By Maya Palit
It’s been barely a couple of weeks since a judge in Rajasthan vouching for the cow as a national animal had everyone revisiting their foggy memories of biology textbooks to ascertain whether peacocks did, in fact, shed tears instead of having sex.
And then the VHP leader Acharya Dharmendra refuted all of that — this is the man who took umbrage to the Rajasthan judge and said that the cow can’t possibly be made a national animal because it isn’t an animal. It’s a national mother. Only natural then that his leap of logic says that cow slaughter should get you capital punishment.
But another judge might have made another faux pas: this time in Hyderabad.
According to reports, Justice B Siva Sankara Rao waxed eloquent on Friday about the cow. Some of it was stuff we’ve heard before: how the gau-mata represents “sacred national wealth”. But then he went on to explain that a cow has a double function too, by being a “substitute to Mother and God”. Parental guidance and spiritual salvation, all in one.
We’ve heard all sorts of twisted analogies before, some of which muddled up cows and women too. Remember when an RSS spokesperson in West Bengal equated killing a cow to raping a Hindu woman? And much more recently, R V Dhulekar, a member of parliament from UP, explained that there might be people who feel far more protective about cows than their mothers or wives: “And our Hindu society, or our Indian society, has included the cow in our fold. It is just like our mother. In fact, it is more than our mother. I can declare from this platform that there are thousands of persons who will not run at a man to kill that man for their mother or wife or children, but they will run at a man if that man does not want to protect the cow or wants to kill her.” With logic like that floating around, is it really that much more ominous when a judge says cows are effective substitutes for mamas?