The Indian cow may be mooing in relief. But Indians may be miffed with the Animal Welfare Board’s decision to shed its proverbial horns and withdraw its plea to countrymen to celebrate Valentine’s Day as Hug-a-Cow day. Absurdity, after all, has its advantages. Given the dismal times, helping citizens break out in periodic peals of laughter should be accorded a priority by elected dispensations. Even though the Board beat a hasty retreat, the powers that be cannot be accused of being unfunny. India, the theory went, can rid itself of the scourge of Westernisation, one of the bug-bears of the sangh parivar, by unleashing its teeming human population on the hapless cow. As for the masses, the Board assured that the experience of embracing a cow would lead to unprecedented emotional richness.
Urbane, net-savvy India certainly appreciated the cockand-bull tale. It reciprocated with biting humour. For instance, social media was full of cheeky commentators speculating on the matter of ‘cow consent’. Others wondered whether the right-wing ecosystem would call the act of a Muslim man hugging the cow an instance of ‘love jihad’. But amidst all the bantering, a lot went unsaid. For instance, the government was silent about the fact that dutiful citizens willing to shower this kind of affection on the cow could suffer avoidable love bites. For cows, just like any deity, are a temperamental lot and may reciprocate not quite gently to being held in a bear hug. There was also the usual — hilarious — bit of the government tying itself up in knots on another count. Cow-hugging is a markedly profitable Western enterprise: distressed Americans, for instance, are spending a tidy sum these days to hug these creatures. A truly indigenous vaccine against the ‘virus’ called Westernisation seems to have eluded a government obsessed with tradition.
All of this would have been funny had it not been for certain unpalatable aspects. One of the factors that has abetted Hindutva’s ascendance is its ingenious ability to weaponise markers — religious or cultural — of reverence. The cow has, therefore, been transformed into an instrument of political aggrandisement and ideological domination. India has witnessed vigilantism in the name of the harmless cow. The fulcrum of the cattle economy has been disturbed with laws preventing farmers from trading their unproductive cattle. The menace of stray cattle has become a matter of concern in several states. For all its talk of cow care, the government has been caught napping with deaths and ill treatment of bovines in cow shelters being common. An estimated one-and-a-halflakh animals perished in an outbreak of lumpy skin disease last year.
Hug-a-Cow day, if it came to pass, would have helped the government deflect attention from these serious lapses. But Indians and, hopefully, the cow always know better.
