General term for a grassroots conservative Hindu effort to ban the slaughter of
cattle, particularly the cow. The traditional Hindu devotion to the cow has
been articulated in calls for a ban on
cow slaughter for more than a century.
The call was first raised in 1875 by
Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the
founder of the reformist Arya Samaj. It
continued to be a basic demand of later
conservative Hindu-oriented groups,
including the Hindu Mahasabha,
the Ram Rajya Parishad, and the
Vishva Hindu Parishad. The call for this
ban occasionally surfaces even in
contemporary times, since it carries
strong support from many religiously
conservative Hindus.
The cow protection demand continues to have profound political implications. Swami Dayanand Saraswati’s
work in the late nineteenth century
coincided with the awakening of Indian
political consciousness and the beginnings of the struggle to regain power
from British imperial rule. Under British
power, overt political dissent was subject
to heavy government restrictions, and
outright rebellion was impossible. Since
the British did not generally interfere
with “religious” issues, the demand for a
ban on cow slaughter was a way for
Hindus to assert and define their identity
and by implication affirm that India was
a Hindu land.
The Cow Protection Movement also
caused friction between the Hindu and
Muslim communities, since Hindus
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worship cows, whereas Muslims eat
them. Hindus saw Muslim beef consumption as a flagrant violation of their
religious sensibilities, and Muslims saw
the demand for a ban on cow slaughter
as a thinly veiled attempt to reinforce
Muslim status as second-class citizens.
Communal relations were often particularly volatile around the annual Muslim
festival of Id, at which it is traditional for
each family to sacrifice an animal and
in which many of the more affluent
Muslim families would sacrifice cattle.
As the relationship between these two
communities deteriorated in the 1930s,
cow slaughter (or rumor thereof) was
often cited as the spark for communal
riots in which hundreds of people
were killed.
This tension persists in modern
India, although it has rarely erupted into
violence since the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Modern India was
founded as a secular state where the
government does not favor any particular religious community. This founding
ethos has made the Indian government
reluctant to pass legislation banning
cattle slaughter, despite continued calls
from traditional Hindus. The Indian
Muslim community, facing the reality of
its minority status in a Hindu majority
state, has had to be far more discreet
about when and how such cow slaughter takes place.