India’s Food Debate Needs to Go Beyond Cow Politics, Tackle Ethics

Our present day culinary politics has hijacked the larger and more pressing debate over the ethics of food.

Portrait of an indian butcher in his small store in New Delhi. (Photo: iStockphoto)

The vile assault on seven members of a Dalit family in Gujarat’s Una is only the latest in a spate of brutal attacks perpetrated by self-styled cow vigilante groups over the past few months. The horrific lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri last year, a firestorm that led to some shockingly unintelligent rationalisations of the tragedy by members of the ruling BJP, in some sense marked the revival of cow politics in India.

Also read: Dalit Victims’ Families Allege Upper Caste Conspiracy in Una

Also read: Dalit Row: Mayawati Trying to Mobilise Lost Support, Says BJP

Right, Left: Political Ping Pong of Cow Issue

This has since been followed up with several more vicious incidents involving people being forced to eat cow dung for instance or Dalit men being stripped, tied to a van and beaten up, or even the rise of as many as 200 gau rakshak groups in Gujarat alone. This brazen bigotry of the right has fittingly been met with equal vociferousness from the liberal establishment. Reams of news space has been dedicated already to ascertain how food is being used as an insidious political weapon by the Hindu right to reinforce supremacist Brahminical values, and continue an almost systematic form of discrimination against meat-eating Dalit and minority groups.

The Holy Cow, Hindutva and meat politics. (Photo: iStockphoto/Altered by The Quint)

Derisive Posts

On Twitter and Facebook, high-profile television anchors have called on their followers to hold their heads high and declare proudly their credentials as beef eaters. Others, meanwhile, have taken to writing teasing, derisive posts about enjoying ‘bloody’ steaks.

Columnist Aakar Patel has even asked Leonardo DiCaprio to lay off and refrain from giving Indians advice on vegetarianism. DiCaprio, a vegan, will share the stage with the RSS later this month in London, where he’s been roped in by the nationalist outfit to campaign for its anti-beef movement. The conflation of the RSS’ barefaced religious agenda with DiCaprio’s more noble mission to shine a light on the gargantuan criminality of industrial animal farming is problematic surely. The golden jubilee of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh is not the best platform to propagate compassionate food choices.

Ethics of Food

But more disconcerting for anybody to whom animals are more than instruments for political ping-pong is how fully we have let culinary politics hijack the larger and more pressing debate that is underway globally over the ethics of food, particularly meat.

There are moral questions that define our relationship with other species who have, as it has been established beyond doubt, suffered unprecedented, almost genocidal, consequences at the hands of human beings. As blinkered, dogma-ridden debates rage on about beef bans, holy cows and tamasic diets every few months, can India discuss its bovine obsessions in a newer context?

Perhaps talk about animals not merely from the prism of caste, religion and politics, but welfare, sustainability and ethics? As someone with vested interests in vegetarianism, this is not a plea for some kind of mass dietary transformation (the quality of an animal’s life and how humanely it is killed is a more pragmatic debate rather than the ethics of meat eating in itself).

In Defence of Animal Rights

• The brutal assault on Dalits in Gujarat has been countered by liberals who have questioned the political right’s use of food as politics.
  
• More disconcerting is that we have let culinary politics hijack the larger and more pressing debate over the ethics of food.
  
• The debate should be not merely from the perspective of caste, religion and politics but also ethics and sustainability.
  
• There is little public conversation in India around animal rights or the abuse that comes with the import of Western factory farming practices.
  
• Not graphic videos but intelligent debate and a greater understanding of evolutionary science can cause change.
  

What About Animal Rights?

Food is an individual choice, defined by culture, habit and tradition. But for a country that is today the largest exporter of beef, most dominant producer of milk, second largest producer of eggs and third largest of broiler chicken in the world, there is scanty public conversation around animal rights, or the devastating abuse that comes with the import of Western factory farming practices into India.

It is very well to express horror and shock when puppies are burnt and dogs are hurled from terraces, but who, barring an odd celebrity campaigner, will take cudgels against policies that allow A4 size battery cages in which more than 200 million laying chicken are confined, unable to stretch even their wings? Or oppose the gruesome practices used in leather tanneries where, according to PETA, animals are skinned alive, their bones twisted and broken and hot chili pepper and tobacco rubbed into their eyes?

Gore in the animal industry can fill many pages of a narrative but much of it has lost shock value in a world where animal brutality has been institutionalised by the domestication of entire species for human use.

Intelligent Debate

What does have capacity to steer change in our mindsets is not graphic videos, but intelligent debate and a greater understanding of evolutionary science which has proven beyond reasonable doubt that every minute of the day, we are sacrificing in billions “sentient beings with intricate social relations and sophisticated psychological patterns” on the production line.

Such dialogue is unfortunately conspicuously absent from Indian drawing rooms and television studios where the politics rather than the ethics of meat eating takes precedence.

“March of Human Progress Strewn With Dead Animals”

(Photo: The Quint)

Historian Yuval Noah Harari, who has called the treatment of domesticated industrial animals as perhaps the worst crime in human history, says the “march of human progress is strewn with dead animals.”

It’s not how they are killed but rather how they live – as products rather than as live beings – that makes their existence particularly cruel. “They may not be as intelligent as us, but they certainly know pain, fear and loneliness. They too can suffer, and they too can be happy,” wrote Harari in The Guardian last year. Yet, such complexities and the understanding of them which can inform policy are redundant, he says, in modern animal husbandry or even among the scientific community which has used its growing knowledge of animals “mainly to manipulate their lives more efficiently in the service of human industry.”

Can India’s political right not steer their anti-meat campaign using these hard truths rather than trying to pass off, as Patel argues, vigilantism as ethical behaviour towards animals? Equally, mustn’t the liberals, by the mere virtue of their ideology, speak up unequivocally, and without the appendage of politics, in favour of a greater moral imperative in our conduct with fellow planetary beings?

(The writer is a freelance journalist and an author. He can be reached @Nik_Inamdar)