In New India, everything is new. Even the foundations of intelligence and learning have to be laid afresh. With this noble aim in mind, the Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog has announced a voluntary online examination to encourage Indians’ curiosity about the cow and the superiority of indigenous breeds over foreign ones. The Kamdhenu Gau-Vigyan Prachar-Prasar Examination will be held on February 25, and everyone, from Union education ministers [sic], state chief ministers and education ministers, district education officers, chairmen of gau seva aayogs and principals of schools to the media, non-governmental organizations and cow donors, is expected to be involved in the “mammoth” exercise. The ambition is on a mammoth scale too, and the sense of all-absorbing national importance quite stunning. The RKA has uploaded an extraordinary syllabus for the test on its website — extraordinary in its complete overhauling of the meaning and definition of science and its confidence in heralding in the New Age of the Indian Cow. Strangely enough, the Centre avoided claiming the syllabus; an officer said that the government has not approved it, and that the RKA is an autonomous body. This claim shrouds in enigma, in hindsight, the fact that it was set up by the Centre in February 2019 to upgrade cow resources genetically and improve productivity, while implementing cow protection laws and welfare schemes. Or that is what the finance minister of the time said.

So is the government behind the examination or not? The gau vigyan reference material explains, using terms from science, that the “Einsteinian pain waves” set off by the accumulated stress and agony of cows going to slaughter cause earthquakes. A book is referred to: evidently, the three authors are the only scientists that the RKA recognizes. Besides, indigenous gau matas, unlike Jerseys, have gold in their milk, the understanding never to sit in dirt, are emotional, with their ears reflecting intelligence and their tails leading to higher regions of being. Their udders dispense ambrosia in the form of milk, with properties no foreign breed can match. The virtues of cow dung and urine have already been much publicized. These can cure leprosy among other illnesses and have antiseptic powers, while being anti-radioactive and anti-thermal as well. In Bhopal, says the reference material, those who had their walls coated with cow dung survived the gas leak; India and Russia use “shielding” dung in their nuclear power centres.

There is much more in the same vein. But questions about the purpose of this exercise are unavoidable. This propagation of pseudo-science and staggering falsehoods masquerading as proven truth comes after widespread objections to the anti-scientific attitude being nurtured by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. Is this, then, a means of distraction from urgent problems as well as a spur to drive Indians deeper into the morass of Hindutva-dictated credulousness? For certificates and prizes await the examinees; all they need to do is believe in the mantra — bovinity is divinity.