India Shining with Hindu Diet. Cow urine and dung for caste hindus, Human shit and piss for dalits

'Holy' cow and 'unholy' dalit
The bovine becomes divine, the cow becomes 'mother', the untouchables
get dehumanised. .

by Siriyavan Anand

There are some protagonists of Hinduism who say that Hinduism is a
very adaptable religion, that it can adjust itself to everything and
absorb anything. I do not think many people would regard such a
capacity in a religion as a virtue to be proud of, just as no one
would think highly of a child because it has developed the capacity to
eat dung, and digest it. But that is another matter. It is quite
true that Hinduism can adjust itself... can absorb many things. The
beef-eating Hinduism (or strictly speaking Brahminism which is the
proper name of Hinduism in its earlier stage) absorbed the
non-violence theory of Buddhism and became a religion of
vegetarianism. But there is one thing which Hinduism has never been
able to do – namely to adjust itself to absorb the Untouchables or to
remove the bar of Untouchability.
– BR Ambedkar


The holy mother.
The dalits account for 165 million of India's one billion-plus
human population. The population of cows is pegged at 206 million.
There are more cows than dalits in India. The cows, therefore, have
more rights than dalits. For instance, you can kill dalits before
thousands of witnesses and get away with it. But the imagined murder
of a cow will not be suffered. The state promotes the drinking of cow
urine and dung, while dalits are forced to eat the shit and piss of
caste Hindus.

Ambedkar was, perhaps, ironically, aware of the literalness of his
metaphor. Hindus have proved that they can not only eat dung and piss
but digest it too. However, while he was right about what brahminic
Hinduism could not ever absorb, what he perhaps did not reckon with
was that latter-day dalits would be forced to eat the shit and piss of
caste Hindus. In Untouchables or The Children of India's Ghetto,
published posthumously like many of his other works, Ambedkar devotes
two sections to highlight the practice of untouchability in his time
through newspaper sources from the 1920s and 1930s. Close to 50
reports, culled from a variety of sources, from The Times of India to
Hindi publications such as Jivan, Milap and Pratap, are cited in an
effort to convince the reader that various forms of untouchability
were indeed in practice. However, not one of these mentions that the
dalit-untouchables were forced to consume human excreta. Not one talks
about dalits being lynched by a Hindu mob for skinning a cow.

Brahminic Hinduism has always yoked together practices that are at
such odds with each other that the meaning of one is to be found in
the meaninglessness of the other. While it is the brahmin who
ritualistically excludes himself from the rest of the caste heap and
indulgently renders himself untouchable, it is the dalit – whose touch
of labour informs perhaps everything that is consumed and used by
society – who is condemned to be untouchable. The brahmin, to protect
his untouchableness, has to render others untouchable. Such a play of
contradictions that binds the brahminical social order is as
historical as it is contemporary. In such a binary, the ridiculous and
the unimaginable jostle with each other; the claim to superiority and
merit of the one depends on the making inferior of the other. The
ridiculous easily invites sarcasm, even critique by
rational-scientific voices that unwittingly participate in the
ridiculous, but the unimaginable defies words, language – it demands
outrage but forces aphasia.

Demonstrative of this dichotomy, we see in New Delhi, India's human
resource development minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, proudly asserting
the legitimacy invested upon the use of cow's urine for therapeutic
purposes by the United States patent authorities, while in
Thinniam, an obscure village in Lalgudi taluq, Tiruchirapalli
district, Tamil Nadu, two dalits are forced to eat dried human shit.
The state and the brahminical social order play equally proactive
roles in both cases – promoting cow urine drinking among caste Hindus,
and in forcing human shit and piss down dalit throats. The bizarre
patenting of cow-urine therapy elicited three kinds of reactions:
sniggers from the 'secularists' who were amused, at best; a sense of
pride from a mostly-Hindutvaised brahmin-dominated media fraternity,
among whom there could be several members who practice cow-urine
therapy; and sheer indifference. How-ever, Thinniam went unnoticed,
uncommented upon.

