turn hungry and aggressive. These vagrant cows destroy crops, create massive traffic, cause road accidents, spawn public health and hygiene issues and even injure or kill people. 

And nobody can do anything about it. 

The governing BJP's state spokesperson, Sameer Singh even came out to say: "These should not be called stray cows as the animal itself is part of the Hindu culture. We never leave our elders to die when they grow old, how can we leave our cows to die on the roads?" 

The cows are meant to be housed in cow shelters ("gaushalas") – in fact, the UP government have allocated millions of rupees to construct more shelters. They also imposed a special alcohol tax to maintain thousands of state-run cow shelters. 

But this hasn't solved the problem because the stray cow population vastly outnumber the number of shelters built to house them. Holy cow!

Insofar as cow vigilante violence is concerned, more than half the victims of lynchings over alleged cow slaughter have been Muslims. Hindutva groups use the cow as a tool to demarcate territories of fear and intimidation. The politics of communalism never hesitates to put symbols it holds sacred to utilitarian use. In any supremacist project, majoritarian pride is incomplete without its obverse (and perverse) side: prejudice and paranoia against minorities. The diktat is clear – minorities have to lose their identity or perish. 

As Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee, author of "Looking for the Nation: Towards Another Idea of India" in an Al Jazeera piece published January 03, 2019 wrote: “Hindu nationalism seeks to make the minority feel minor. Hindutva’s cunning rhetoric pits a rigid idea of national unity against disunity, rather than accept legitimate (and competing) political and cultural difference”.

Cows seem to be a more pressing matter than humans. A police officer in Uttar Pradesh was killed on December 03, 2018, while investigating an incident of alleged cow slaughter, as the local government continued to focus on preventing the killing of cows. 

And until a few months back, states like Haryana had 16 members in its "Gau Seva Ayog", or cow service committee, while the state human rights commission had none.