Recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) complained that she was being perceived as a “cow dictator” for her co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal (GND), which among other things, attempts to address the role of bovines in global warming. The simple idea, that Americans can do with a few less hamburgers for a livable planet has been transformed into a fear mongering that the Democrats are coming to “take away your hamburgers.” When someone, particularly a young Latinx woman, dares to question something as all-American as the beef burger, we can’t be surprised that the opposition would dismiss and ridicule the GND resolution.
For those of us of the Indian diaspora, AOC’s statement that she is not a cow dictator is resonant. In India we have actual cow dictators! India’s current ruling party, the BJP, imposed a ban on beef in many Indian states since 2015. While it might look, on the surface, that the ruling was to protect cows, the effect is actually to further oppress marginalized caste people, Muslims and Christians, in favor of the dominant Hindu narrative of the “sacred cow.” The ruling has resulted in dozens of instances of vigilantism in the country, with a total of over 40 deaths of people suspected of killing cows or eating beef.
With this, 2019, being an election year in India, cow politics has only got more intense with a whole variety of bovine protection proposals.
Animal rights activists in the west might get unfairly accused of caring about animals more than humans, but in India, it really does seem to be the case that animal welfare is pitted against human welfare, ultimately in an effort to put marginalized people in their place.
With clamor over cows across the globe, I think it is appropriate to take a moment and ask who we are actually fighting over. Cow politics, after all, is not new to human civilization. The herding culture that was the seed of our human civilization was “organized around owning and commodifying animals,” and the primary measure of wealth, “capital,” was cattle ownership. The mighty auroch species, now extinct, was ancestral to all the sub species of domesticated cattle. Cows are bred and used for meat, milk, leather, for labor as draft animals, and their dung is used as manure or fuel. Human “advancement” is so dependent on cows, that our domination of our planet is tightly linked to the proliferation of bovines. To maintain control of this profitable commodity, humans went to violent lengths. For example, settlers in America waged wars on indigenous people and other free-living animals to maintain access to land for profitable cattle ranching. The environmental detriments of ranching, such as depletion of fresh water supplies, were noted in reports even back in 1879.
Although though a beef ban is imposed over much of India now, we did not always have such a veneration for cows. Religious rituals from early Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, provide detailed and frequent descriptions of cow sacrifices. The current imposition of the ban is a characteristic trait of modern day right-wing religious groups in India, it would seem, to further oppress the marginalized people in this impoverished part of the world.
If I were a cow, I would be wondering, when the day will come that I will not be used as a pawn in human politics. “Just like you humans, and just like other animals, I am here for myself, not as a weapon to wield power over others and over the earth. I am not your hamburger, I am not your mother. Let me be.” I hope that the extremism displayed over cow ownership, whether as all-American burgers or as an Indian “mother of nation,” we are witnessing the last gasp of human domination over cows.
