The Indian state is directed by the directive principles of the Indian Constitution to discourage the slaughter of draught and milch cattle. This is not legally binding upon the state but like all directive principles, the state is meant to enforce this principle over time. In India this constitutionally mandated ban has been imposed in all but two states, the exceptions being Kerala and West Bengal. Recently there have been renewed calls for the prohibition of slaughter on the ground that Indian abattoirs inflict needless pain upon cattle. The accusation of cruelty has been most forcefully levelled by an animal rights group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals which has sponsored a campaign against the import of Indian leather goods in Western countries. In response to this campaign, government officials have promised to more stringently enforce regulations forbidding the transport of cattle from one state to another. Generally north Indian cattle are trucked to Bengal where they are slaughtered. PETA finds the conditions of transportation appalling because by the time they reach the abattoir, many animals are half-dead because of exhaustion or injury. The cause of banning cow slaughter has influential local sponsors too. The campaign against cow slaughter in India cites animal rights, cruelty to animals, the economic wellbeing of the rural Indian population, but it's fair to say that these reasons are red herrings. Cow slaughter in India is taboo because of the religious sensibilities of the Hindus who variously worship the cow as Nandi or sentimentally and rhetorically think of female cattle as embodiments of nurture and therefore as mothers: gau mata. Since the late 19th century, cow slaughter has been a political issue in India. The issue has been constantly agitated not just in isolated ways but as a national problem. During the Khilafat/Non-cooperation movement, M.K. Gandhi saw the institution of the Khilafat as the 'Muslim Cow'! Indeed, he specifically asked his Khilafatist comrades to urge Muslims not to sacrifice cows. So the quid pro quo for non-Muslim support for the sultan of Turkey, the so called Khalifah, was a Muslim moratorium on the killing of cows. During the Twenties and the Thirties, there was a similar reciprocity of provocation: when Hindus asserted their unrestricted right to play music before mosques, Muslims held out for an unlimited right to slaughter cows. The insertion of the directive principle on cow slaughter could not have happened if India had not been divided. It was a republican sop to Hindu sentiment, halfheartedly written into the Constitution. Jawaharlal Nehru, who personally opposed a ban on cow slaughter, indirectly conceded it by transferring the responsibility for imposing such a ban on state governments, and not the Centre. He tried to camouflage this capitulation to Hindu sentiment by directing that should such a ban be imposed by a state government, its justification should be on 'rational' economic grounds, not on the grounds of wounded religious sensibility. It is important to establish the real reason behind this particular directive principle so that we can focus on the rights and wrongs of it without being diverted into irrelevant discussion of the place of the cow in the wealth of India or the cruelty of abattoirs or the perils of red meat or the merits of vegetarianism. The substantial issues this directive principle raises are these: one, is it legitimate to restrict the rights of others to protect the sensibilities of a religious community, and two, does it become okay to do so when the community constitutes the overwhelming majority of the republic's population? To answer the first question, it is important to ask what the consistent application of this principle would entail. It would mean more prohibitions to start with. There is another directive principle which instructs the Indian state to enforce a ban on the sale and consumption of liquor, prohibition in the historical meaning of that word. Yet, unlike the near total prohibition of cow slaughter, the prohibition on the sale and consumption of alcohol has been durably enforced only in Gujarat. Tamil Nadu was a dry state for many years but is not now and Andhra Pradesh, having courted populist feeling by imposing prohibition, has now backtracked. If a Muslim political party or a fundamentalist Islamic organization demanded prohibition on the ground that the Constitution mandates it, as does Islam, what answer would the Indian state give them? Alcohol is bad for you, women suffer terribly at the hands of alcoholic husbands (in states like Andhra, women have historically favoured prohibition), Islam, Gandhi and the Constitution are against it. There's no argument that you can make for banning cow slaughter that you can't make for prohibition. To test this principle further let's look at smoking in the context of bans. When J.S. Bhindranwale was alive and the writ of militants ran in towns like Amritsar and Patiala, newspapers reported that cigarette vendors and cigarette smokers were being terrorized into submission. A new Sikh puritanism was enforcing no-smoking zones upon Punjab's citizens. Newspaper readers were indignant. But seen in the light of our principle, smoking is a better candidate for the directive principle treatment than either cow slaughter or prohibition. It is anti-social in that non-smokers are forced into