Why Cows Are Revered in India
India tries to project itself as the world's largest democracy with a modern, cosmopolitan and liberal society. The truth, however, is that the nation is a powder keg ready to explode because of religious strife stoked by a biased government that favors the dominant religion to the point of near tolerance to violence and abuses committed by its adherents.
Nowhere has this abuse been demonstrated than the protection of Hindu's sacred cow. Last year, a 50-year-old man wrongfully accused of slaughtering a cow and consuming its meat was mobbed to death in northern Uttar Pradesh. The meat turned out to be that of a sheep, BBC reported.
Policies that favor a certain religion — in this case, Hindu, which comprises 80 percent of India's 1.2 billion people — has fueled antagonism and has been used as a license by extremists to persecute people of other faiths. Last month, mobs also burned down meat shops in Uttar Pradesh.
Cows are sacred in India that the veneration of the animal is often mistaken for worship. Owing to its ability to produce milk, cows are considered by Hindus as the mother of civilization and a symbol of universal life. Historian Mukul Kesavan described the cow as "the most evolved of animals."
He further explained: "I am a Hindu, the cow is my mother, and I won't have her killed. What's being invoked here isn't morality or sentimentality or chivalry or economics: this is an assertion of fictive kinship that effectively argues that all cows are Hindu women."
Before the internet, westerners took with a grain of salt stories of cows causing traffic in New Delhi. Not only were they allowed to roam free and defecate on busy streets, worshippers are said to wash their faces with the animal's urine. The stories have been confirmed true recently.
"I have been consuming cow urine for years. It purifies your soul," 25-year-old Akhilesh Singh admitted to Indian Express. What's surprising is that he is not an uneducated man who is easily misled by false information. He is a junior engineer working at a telecom firm on the border of Delhi.
