Is a cow's life worthier than those of five Dalits? T h e Dalits have had to pay an enormous price—remaining untouchables—for remov- ing carcasses from villages and towns for thousands of years. They have had to pay the price of remaining illiterate and insecure in or- der to build up the leather economy of India. If they had not re- moved dead cattle, dogs and even humans, the people in the towns and villages would have died of dreadful contagious diseases. Even now they continue to pay the price—sometimes with their lives as happened at Jhajhar in Haryana.
All that was essentially scientific was constructed as spiritually bad and sinful in the Maiiu Dharma Shastra. Such superstitions con- tinue to be passed off as spiritual and scriptural, but more shocking than that is the fact that Hindutva organizations such as the VHP want to implement them, emboldened by the fact that their ideological twins are at the helm of the state. They killed five Dalits for skin- ning a dead cow on a roadside in Haryana. They say the Hindu scrip- tures prohibit such an act. To bolster their case for the modernist legal context, the murderers say the Dalit youths were skinning a live cow.
T h e leather industry was one of the first that Indian society estab- lished, much before the Europeans and Americans, but instead of being proud of it, society has rendered its builders 'untouchable'. There is something basically wrong with this mode of understanding divinity and spirituality. T h e problem is deeper than the present
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behaviour of the VHP and its ilk. An anti-scientific temper runs deep in the Hindu psyche. Does this not deserve much more serious de- bate? Is the struggle against such a spiritual psyche to be carried on only by the Dalits?
Many of the VHP leaders themselves are industrialists. Some of them are training their children in America—their dreamland—to become successful industrialists. Some of them are even involved in the leather industry. How does the leather industry exist without skinning dead cattle? If being in the leather business is not sinful, how does skinning a carcass become sinful? How does leather come into existence without skinning dead animals? T h e Shastras say that it was for doing this early industrial work that the Dalits became un- touchable. Now Dalits get lynched for doing this job. What kind of nationalism is this?
Incidentally, when this took place I was touring America—the dreamland of many Indians, as just mentioned. I met many boys and girls—many of them Brahmin too—who are working in beef-packing and leather units. A majority of them eat beef as well. Do all of them become untouchables? By invoking the same scriptures that the Hindutva forces are talking about, they too should be declared un- touchable and should never be allowed to enter the Hindu Rashtra that Bal Thackeray is talking about. But these beef-eating NRIs fill their coffers with dollars and hence they are most lovable. How do they explain this mode of Hinduism?
Indians do not live with one set of scriptures. We have the Bud- dhist scriptures, we have had the Bible as a living book for 2,000 years in India. T h e Quran has been in India for more than 1,000 years. The Dalits in the spiritual realm have more affinity with Bud- dhism and Christianity than Hinduism. In their spiritual realm, the cow is not sacred. How can Hindutva forces impose their spirituality on others? And how can spirituality allow so much hypocrisy, terror- ism and brutality in day-to-day life? Hindutva forces want to wel- come economic globalization but do not want to have anything to do with the process of cultural globalization. How do global spiritual cultures see the relationship between animals and human beings? Is it not important to learn from all positive cultures?
In the economic realm, they want to carry on the leather business; in the political realm, they want to use Dalits as vote-givers, and in the spiritual realm, the science and technological processes that the
Cow and Culture 139 Dalits as historical people constructed became impure, polluted. Not that the professions that the OBCs are involved in their day-to-day life—washing clothes, making pots and rearing sheep and cattle— have become spiritually acceptable for Hindutva forces. They too still—perhaps forever—remain impure. All the Sudras/OBCs in- volved in productive activity are still unacceptable as priests in Hindu temples. But their muscle power becomes acceptable to kill Dalits in the name of cow protection, Muslims in the name of reli- gion. Even the Yadavs who work within Hindutva organizations do not ask why the buffalo, that gives us most of our milk, is not sacred. Our intellectual class does not ask why Hindu nationalism is con- structed around issues such as animal sacredness and human pollu- tion. When I asked this question at my Columbia University talk, the Indian diaspora intellectuals appeared to agree entirely with me. But how much writing do they do on such issues is the moot question. What kind of theoretical and practical nationalism do we have? No one asks why the cow alone should remain a constitutionally pro- tected animal under the Directive Principles of State Policy.
Today the whole world knows that the African-American's culture has been assimilated not only in American civil society, it has be- come part of the state system as well. T h e American Constitution values the Black life absolutely equally to the White life. Indian in- tellectuals must realize that the civil war to grant equal rights for Blacks was not fought only by Blacks, but by Whites under the lead- ership of Abraham Lincoln. African-American taxi drivers tell a lot of positive stories about White intellectuals. They tell them because many of those men and women sacrificed their lives for the freedom of the Blacks. In India has such a rebellion against the barbarity of treating the life of a cow as more worthy than those of five Dalits taken place? Imagine such a thing taking place against African- Americans today. Would not such an incident have created condi- tions for another civil war? Look at the way Indian legal agencies are dealing with this brutality. They are waiting to find out whether the cow was dead or alive when it was skinned.
T h e Hindutva forces do not think of abandoning such supersti- tious notions of life and religion. So far there is no evidence of Hindu spiritual leadership coming down heavily on the VHP even on this issue. T h e rulers in New Delhi remain indifferent as well. After the BJP came to power, the cow question has been brought to
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the national agenda again and again. Earlier, it was always in refer- ence to Muslims. Now Dalits get lynched. Their very livelihood is attacked.
The OBCs who are being increasingly used for all kinds of funda- mentalist activity including the Gujarat pogrom, were possibly em- ployed in this lynching of Dalits as well. Many Dalit activists have been complaining that more and more the OBCs are getting in- volved in attacks against them. T h e OBCs must realize that the very same fundamentalists are going to say that caste hierarchical prac- tices must come into operation in classical form. They may dis- qualify them from contesting elections and administering the state. The Hindutva attacks did not stop with Muslims. They went on to target Christians and now the Dalits. Now at least the whole nation must stand up against this kind of spiritual and political nationalism.