Here's a curious anecdote of Mahatma Gandhi & the killing of a calf he ordered for a greater good

In 1928 Mahatma Gandhi ordered a calf at his ashram to be killed. In a letter to one of his followers he explained that it had been injured and was in great pain: “It had been under doctors’ treatment and they had given up all hope… Four or five men were required to turn it on its side and even then this caused it pain. In this condition, I thought that dharma lay in killing it.”

But when Gandhi publicised this case, critics erupted. They angrily questioned how he could claim to be a devotee to ahimsa (non-violence) when he had allowed such a killing. He reported that some even wished that when he had gone for treatment to hospital sometime earlier the doctors could have diagnosed his case as hopeless “and cut short my sinful career by giving me a poison injection in which case the poor calf in the Ashram might have been spared…”

Gandhi took these attacks in his stride, even welcoming them as a way to give a lesson in satyagraha. For people living in this world he said perfect ahimsa was impossible, since living always caused violence in some way. The question was how to minimise violence and yet live, and in that context “by restricting the meaning of ahimsa to non-killing we make room for nameless cruelties in this country...” He urged his followers to always consider the realities of the situation — in this case the suffering of the calf. This practical approach always underlay Gandhi’s considerable involvement with cow protection.

Mahatma Gandhi and Mirabehn (right) with the goats he used for milk in London in 1931

This would reach a peak in the 1920s, in a somewhat unlikely combination with his advocacy for the Khilafat movement. While Gandhi denied vehemently that he was trying to trade Hindu support for the Muslim’s Khilafat movement with Muslim support for Hindu cow protection, he did admit that this would be an ideal example of both communities respecting each other’s interests.

But this respect had to come voluntarily and not by compulsion since only this, Gandhi recognised, caused real change. In a piece written in 1921 entitled ‘Let Hindus Beware’ he wrote: “to attempt cow protection by violence is to reduce Hinduism to Satanism and to prostitute to a base end the grand significance of cow protection. As a Mussulman friend writes, beef-eating, which is merely permissible in Islam, will become a duty if compulsion is resorted to by Hindus”.

Gandhi also argued that Hindus rather than Muslims caused far more violence against cows. Muslims might actually slaughter cows, but Hindus who traded their cows away, for export to places like Australia where they were slaughtered, were equally complicit. He also questioned how people could be against cow slaughter, but ignore how bulls were mercilessly goaded and cows forced to give milk on a daily basis. And he attacked cow shelters where ‘rescued’ cows were abandoned to live in abject conditions. “In cases like this instead of being a refuge for the animals the goshala (cow shelter) becomes a cow-killing institution, the method of killing being a cruel death by starvation,” he wrote in Young India in 1927.

Instead of this, Gandhi conceptualised cow shelters that looked beyond just keeping cattle alive, to wider issues. “Cow-protection societies must turn their attention to the feeding of cattle, prevention of cruelty, preservation of the fast disappearing pasture land, improving the breed of cattle, buying from poor shepherds and turning pinjrapoles (cow shelters) into model self-supporting dairies,” he wrote in 1924. As the nationalist movement grew, he had less time for cows, but appointed a follower, Balwant Sinha, to run the Sevagram dairy as an example. Balwant Sinha was a difficult character, always quarrelling with other Ashramites, but he was devoted to the cows and Gandhi was always ready to give time and resolve his disputes.

Of Favours and Rights

As Independence approached though, cows came back to Gandhi’s mind. Khilafat was long dead and Pakistan — lead by the anti-Khilafat Jinnah — a reality, but Gandhi was adamant that nothing change in the Indian position on cow preservation. The Times of India (ToI) reported on July 28, 1947 of a speech in which Gandhi spoke of the many calls for cow slaughter to be banned in the new country. But this was not possible, he said, because cow preservation was enjoined on Hindus only and “India is the land not only of Hindus but Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, Jews and all who claimed to be of India… Just as Shariat could not be imposed on non-Muslims, Hindu law could not be imposed on non-Hindus.”

A few days later ToI reported a furious response from Hanuman Prasad Poddar, the founder of the Gita Press, Gorakhpur, whose influence in organising the Hindu right has recently been chronicled by Akshaya Mukul. “Mahatma Gandhi seems to be intent upon opposing every just and legitimate demand of the Hindus even in their own land,” he raged. Ignoring the fact that Gandhi could hardly be responsible for what happened in Pakistan now, Poddar argued that “the Muslims cannot have it both ways. They cannot be allowed to slaughter the cow both in Pakistan and Hindustan”.

