In the past year India has been witness to numerous gruesome public murders of men suspected of eating beef or transporting ostensibly sacred cows for slaughter. A band of radicals calling themselves gau-rakshak, or cow-protectors, may lay claim to being the world’s first terrorists in a bovine cause. Yet this intolerant movement’s appeal to religion is greatly at odds with the facts.
The great eighth-century Hindu sage Yajnavalkya made a delicious observation on the flesh of the cow, rarely invoked in present times except by historians. In the “Satapatha-Brahmana”—a text that describes many of the rituals in the Vedic religion that preceded modern Hinduism—Yajnavalkya says of beef: “I, for one, eat it, provided that it is tender.” These awkward words are ignored by the Hindu extremists who wage a thuggish campaign against beef eating, as well as by their more sophisticated enablers in the Indian Parliament, who urge Indians to empathize with the wounded religious sentiments that give rise to today’s vigilante violence.
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