It gives the world leather belts, leather seats, leather coats and shoes, beef jerky, cowboy hats — you name it. Cow protection to me is not mere protection of the cow.
It means protection of all that lives and is helpless and weak in the world. The cow means the entire subhuman world. In the Hindu tradition, the cow is honoured, garlanded and given special feedings at festivals all over India, most importantly the annual Gopashtama festival.
Demonstrating how dearly Hindus love their cows, colourful cow jewellery and clothing is sold at fairs all over the Indian countryside. From a young age, Hindu children are taught to decorate the cow with garlands, paint and ornaments. Her nature is epitomized in Kamadhenu, the divine, wish-fulfilling cow.
The cow and her sacred gifts —milk and ghee in particular —are essential elements in Hindu worship, penance and rites of passage. In India, more than 3, institutions called Gaushalas, maintained by charitable trusts, care for old and infirm cows. Wendy Doniger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Just this past June, at a national meeting of various Hindu organizations in India, a popular preacher, Sadhvi Saraswati, suggested that those who consumed beef should be publicly hanged. Later, at the same conclave, an animal rights activist, Chetan Sharma, said ,. When she is slaughtered, something called EPW is released, which is directly responsible for global warming. These provocative remarks come at a time when vigilante Hindu groups in India are lynching people for eating beef.
Such killings have increased since Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata party came to power in September In September , a year-old Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, was lynched by a mob in a village near New Delhi on suspicion that he had consumed beef.
Since then , many attacks by cow vigilante groups have followed. As a scholar, studying Sanskrit and ancient Indian religion for over 50 years, I know of many texts that offer a clear answer to this question. Scholars have known for centuries that the ancient Indians ate beef. After the fourth century B.
Also buttermilk , a by-product of butter, forms a major part of the rural diet. Cow urine is sometimes included in a purifying mixture used in some religious rituals. Cow dung is used as a fertiliser and fuel. Collected, shaped and dried, it is used for cooking food. Like beef, pork is also forbidden in Hinduism. However, unlike the sacred cow, the pig represents impurity and filth , because it eats our wasted food. This is considered to be particularly impure and soiled as, for example, it has been touched or come into contact with saliva.
Mahias, Marie-Claude, Le barattage du monde. Home The sacred cow. The numbers have caused a rise in incidents of traffic accidents involving cows that have been reported in the last couple of years, although comprehensive statistics on the problem are still missing. According to Arjun Sheoran, advocate and the head of the People's Union for Civil Liberties in the northern city of Chandigarh, the changes in cow protection laws and their harsh implementation have led to an exponential rise in the number of stray bovines.
People, who cannot afford to look after their cows after they stop producing milk, are forced to leave the animals on the streets. Thus, "many cows, which are abandoned, end up in urban areas where they create massive traffic and public health and hygiene issues," Sheoran told DW. Read more: Can India take the lead on Asia's renewable energy future?
In West Bengal, for example, authorities intensified a cattle seizure drive earlier this year after reports that a car lost control because its driver was trying to avoid hitting a cow.
In Noida, north of the capital New Delhi, a year-old man died after his motorcycle collided with a stray cow. Cows themselves have been victims of traffic accidents, with nearly 7, animals dying on railway tracks in India's Uttar Pradesh since April this year, according to data collected by the North Central Railway.
Legislators in India, backed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, have announced steps to protect stray cows. Most recently, the government of India's Himalayan state, Himachal Pradesh said it was passing a resolution to declare the cow the "national mother. Anirudh Singh, the political leader who proposed the resolution said, "The cow is not bound to any caste, creed or religion and makes a huge contribution to humanit People abandon cows when they stop giving milk so there is need for such a move," the leader told the newspaper, Times of India.
Singh hopes the resolution will help create more cattle shelters and spur legislation to stop cow-related lynching, although that has not proven to be effective in other regions.
Many states like Delhi, Rajasthan and Punjab have established cow shelters, however these are stretched beyond their capacities, according to local administrative bodies.
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