Why the cow is sacred in India: faith, law and history.

The religious reasons

For many Hindus, the cow is called “Gau Mata”, the mother cow. The image comes from milk, which feeds the family the way a mother feeds her child. Several reasons are commonly cited:

• Motherhood and generosity. The cow gives milk, and its products (clarified butter or ghee, yogurt, dung) are used in the kitchen, in the field and in rituals.
• The gods and the stories. Kamadhenu, the wish-fulfilling cow, is a mythical being tied to prosperity. Krishna grew up among herdsmen and is called Gopala, “protector of the cows”. Nandi, the bull, is Shiva's mount.
• Nonviolence (ahimsa). The cow is seen as a gentle animal, and protecting it expresses the idea of not harming living beings.
• The ancient texts. The tradition reads in the Rigveda the word aghnya, “she who is not to be killed”, applied to cows; some scholars debate the scope of this term.

It is important to note that the sacredness of the cow is a value of faith, lived in different ways. There are Hindus who revere the cow with daily rituals and there are those who respect it without ritual. As for diet, a 2019 and 2020 Pew Research Center survey showed that most Hindus say that a person who eats beef cannot be considered Hindu, and that the share of vegetarian Hindus varies greatly from one region to another. Respect is the wisest attitude for anyone who lives in or visits India.

What historians say

The history is more complex than today's image. Researchers such as Romila Thapar and D. N. Jha point to evidence that beef was eaten in ancient India and that the cow became inviolable over centuries, with factors such as the rise of ahimsa and the influence of the Brahmins. Other scholars note that the term aghnya already appears in the Rigveda. Historians still debate the weight of each argument, and Jha's book, The Myth of the Holy Cow, drew threats against the author and a court order banning its circulation.

In the nineteenth century, cow protection took the form of an organized movement: in 1882, Dayananda Saraswati founded the first cow protection society (Gaurakshini Sabha). From then on the subject entered the country's politics.

The law: from the Constitution to the states

There is no national law banning cow slaughter. The protection rests on Article 48 of the Constitution, a directive principle (not directly enforceable by the courts) that directs the State to prohibit the slaughter of cows and calves and of other milch and draught cattle. Since the matter falls within the states' competence, each one has its own law. In a 2015 survey by the US Library of Congress:

Penalties vary widely. In Maharashtra, the 2015 law began to punish with up to five years in prison. In Gujarat, a 2017 amendment provides for up to life imprisonment for cow slaughter.

The Supreme Court upheld the total ban on cow slaughter in 1958 (the Mohd. Hanif Quareshi case) and, in 2005, upheld the total ban on slaughtering bulls and bullocks of any age, in a Gujarat law (the Mirzapur Moti Kureshi case).

A detail that often surprises: according to the same source, Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya (Christian-majority), Kerala and other states of the Northeast had no state law that banned or restricted cattle slaughter. For food culture as a whole, see the spice that tells a story.

When protection turns into violence

In February 2019, Human Rights Watch published the report Violent Cow Protection in India. According to the organization, between May 2015 and December 2018 at least 44 people were killed in attacks by groups that call themselves cow protectors, and 36 of them were Muslim. The organization states that the attacks target mainly Muslim, Dalit and Adivasi (tribal) communities, that in almost all the documented cases the police delayed investigations, ignored procedures or were even complicit, and that several BJP politicians, the party of the national government, publicly justified the attacks.

This is the point where the subject reaches those who pray for India: Christians, who are 2.3% of the population, live side by side with Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis, the communities hit hardest. The relationship between these communities, religion and the law appears in the pages on the persecution of Christians and on where India's Christians live.

How to behave

Visitors to India should know that most Hindus, according to Pew Research Center, consider eating beef incompatible with being Hindu. So it is wise to avoid any gesture of disrespect toward the animal and not to offer beef to a Hindu host. For more rules of conduct, read greetings, hospitality and what is expected of a visitor. The cow is just one of the nine facts about India that tend to surprise Brazilians, and the festivals in the Indian calendar show how faith organizes the whole year. For the overall picture of the country's religions, see what is the religion of India.