In What Country Do Eople Not Eat Beef

Just this by June, at a national meeting of various Hindu organizations in India, a popular preacher, Sadhvi Saraswati, suggested that those who consumed beef should exist publicly hanged. Later, at the aforementioned conclave, an animal rights activist, Chetan Sharma, said,

"Cow is likewise the reason for global warming. When she is slaughtered, something chosen EPW is released, which is directly responsible for global warming. It'south what is called emotional pain waves."

These provocative remarks come at a time when vigilante Hindu groups in India are lynching people for eating beef. Such killings accept increased since Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata party came to power in September 2014. In September 2015, a fifty-yr-old Muslim human being, Mohammad Akhlaq, was lynched by a mob in a hamlet almost New Delhi on suspicion that he had consumed beef. Since and so, many attacks by cow vigilante groups have followed. Modi'due south government has also prohibited the slaughter of buffalo, thus destroying the Muslim-dominated buffalo meat industry and causing widespread economic hardship.

Most people seem to assume that no Hindu has ever consumed beef. But is this true?

Equally a scholar, studying Sanskrit and aboriginal Indian religion for over fifty years, I know of many texts that offer a clear reply to this question.

Cows in aboriginal Indian history

Scholars take known for centuries that the ancient Indians ate beef. Afterwards the 4th century B.C., when the practice of vegetarianism spread throughout India among Buddhists, Jains and Hindus, many Hindus continued to eat beef.

In the fourth dimension of the oldest Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 B.C.), cow meat was consumed. Like almost cattle-breeding cultures, the Vedic Indians generally ate the castrated steers, simply they would consume the female person of the species during rituals or when welcoming a guest or a person of high status.

Ancient ritual texts known every bit Brahmanas (c. 900 B.C.) and other texts that taught religious duty (dharma), from the third century B.C., say that a bull or moo-cow should be killed to exist eaten when a guest arrives.

Co-ordinate to these texts, "the cow is food." Even when i passage in the "Shatapatha Brahmana" (3.1.2.21) forbids the eating of either cow or balderdash, a revered ancient Hindu sage named Yajnavalkya immediately contradicts it, saying that, withal, he eats the meat of both cow and bull, "as long as it's tender."

Cows painted over a door are believed to bring adept luck. Ross Funnell, CC BY-NC-ND

It was the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata (composed between 300 B.C. and A.D. 300) that explained the transition to the non eating of cows in a famous myth:

"Once, when in that location was a cracking famine, Rex Prithu took up his bow and arrow and pursued the Earth to force her to yield nourishment for his people. The Globe assumed the form of a cow and begged him to spare her life; she and so allowed him to milk her for all that the people needed."

This myth imagines a transition from hunting wild cattle to preserving their lives, domesticating them, and breeding them for milk, a transition to agronomics and pastoral life. It visualizes the cow as the paradigmatic animate being that yields food without beingness killed.

Beefiness-eating and caste

Some dharma texts equanimous in this same period insist that cows should not exist eaten. Some Hindus who did eat meat made a special exception and did not eat the meat of cow. Such people may have regarded beefiness-eating in the calorie-free of what the historian Romila Thapar describes as a "matter of status" – the higher the degree, the greater the nutrient restrictions. Diverse religious sanctions were used to impose prohibition on beef eating, only, as Thapar demonstrates, "only among the upper castes."

Equally I see information technology, the arguments confronting eating cows are a combination of a symbolic argument about female person purity and docility (symbolized by the cow who generously gives her milk to her calf), a religious statement about Brahmin sanctity (as Brahmins came increasingly to be identified with cows and to exist paid by donations of cows) and a way for castes to rise in social ranking.

Sociologist M. North. Srinivas pointed out that the lower castes gave upward beef when they wanted to move up the social ladder through the procedure known as "Sanskritization."

A central tenet of Gandhi's teaching was vegetarianism. But he did not phone call for a beefiness ban.

By the 19th century, the cow-protection movement had arisen. One of the implicit objects of this movement was the oppression of Muslims.

Famously, Gandhi attempted to make vegetarianism, particularly the taboo against eating beef, a cardinal tenet of Hinduism. Gandhi's attitude to cows was tied to his idea of nonviolence.

He used the image of the Earth moo-cow (the one that King Prithu milked) as a kind of Female parent World, to symbolize his imagined Indian nation. His insistence on cow protection was a major factor in his failure to concenter large-calibration Muslim support.

Yet even Gandhi never called for the banning of cow slaughter in Republic of india. He said,

"How can I force anyone non to slaughter cows unless he is himself so tending? It is not as if there were only Hindus in the Indian Union. There are Muslims, Parsis, Christians and other religious groups here."

Today's India

From my perspective, in our day, the nationalist and fundamentalist "Hindutva" ("Hindu-ness") movement is attempting to use this notion of the sanctity of the moo-cow to disenfranchise Muslims. And it is not merely the beef-eating Muslims (and Christians) who are the target of Hindutva's hate brigade. Lower-caste Hindus are also being attacked. Attacks of this type are not new. This has been going on since Hindutva began in 1923. And indeed, in 2002, in a north Indian boondocks, five lower-caste Hindus were lynched for skinning a moo-cow.

But, as local analysis shows, the violence has greatly increased under the Modi authorities. IndiaSpend, a data journalism initiative, found that "Muslims were the target of 51 percent of violence centered on bovine issues over most eight years (2010 to 2017) and comprised 86 per centum of 28 Indians killed in 63 incidents…As many of 97 pct of these attacks were reported after Prime Minister Narendra Modi'due south authorities came to power in May 2014."

In 2015, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, lower-caste Hindus were flogged for skinning a dead moo-cow, triggering spontaneous street protests and contributing to the resignation of the state's chief government minister.

As these so many other recent attacks demonstrate, cows – innocent, docile animals – take become in India a lightning rod for human cruelty, in the name of religion.

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Source: https://theconversation.com/hinduism-and-its-complicated-history-with-cows-and-people-who-eat-them-80586

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