Beef biryani politics: Cooked in caste and communal identity

Note: This article isn’t intended to hurt readers’ sensibilities, but to promote a dispassionate discussion on the caste-based politics of beef-eating and of cow slaughter, which has been in the news in recent times, in Tamil Nadu and in Madhya Pradesh. On the diplomatic circuit, there’s a story that’s told of a staunch Hindutva leader who, while once travelling abroad in the service of his motherland, was seen to be tucking into a juicy beef steak. When other scandalised members of the parliamentary delegation, who were more accustomed to seeing the beef-eater as a swadeshi campaigner against cow slaughter, enquired of him if he knew what manner of beast he was devouring, his response was as comical as it was honest. “Yes, I know it’s gomata,” he said in chaste Hindi. “But this is videshi gomata!” He isn’t, of course, the only “upper caste” politician to make light of a fondness for beef, despite the widespread taboo associated with bovine meat. On another occasion, in the 1980s, Mani Shankar Aiyar, then an upstart politician and Rajiv Gandhi’s Doon School buddy, addressed a public seminar in Chennai on the subject of secularism – and, by a curious stretch of logic, advanced his fondness for beef as a badge of secular honour. “I am a Brahmin, and yet I eat beef,” noted Aiyar. And, since he had additionally dispensed with various other symbols of caste and religious identity – he had, he said, cast away his ‘sacred thread’ and had married a non-Hindu – he was, he claimed, “very secular”. For such specious reasoning – and a frivolous definition of what it means to be secular – Aiyar was justifiably rapped on the knuckles by political commentator S Gurumurthy. [caption id=“attachment_194632” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“A Hindu devotee offers a banana to a cow during a religious ceremony. Reuters”] [/caption] “On this test,” wrote Gurumurthy , “for a Muslim to claim ‘secular’ status, he must eat pork, cut off his beard and marry non-Muslims. But, for Mani, Muslims are, by birth, ‘secular’. Only Hindus have to turn un-Hindus to be ‘secular’.” Aiyar may have been gored by the sheer force of Gurumurthy’s criticism, but from what we’ve seen of him over the years, he wasn’t easily cowed down by the Dravidian caste-based politics of meat-eating. While campaigning for an election as an MP in 1991 in Mayiladuthurai constituency (in Tamil Nadu), Aiyar found himself subjected to venomous anti-Brahmin rhetoric from his DMK rival. Aiyar initially tried to keep his campaign clean by talking of developmental issues, but when he realised that his rival’s anti-Brahmin platform was gaining resonance in that decidedly Dravidian constituency, he took the challenge head-on by projecting himself as a meat-eating Brahmin. Aiyar even challenged his rival to a contest in the village square to see who could eat more chicken biryani! Evidently, his campaign’s masala recipe was well received, and Aiyar won (although the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi just ahead of the elections may have also contributed to generate a sympathy wave). These political anecdotes serve to establish the scurrilous, low-blow nature of the journalism that the Tamil journal Nakkheeran practised against Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa by putting out a thinly sourced article about her dietary preferences despite her standing in the caste hierarchy. For its pointless exertion, the journal has rightly been slapped with a legal suit. But it isn’t just deep-south Dravidians who play identity politics with a cow for a prop. The Madhya Pradesh government’s efforts to ban cow slaughter, which received presidential assent earlier this month, also presses the emotive, hot-button, culture-war issue. But although the cow-slaughter ban is, to borrow a phrase, “red meat” for the diehard Hindutva base, the politics surrounding it is diluted by the fact that historical narrative in fact works against it. In 2003, the NDA coalition government sought to bring in legislation to ban cow slaughter at the national level, but the proposal didn’t win any support from its coalition partners. The proposal received pushback from states like Kerala, West Bengal, most of the northeastern states and Jammu and Kashmir. The politics of cow slaughter doesn’t fly in states like Kerala, where beef accounts for about 40 percent of all meat consumed. Not unsurprisingly, dietary nutrition from animal proteins is relatively higher in Kerala. The cow slaughter ban initiative also ignores the economic aspect to it. Since beef in India costs much less than chicken or lamb, beef is the primary source of protein for the poor. The politics of beef again resolves around identity: much of the effort is directed at establishing that beef-eating is not endemic to India and came with the advent of Islam. Historians and commentators have offered plenty of citations from the scriptures – from the Vedas on - to disprove that position. In 2001, historian DN Jha’s book Holy Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions too sought to dispel that myth, for which his book was banned and demands were made for his arrest and prosecution. Jha also cites orthodox historians like PV Kane and JC Jain to note that meat eating was not uncommon among early Jains and that Vedic Hindus ate beef. According to Jha, it was only in the 19th century that the demand for banning cow slaughter emerged as a tool of mass political mobilisation by right-wing Hindu groups with the intention of isolating Muslims by aggressively challenging their dietary practices as ‘alien’. All this is not to say that there are no religious sensitivities involved in the debate over a ban on cow slaughter. But the debate has over time been overwhelmed by the politics of religious identity and of caste affiliation. A bit of sobriety – and a better appreciation of history – might contribute to a cooling of passions all around, and fewer snark attacks revolving around the politics of caste and religious identity.