![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Recent efforts to prevent cow-slaughter in India have prompted U.S. concern about violations of religious freedom. But although the politics of cow protection poses a significant threat to disadvantaged groups in India, efforts to ameliorate that threat through an international policy of religious freedom also carry serious risks. This paper reviews reports issued by the U.S. Department of State's Office of International Religious Freedom and by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. It argues that by unnecessarily portraying the politics of cow protection in terms of a stark conflict between Hindus and Muslims, they threaten to undermine the goal of reducing anti-minority discrimination and violence in India.
Notes
1 India 2015 International Religious Freedom Report, p. 11 (see note 4 for details).
2 Following cow protectionist violence in December, Gyan Dev Ahuja, BJP MLA from Alwar, Rajasthan, reportedly remarked that if someone engages in cow smuggling or slaughters a cow, he will be killed. He commented on the April murder of a middle-aged dairy farmer, Pehlu Khan, in similar tone, saying, “we have no regret over his death because those who are cow-smugglers are cow-killers, sinners like them have met this fate earlier and will continue to do so”. ‘If You Smuggle and Slaughter Cows, You Will Be Killed: BJP MLA Gyan Dev Ahuja’. The Wire, 25 December 2017. https://thewire.in/communalism/if-you-smuggle-and-slaughter-cows-you-will-be-killed-bjp-mla-gyan-dev-ahuja, accessed 6 January 2018. Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly denounced cow protectionist violence, but after a long silence that many read as complicity. ‘After Lynchings, India's Modi Condemns Violence in Name of Cow Worship’. Reuters, 29 June 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-politics-religion/after-lynchings-indias-modi-condemns-violence-in-name-of-cow-worship-idUSKBN19K13S, accessed 29 August 2017.
3 I refer to countries ranked ‘Tier 2’ by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which is an independent federal commission that advises government. If the situation worsens, USCIRF may recommend that India be named a ‘Country of Particular Concern’. CPC countries receive special consideration for policy response or sanction by the U.S. They are ultimately designated by the Secretary of State, as is the ‘Special Watch List’, which as of December 2017, includes Pakistan but not India.
4 There are significant differences between IRF and USCIRF and the reports they produce, but it is not my purpose to assess their respective merits. I will refer to their reports issued since 2015 collectively as the ‘U.S. religious freedom reports’. India 2015 International Religious Freedom Report. Washington, DC: United States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2015. http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/religiousfreedom/index.htm?year=2015&dlid=256305; India 2016 International Religious Freedom Report. Washington, DC: United States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2016. http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/religiousfreedom/index.htm?year=2016&dlid=268930; ‘India’, Annual Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2017, pp. 148–155. http://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2017.USCIRFAnnualReport.pdf; I. K. Cheema, Constitutional and Legal Challenges Faced by Religious Minorities in India. Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2017. http://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/Constitutional%20and%20Legal%20Challenges%20Faced%20by%20Religious%20Minorities%20in%20India.pdf; ‘India’, Annual Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2016, pp. 159–166. http://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/USCIRF%202016%20Annual%20Report.pdf; ‘India’, Annual Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2015, pp. 149–154. http://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/USCIRF%20Annual%20Report%202015%20%282%29.pdf
5 I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funded a Senior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and to a Fulbright Scholar Award, for supporting my research.
6 See ‘Indian Man Lynched Over Beef Rumours’. BBC News, 30 September 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-34398433
7 The essays collected in W. F. Sullivan et al. (Eds.), Politics of Religious Freedom. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015 are a good introduction. Philpott and Shah have mischaracterized this scholarship as a condemnation or rejection of religious freedom, or of U.S. policy in general (D. Philpott and T. S. Shah, ‘In Defense of Religious Freedom: New Critics of a Beleaguered Right’. Journal of Law and Religion Vol. 31. Issue 3 (2016): 380–395). Editors Sullivan, Hurd, Mahmood and Danchin state explicitly that they do “not take a position for or against religious freedom”, but instead “are interested in laying out the kind of work that advocacy for religious freedom has done and is doing in various times and places, and the kind of political and legal worlds it has created and is creating. Our basic assumption is that, before either championing religious freedom or rejecting it, we need to understand the complex social and legal lives of this concept” (Sullivan et al. (Eds.), Politics of Religious Freedom, p. 2).
8 E. S. Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 39, 42.
9 C. S. Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. For a brief statement of the book's argument, see C. S. Adcock, ‘The Problem of Translation: A View from India’. The Immanent Frame. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/04/26/the-problem-of-translation-a-view-from-india/, accessed 26 April 2012.
10 For a discussion of how religious freedom can exacerbate the marginalization of minority communities, see S. Mahmood, ‘Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East’. Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 54. Issue 2 (2012): 418–446.
11 Mohammad Hanif Qureshi and others vs State of Bihar and connected petitions. All India Reporter Vol. 45. Nagpur: All India Reporter, Ltd, pp. 731–756. Hereafter, I will refer to this case as the Supreme Court judgment of 1958.
