The Beef Taboo

India’s news cycle was recently dominated by the tragic lynching of an elderly Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, near the town of Dadri, Uttar Pradesh. This was due to the false rumor, instigated by some village locals, that he slaughtered a cow and ate beef. An announcement to this effect was broadcast throughout the village using the local Hindu temple’s loudspeakers. Subsequently, his family was attacked by a mob on September 29 and the victim was beaten to death. Why did this happen? To understand the events in Dadri, one needs to understand the deeper roots of Indian attitudes toward food, as well as the recent rise in religious polarization

Indian civilization has long been defined – some would say obsessed – by food like no other culture. While all cultures have food taboos of one kind or another, such as forbidding the consumption of the meat of pigs or cats, Indian society is unique in that it has traditionally divided itself into mutually exclusive groups of people on the basis of what they ate. In particular, in rural India, different castes would eat different foods, prepared in distinct ways, and inter-caste and inter-religious dining was rare.

People who broke these taboos were often ostracized or made to undergo extensive purification rituals. While some of these attitudes have relaxed, their legacy remains. People in rural India still take the question of who eats what very seriously. The most contentious food issue in India is the consumption of beef, since most Hindus consider cows sacred. For at least the past two thousand years, killing and eating cows has been one of the cardinal sins of Hindu society throughout most of India (the southern state of Kerala being an exception), such that in many historical kingdoms the penalty for killing a cow was greater than that of killing a member of a lower caste. The slaughter of cows was associated with evil and was seen as something only foreigners or untouchables would do. Consequently, even historically Muslim rulers, such as most of the Mughal emperors, tried to forbid the slaughter of cows in their realms.

Yet because Islam permits the eating of beef, Muslims, India’s largest minority, regularly come under suspicion in India. This suspicion is particularly virulent in India’s religiously tense rural communities, especially in northern India. In fact, for a variety of economic, social and communal reasons, lamb and goat are much more popular among Muslims than beef is. In fact, Mohammad Akhlaq’s refrigerator was filled with mutton, not beef.

The beef issue, while rooted in India’s rural culture, has been exploited by right-wing Hindu groups to achieve their social and political goals. Some of these groups have connections with India’s ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). While there has always been food-based violence in India, India’s Hindu right-wing groups have increasingly been directing this violence against Muslims, capitalizing on the image of the Muslim as “the other,” the non-Indian who eats beef.

It is no surprise that within days of the Dadri lynching, politicians of all stripes had jumped in to comment, with an eye on October elections in the neighboring state of Bihar. Bihar’s politics are highly fragmented on the basis of caste, so in order to have a shot at winning the election, the BJP strategy focused on polarizing Hindus against Muslims, effectively scaring Hindus of all castes into voting for the BJP. Many of the justifications used by BJP and other right-wing politicians are disturbing. Some seem to argue that if the meat had been beef and not mutton, the lynching would have been perfectly acceptable, despite the illegality of murder. Others argued that because some Muslim-majority countries used force to prevent the consumption of pork, India and its society was entitled to do so the same thing with beef. Yet others argued that the media was making too much of the lynching and ignoring incidents where Muslims had killed Hindus. But shouldn’t all killings be investigated and punished, instead of trying to justify one set of killings by pointing to another set? Does India really want to aspire to the level of communal revenge?

Make no mistake, violence over the consumption of beef predates the BJP’s rise to power, and beef was banned in many states under the tenure of the self-proclaimed secular, left-wing Congress Party. The banning or discouraging of beef consumption is an issue that finds fairly broad support throughout Indian society, and Article 48 of the Indian Constitution, written mostly by the Congress Party, directs the Indian state to “take steps for...prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves.” The justification for this is not wholly different than the arbitrary taboos, sometimes enshrined in law, that forbid the consumption of animals such as dogs and pigs in other societies due to sentimental or religious reasons.

The beef taboo may be a unique marker of Indian civilization, one that will not give way due to sentiment, religion and nationalism. But none of this justifies the violence associated with food taboos in India. Even though Gandhi believed that “the central fact of Hinduism is cow protection,” he also stated that he “would not kill a human being for protecting a cow.” Regardless of one’s view on protecting cows, not killing human beings for that belief is a sentiment that all Indians should take to heart.