breathing in smoke and we know now that passive or secondary smoking is dangerous. It deeply offends Sikh sensibilities and given the fact that non-smokers involuntarily inhale the smoke around them, Sikhs are everywhere provoked by that which is anathema to them and their faith. Yet we all know that a generalized ban on tobacco would create a storm of protest if it were imposed to protect Sikh sensibilities. Interestingly, there have been restrictions placed on smoking by the Indian state. Smoking is forbidden in nearly all public buildings and public transport and in some cases, even in public parks like the Lodhi Gardens in Delhi. The prohibition is, in the main, respected. It is respected because smoking has been shown to be a global health hazard and the Indian state is seen to be acting out of concern for the wellbeing of its entire population and not the sensibilities of a fraction of it. Secondly, the restrictions on smoking are successful because they are restrictions, not a total ban. Smoking is controlled by designating no-smoking areas, health warnings, public education and punitive taxation. The act isn't criminalized or driven underground as has happened in Gujarat with drinking. There is no significant black-marketing of cigarettes and no tobacco mafia. Cow slaughter, on the other hand, has been criminalized. When it occurs, it occurs in a hole-in-corner way. Even abattoirs in states where it is legal, like West Bengal, are often illegally supplied with cattle from other states because not only is slaughter forbidden in most states of the Indian Union, it is also illegal to transport cattle from these states to other states. This law, solely designed to thwart the trade in beef cattle, does nothing of the kind. It becomes a bludgeon in the hands of a corrupt police force that uses it to wring gratuities out of the beef trade. In response to the PETA campaign a defensive Bharatiya Janata Party government declared that it would monitor more stringently the illegal transport of cattle. For the BJP this is a win-win situation: the party pleases its home constituency by going after butchers and beef traders who aren't generally called Agrawal, Singh and Sharma, and the sangh parivar, for once, is seen to be on the same wavelength as the international community of the politically correct. We have seen this before, this twinning of humane causes and human prejudice. The pioneer in this field is that mega-starlet Brigitte Bardot who hates Arabs and loves animals and has found the perfect platform for both passions by leading a campaign to protect French cows from the ministrations of halal butchers. In India this double act will play even better to a larger, more receptive audience given the Hindu attachment to cows and constitutional sanction of the directive principles. It's clear that the ban on cow slaughter cannot be justified by an appeal to religious sensibility simply because there are several different religious sensibilities which aren't given the same consideration when it comes to their taboos and anathemas. What about the second justification, the brazen assertion that India is a Hindu country and that this overwhelming majority has a right to have its sensibilities deferred to by those who may not share its feelings? This is a bad argument simply because it is a non-constitutional one. Nowhere in the Constitution is there any warrant for treating a community as preeminent or its preferences as overriding. Could concerned Hindus argue that the cow is a mother for Hindus and her murder therefore is matricide? Or that the cow is a goddess and therefore her (or his) slaughter pains Hindus in a way that cannot be compared to the Muslim distaste for drinking or the Sikh rejection of smoking. If a Hindu was to argue this, what answer would he have to Catholics who oppose abortion because they believe it is murder. By what reckoning do Hindus rank killing adult bovines as more offensive than killing foetuses in the womb? What kind of society is it where killing human foetuses is an undebated, taken-for-granted social good subsidized by the state, while killing cows is an evil that needs to be combated by the directive principles of the Indian Constitution and prevented at enormous expense by the police. The Indian state allows the destruction of human foetuses. It even subsidizes it. It allows foreign agencies like Marie Stopes to set up shop to perform abortions. Abortions are advertised in every street corner by doctors, qualified ones and quacks, and there is no controversy, outrage or provocation. There is a real issue at stake here, the question whether destroying the foetus means taking human life. Catholics believe it does and as a result oppose the legalization of abortion. I believe it doesn't and support the Indian government's position. Civil society accepts state policy in the matter of abortion because it is seen to be in the interest of women generally. If, for religious reasons, the government was to take the opposite view, it would be properly criticized for letting religion muddy its thinking. There are Catholic states like Ireland that restrict abortion and there too, liberal and secular opinion has insisted that the state not intervene and that the matter be left to individual conscience. By the same argument the slaughter, sale and consumption of beef should be determined by individual choice not government prohibition.