12 I. K. Cheema, Constitutional and Legal Challenges, p. 11 (see note 4 for details).
13 The connection is already implied in the term ‘vigilante’. The term refers to “a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate)”. ‘Vigilante’, Merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vigilante, accessed 5 April 2018.
14 I. K. Cheema, Constitutional and Legal Challenges, p. 7.
15 S. Chigateri gives a more critical reading of the Supreme Court judgment of 1958 than I offer here (‘Negotiating the “Sacred” Cow: Cow Slaughter and the Regulation of Difference in India’, in M. Mookherjee (Ed.), Democracy, Religious Pluralism and the Liberal Dilemma of Accommodation. New York: Springer, 2011, p. 150). She also raises the important point that although the Supreme Court subjected Muslims’ appeal to religious right to rigorous examination, it did not apply the same rigorous standard to the understanding that avoidance of cow-killing is a central tenet of the Hindu religion. Scholars like D. N. Jha have argued that in the earliest years of Hinduism, cow-killing was condoned. See D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow. London: Verso, 2002.
16 State of Gujarat vs Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab … on 26 October 2005. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/55842/, accessed 20 April 2018.
17 It did remark on the existence of Hindu sentiment regarding the “usefulness and the sanctity” of the cow. Gujarat vs. Mirzapur, p. 9.
18 Hindus often explain their religious reverence for the ‘sacred cow’ by observing that the cow is a useful animal, linking ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ reasons indissolubly together.
19 I discuss the colonial literature on cow protection in C. S. Adcock, ‘Sacred Cows and Secular History: Cow Protection Debates in Colonial North India’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 30. Issue 2 (2010): 297–311.
20 This is evidenced in colonial cow protectionists’ discussions of the need to ‘salvage’ the dry cattle sold for slaughter by predominantly Hindu urban dairymen. C. Adcock, ‘“Preserving and Improving the Breeds”: Cow Protection's Animal-Husbandry Connection’. Paper presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, October 2017.
21 P. Ghassem-Fachandi documented their use to justify Hindu violence against Muslims in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 (Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 123–154). R. Govindrajan discusses contemporary Hindu Nationalists’ recognition of Hindu complicity in cow-slaughter in Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. James Staples has also discussed Hindu complicity in cattle-slaughter: ‘Blurring Bovine Boundaries: Cow Politics and the Everyday in South India’. Paper presented at the Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, October 2017.
22 I. K. Cheema, Constitutional and Legal Challenges, p. 7.
23 S. Chigateri notes the effort in 2002 to have violators of cow-slaughter prohibitions punished under POTA, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (‘Negotiating the “Sacred” Cow’, pp. 137–159, at p. 141).
24 I do not suggest that stereotypes are a sufficient cause of violence against minorities in India, which is often described as spontaneous but is in fact highly organized. P. R. Brass, The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
25 ‘“Your Mother, You Take Care of it”: Meet the Dalits behind Gujarat's Stirring Cow Carcass Protests’. Scroll.in, 23 July 2016. https://scroll.in/article/812329/your-mother-you-take-care-of-it-meet-the-dalits-behind-gujarats-stirring-cow-carcass-protests. On the stereotyped identification of Dalit castes with this work, see R. Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2011.
26 S. Chigateri, ‘“Glory to the Cow”: Cultural Difference and Social Justice in the Food Hierarchy in India’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Vol. 31. Issue 1 (2008): 10–35, at pp. 17, 23. The source of beef varies in different states, as the laws restricting cattle also vary. In some states beef is available, in some it is outlawed. In many states beef is sourced from male cattle and buffaloes.
27 ‘In Kerala, a Beef-Eating Fest to Protest Against Beef Ban’. NDTV, 10 March 2015. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/in-kerala-a-beef-eating-fest-to-protest-against-beef-ban-745587. There has been a fair amount of reporting and commentary around this subject in the Indian press. For a recent example, see ‘What India Really Eats’. The Wire, 5 March 2018. https://thewire.in/229630/india-food-eating-vegetarianism/
28 ‘Lawyers Consume Beef on HC Campus to Protest Maharasthra Ban’. The Times of India, 7 March 2015. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Lawyers-consume-beef-on-HC-campus-to-protest-Maharashtra-ban/articleshow/46481522.cms
29 I. Jaising, A. Chakravorty and M. Dev, ‘It's Time the Supreme Court Untangled Its Contradictory Rulings on Cow Protection’. The Wire, 18 August 2016. https://thewire.in/law/untangling-the-supreme-courts-contradictory-rulings-on-cow-protection. Thanks to Meher Dev, Research and Teaching Fellow, Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy & Governance, National Law University, Delhi, who is Advocate on this case, for providing me with updates.
30 Large-scale protests in Maharashtra in January of this year organized primarily by Dalits and OBCs, but also Muslim groups, are another example. The immediate provocation behind the protests was an act of violence by Hindu Right activists against a group of Dalits, but acts of violence by cow vigilantes have been named as a contributing cause.
31 ‘Privacy Ruling to have Bearing on Beef Ban Cases: SC’. Indian Express, 26 August 2017. http://indianexpress.com/article/india/privacy-ruling-to-have-bearing-on-beef-ban-cases-sc-4813975/