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India's absence from the ongoing world championship in which a political pariah like North Korea was able to make history by scoring a goal was of a piece with an even more embarrassing show in 1992.
That year the same lot of people — rightwing Hindus that pushed the law to protect the cow in the southern state of Karnataka — had travelled to Ayodhya to raze a 16th-century mosque. Many saw it as a frustrated response by pseudo nationalists at not getting even a single medal in the Summer Olympics held in Barcelona earlier that year.
When the zealots, represented in parliament by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), tore down the mosque they said it was their revenge on Mughal Emperor Babar who they claimed had destroyed a Hindu shrine to build the Babri Masjid. Babar would have frowned not only on the events in Ayodhya but would have found the BJP's efforts in Karnataka a bit cynical.
In his will to Humayun, Babar wrote “Son, this nation Hindustan has different religions. Thank Allah for giving us this kingdom. We should remove all the differences from our heart and do justice to each community according to its customs. Avoid cow-slaughter to win over the hearts of the people of this land and to incorporate the people in the matters of administration. Don't damage the places of worship and temples, which fall in the boundaries of our rule.”
There can be of course many good reasons to avoid as opposed to banning the consumption of beef. A leading heart doctor at a specialist clinic in Delhi insists that if he had his way he would add cholesterol-reducing statins to the city's municipal water supply, such is the tendency of the South Asian gene to accumulate lethal levels of lipid in the body.
It is another matter that the dairy culture of milk, butter and ghee prevalent in the regions surrounding Delhi is just as harmful for its high cholesterol content. (Lord Krishna, born in neighbouring Mathura, as the legend goes, used to steal butter and there is so much music — both thumris and bhajans, including a beautiful song by K.L. Saigal — celebrating this aspect of the deity when he was a child!)
Of course if they were to follow the doctor's instructions on healthy eating, most Indians would starve, as there is not enough of the good food going around. That's perhaps why former Lok Sabha speaker G.G. Swell, an MP from the tribal state of Meghalaya, protested strongly when Prime Minister Vajpayee, during his 13-day tenure in 1996, introduced a ban on cow slaughter as one of his government's priority objectives. It takes courage to question the axiom of the holy cow, but the alternative before Swell was to see his people starve to death.
It was not the first time that the debate around cow slaughter bills and beef eating took place. When a subsequent BJP-led government was in power it went to the extent of appointing a committee to go into the matter and the committee concluded that cow protection should be made a fundamental right and there was a need to constitute a Central Rapid Protection Force to prevent cow slaughter, and also to invoke Pota (the now repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act) to detain those smuggling cows!
Of course to stop the smuggling of cows is well nigh impossible and there is this instructive story from a Pakistani diplomat who used to have his many Indian friends in splits. In one of their meetings that India's Border Security Force (BSF) and Pakistani Rangers had in Islamabad, the Indian side complained how large volumes of heroin were being smuggled from across the border.
How was that possible with the fence in place, they were asked by Rana Chander Singh, Pakistan's minister dealing with the smuggling issue. Why of course there was this occasional bag of heroin that was found stuck on the fence. The drug was being tossed across the border, came the BSF's reply. If so, then how come the Indians had never found a cow that got stuck on the fence, guffawed Chander Singh.
The implication was that if smuggling was happening — cattle, drugs or whisky — it could be possible only with the complicity of the security forces that controlled the gates of the fence. In this situation the buck never stopped.
“The cow obsession of BJP is a part of deeper agenda of targeting Muslim minorities as they want to Brahminise society by creating situations where beef eating becomes taboo for large sections of society,” says Prof Ram Puniyani, a liberal ideologue.
Beef, he says, is amongst the cheapest sources of proteins for the poor, especially Dalits and Adivasis. Till just a couple of decades ago there were many communities who preferred beef to other expensive, protein-rich food. At the same time the minorities, Muslims and Christians, for whom, beef is neither a taboo nor a compulsion, are being looked down on this pretext. Large propaganda campaigns are on through which minorities are being demonised around the issue of beef eating and cow slaughter.
That food habits should be our personal choice was best summed up by the poet Mirza Ghalib. He told a British magistrate how he was a half-Muslim, that though he drank wine he did not eat pork.
A scion of the ruling family of Sharjah offered me another vignette. It so happened that the emirate, the third largest state of UAE, was losing its once flourishing hotel business to Dubai. Everyone who came to watch a cricket fixture in Sharjah would check into hotels in the neighbouring emirate.
The reason soon became obvious. Sharjah, under heavy financial obligations to Saudi Arabia, had cracked down on alcohol and had banned its consumption even in five-star hotels. Yet the breakfast tables would be piled with pork ham and sausages, forbidden in Islam.
So I asked the ruler's close relative about the logic behind serving pork while banning alcohol in hotels, particularly when it was driving away customers. “The reason is very simple my friend,” said the sheikh with a wink. “Pork is not as tempting as alcohol.” There is a lot for the government in Karnataka to learn in the edicts of Babar, from the wry humour of Chander Singh and from the ready wit of Ghalib. Let it learn the art of winning medals in international sports. Let it find a healthy way to feed its poor. That should be a good tribute to the holy cow, and a possible way to protect it.
The writer is Dawn's correspondent in Delhi.