In words that lay out the dichotomous, either with-us or against-us polarisations that have become familiar today, Poddar argued, “If it is held that prohibiting cow slaughter by law in the Indian union will be favouring the Hindus, and thus fostering communalism is it not showing equal partiality to the Muslims to oppose this legitimate demand of the Hindus?” Gandhi was appealing to a larger idea of India than the narrow idea that had led to Pakistan; Poddar demanded a reciprocal equivalence. In the short term, Gandhi’s assassination by Hindu extremists would deal a setback to Poddar’s views, yet cow preservation would be the tactic that the extremists used to regain their influence. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, when the taint of their link with Gandhi’s assassins persisted, cow preservation was seen as the least controversial way to advance their agenda. They filed cases to ban cow slaughter through the Supreme Court and when this tactic was finally halted, they resorted to more direct political means.

One of their first victims was Kailash Nath Katju, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, who lost his seat in 1962 in a battle fought largely on cow preservation. (His grandson, Justice Markandey Katju, would indirectly hand the cow preservationists a major legal victory with his Hinsa Virodhak judgment). Over the next few years the Jana Sangh, the political arm of the Hindu right, led a steadily mounting campaign for cow preservation that culminated in an extraordinary demonstration in Delhi in November, 1966, which resulted in the first ever attack on Parliament, lead by naked sadhus waving trishuls and spears.

This cow-preservation movement, it should be noted, had no interest in the details of Gandhi’s programme for cow welfare; its demand was simply for a ban on slaughter, with little thought on what would really benefit cows. But there was a third approach to this issue, and this would be articulated by Verghese Kurien, the founder of India’s dairy revolution, who was appointed to the committee on cow slaughter that the Indian government set up after the 1966 agitation, to find some solution to the issue.

This committee had cow-preservation heavyweights like the Shankaracharya of Puri and MS Golwalkar of the RSS, yet they were stymied by one basic point which Kurien would articulate in his memoir, I Too Had A Dream: “It was important for us in the dairy business to keep weeding out the unhealthy cows so that available resources could be utilised for healthy and productive cattle.” When the Shankaracharya argued this, Kurien simply asked if he was willing to take all the unproductive cows in India and feed them till they died.

Kurien was articulating the reality that milk implies meat. Dairy farmers cannot maintain unproductive cattle and, even more, they need to sell them to buy new cows for milk. Societies around the world had no problems with this, but in India it was concealed thanks to the caste system, where the uncomfortable truth of buying and disposing of old cattle could be passed on to Dalits, and then Muslims, who could be stigmatised, yet provided a necessary service. India’s major consumption of milk rested on this hypocrisy.

A Troubled Awareness

The Hindu right has historically simply ignored this point, perhaps because it suits them to stigmatise the groups that dispose of cows. But Gandhi did show a troubled awareness of this point, even if he could never bring himself to entirely accept it. His criticism of the Hindu trade in cows stems from this awareness and also his refusal, when he started focusing on Dalit issues in the 1930s, to accept their stigmatisation by upper-caste Hindus for dealing with dead cows. How could they be left with no other sources of income, and then be criticised for this, he asked.

At the most personal level, Gandhi showed this awareness in his refusal to drink cow’s milk. He had taken a vow to abstain from it after learning of the cruelties performed on cows to keep getting milk from them. But his health promptly suffered since milk was his main source of protein (he had problems with dals). His solution, devised by his wife Kasturba, was to shift to goat’s milk, but he was always uncomfortably aware that this simply transferred the questions of suffering and slaughter to goats. “I was fully conscious, when I started taking mother goat’s milk, that the spirit of my vow was destroyed,” he wrote, but he felt that he had too much service left in his life to obey his principles and die by giving up even goat’s milk.

Today, as Indian governments, at central and state level, contemplate a demand for banning cow slaughter that is reaching a peak again after nearly 50 years they have these three courses of action to take. There is Kurien’s clear position: if milk is required then cow slaughter is inevitable. There is Gandhi’s less clear position which combines trying to increase welfare of cows, persuading people to stop killing them and perhaps avoid milk altogether (which vegan alternatives make more palatable these days).

And there is the Hindu right’s position, equally clear in its way, to avoid such nuances and embrace cow preservation, with all the dangers and divisiveness that come with it. Dadri’s violence, that started with an allegation of slaughter of a calf — untrue, unlike in Gandhi’s case, but still easily believed — demonstrates what lies that way.