The right wing loves the word, 'pseudo'. A volatile devotion to authenticity evidently leads to an intense loathing for what Holden Caulfield called 'phoneyness'. The right wing expresses this loathing without any of Caulfield's sweet teenage discomfiture. And it's been years since it came up with the ingenious neologism that it continues to use with great frequency - 'pseudo-secular'. The word has some purchase because the accusation it contains is partly true - that is, the secular lot in our country isn't equitably secular. It abhors religious extremism when it occurs in Hindus; on the other hand, it either ignores or attempts to come to terms with and occasionally even view sympathetically the contexts of extremism in Islam. This secular leaning to one side more than the other leaves it vulnerable, but it's maybe unavoidable in a context that's inequitable itself - just as reservation quotas are problematic, but difficult to avoid in the face of millennial discrimination.

The word 'pseudo' has been appropriated from the Right more recently by commentators and politicians who occupy the ideological centre: so, Pavan K. Varma not long ago charged the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and their cohorts with 'pseudo-nationalism'. It's an easy but effective transposition, and it works quite well when you use it, because the Right's nationalism is as discriminatory and conniving - and far more violent - as the Left's (the Left being the catch-all term used by the Right for anyone who isn't right-wing) secularism is supposed to be; pseudo-nationalism stares us in the face everywhere at the moment.

In the meantime, a further pseudo-activity mutilates our nation. We could call it pseudo-animal rights. Having said that, one should add that the sniffing out of phoneyness is an act now fraught with challenges, given we live in the age of Trump, who performs a brutal authenticity for his constituency. The parameters of performance - whose proscenium for Trump is social media, mainly Twitter - give him the licence to manufacture his own anti-phoney vocabulary - a million miles away from Holden Caulfield's - to do, say, with 'fake news'. So - keeping in mind the associations that suddenly swarm today around 'fakeness' - we must be cautious about poaching this otherwise useful word, 'pseudo', from the right-wing. But how to classify gau raksha except as pseudo-animal rights?

Right-wing animal activism has introduced curious lexical changes to our political landscape. The word gau rakshak is a case in point. As we know, the term can be translated as 'protector of the cow', or, if the syntax of the original were to be maintained, 'cow protector'. But, as with any word that doubles as both adjective and noun - as with gau here - there's an element of confusion. Could gau rakshak also be a protector who's a cow, given the sequence of the two words; just as, for example, mahila chikitshak means 'woman doctor'? It's a grammatical ambiguity. And we need to attend to the possible meanings generated by a word at any given historical moment. The confusion occurs whenever an adjective has an equally valid life as a noun. For instance, pagal in Hindi is at once an adjective (meaning 'mad') and a noun ('madman'). The statement, Pagal admi hai, can mean, if pagal is taken to be an adjective, 'He's a madman'. But if the pagal in the sentence is a noun, the words could - should - be interpreted as, 'A mad person is a human being'.

Ambiguity creeps into another key contemporary term of pseudo animal-activism (an English one this time), 'cow vigilante'. This is an unprecedented neologism related to an unprecedented vocation, one involving somebody looking out for the well-being of cows. But, grammatically, it could also refer to a cow that's a vigilante. What or whom would a vigilante cow (the ambiguity is cleared up marginally if we use vigilante as an adjective) be looking out for? The welfare of other cows; or dogs; or goats; or human beings? There are any number of endangered beings at any point of time in a difficult, congested milieu. I've noted that cows look as concerned about their environment as anybody else. So it's plausible that a cow vigilante, or vigilante cow, a gau that's a rakshak, a rakshak who's a gau, might exist, and contribute something to society. At the same time, it's undeniable that these lexical shifts have brought an Animal Farm-like slipperiness to our political discourse. It's in Animal Farm that we first encounter activist animals (who are to be distinguished from animal activists). More than one hegemony is portrayed in Orwell's story; there is mobilization and an attempt at a revolution.

This leads us to the book's celebrated anti-edict: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." If you recall, the principal edict of animal liberation was originally "All animals are equal" before the insidious constitutional modulation upon that statement was perpetrated by a pig (it's the pig, not the cow, that's the vigilante in Animal Farm). Of course, the most equal of all animals is the human being, in that they reserve equality for themselves, and for certain kinds among themselves. Of four-legged creatures today in India, the cow is clearly 'more equal' - even, at times, more equal than the wrong kind of human. But that's only because greater equality has been conferred - enforced - on the cow. How can we know what a cow vigilante, or a vigilante or vigilant cow, might feel about what's happening? Expectedly, they will have the welfare of their own in mind; but they might also desire longevity and happiness for the other species.