https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/opinion/the-cows-between-us.html
Like many men of his generation, my grandfather had a simple answer for a question that India and Pakistan have been asking themselves since independence: Why did we have to separate? He used to say that Muslims and Hindus couldn’t live together because of a fundamental difference over what was cooking in their kitchens. Hindus worship their cows. We eat ours. How could these two people live together?
Of course, grandfather conveniently ignored the fact that more Muslims live in India than in Pakistan, that millions of Hindus eat cow and that many Hindus who worship cow and don’t eat it are fine raising it to sell to people who do eat it. But 70 years after partition, India seems to be taking my grandfather’s theory very seriously.
The Bharatiya Janata Party government in the Indian state of Gujarat has just passed a law imposing life imprisonment for anyone who slaughters a cow, and 10 years in jail for anyone who drives a cow to slaughter.
Elsewhere, self-appointed cow protectors are dishing out their own justice. People are being lynched by mobs over rumors that they keep beef in their fridges. Just this week, vigilantes in Rajasthan beat a Muslim man to death for transporting cattle.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, thousands of people could lose their jobs because of a government campaign against slaughterhouses and meat shops, which the authorities consider illegal. For a time, the tigers and lions of Lucknow Zoo were being fed only chicken and mutton.
What we eat and don’t eat forms the basis of many of our prejudices, and many of our hypocrisies. Many Muslims believe that drinking alcohol is a sin, but around the world you’ll find Muslim men heading into the night in search of halal food while drunk. Muslims can break every imaginable Shariah law and still be offended if someone offers them a ham sandwich.
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Yet in the name of faith, or for lack of it, some of us convince ourselves that the cow, with its soulful eyes, has nothing to do with the skewers on our plates. I happen to have grown up with water buffaloes and still think people who eat them are barbarians. But I am fine eating bits of beef when they’re well-done.