On 21 May this year, a caste-Hindu thevar family in Thinniam branded
two dalits, Murugesan and Ramasamy, with hot iron rods and forced them
to feed dried human excreta to each other. After local activists of
the Dalit Panthers Movement heard about the incident on 30 May, they
informed a human rights activist-lawyer and sometime in mid-June a
press conference was organised where the dalits presented their
testimonies. The mainstream media in India, which has almost no dalit
members, ignored it.

About a month and a half later, the media splashed the news that the
United States Patent and Trade Office had granted Patent No 6410059 to
an "Indian innovation which has proved that cow's urine can make
antibiotics, anti-fungal agents and also anti-cancer drugs more
effective" (The Hindu 4 July 2002). The product, cow-urine distillate
(CUD), was the result of a joint enterprise by the centrally funded
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad's Go-Vigyan Anusandhan Kendra (cow science research
centre) in Nagpur. Seems Murli Manohar Joshi, union minister for
science and technology as well, notorious for introducing 'vedic
astrology' and reviving Sanskrit courses in universities, had asked
the Centre for Science and Industrial Research in 1999 to investigate
the chemical properties of cow's urine. According to The Indian
Express (4 July 2002), 10 lakh rupees were spent over three years by
the Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants at Lucknow to
establish that "certain compounds in cow urine, when used in
combination with certain antibiotics like the commonly used
anti-tuberculosis drug rifampicin, can help kill more bacteria than a
single application of the antibiotic".

In Tamil Nadu, the Thinniam incident did not make any impression on
the government, media, civil society or the mainstream intelligentsia.
Most newspapers and television channels did not report it and those
that did, like The Hindu, ran shy of seeming scatological and referred
to it as simply "a heinous incident". This neglect led to another
Thinniam. On 7 September, Sankan, a dalit, was drinking tea with a
friend at a shop in Goundampatti, Nilakottai taluq, Dindigul district
when he was attacked by six caste Hindus. He was verbally abused and
beaten up, after which an off-duty constable urinated in his mouth.
Sankan had earned the wrath of the caste Hindu gounder community
because he had aggressively pursued his right to a piece of land of
which he had been cheated. Today in the village, even the dalits
appear angry with Sankan because the caste Hindus are threatening the
entire community with social boycott. Peace in a village can be
maintained as long as the dalits accept oppression and learn to digest
urine.

The profanity of the sacred
Before 'discovering' the medicinal values of cow-urine and dung, the
brahmins, during the vedic and immediate post-vedic period, ate the
meat of all kinds of animals (see Indian Food by KT Achaya, 1998). As
evident from brahminic texts such as the Satpathatha Brahmana and the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, beef was in fact a favourite food in vedic
times.

Following the powerful discourse of spiritual democracy that Buddhism
unleashed, brahmins were forced to give up beef and their cults of
animal sacrifice. As the dalit-bahujan writer, Kancha Ilaiah, points
out in God as Political Philosopher, "Though the use of animal power
had been discovered, the killing of animals in the yajnas prevented
their practical implementation". With the coming to power of the
Buddhist king Asoka in the third century BCE, whose edicts proscribed
the killing of animals for sacrifice (however, not necessarily for
food), the brahmins not only gave up beef but slowly turned vegetarian
and remained so in a post-Buddhist society; in a reversal, those who
continued to, and were forced to, consume beef, specifically the meat
of the dead cow – not in a grand sacrificial manner, but as ordinary
food – were labelled untouchables. They became the 'broken people',
literally "dalit", falling outside the pale of the fourfold varna
system to which all caste Hindus belong.

According to this theory of the origin of untouchability that Ambedkar
formulates, the broken people were the pre-untouchables of the
'primitive society'. To paraphrase him: During the frequent wars
between the 'settled tribesmen' and the 'nomadic tribes', those who
were separated from their communities came to constitute the 'broken
men'; these were then captured and used by the agriculture-bound
settled community to protect the villages from the invading nomads.
Though there was no ritual untouchability imposed on the broken
people, they were to live segregated from the main village. It was a
time where there was no taboo on cow's meat and it was consumed by
all. After the brahmins made the cow a sacred animal and made
beef-eating a sacrilege, the broken people continued to consume beef.
The broken people were not to own any wealth, land or cattle. They
could not kill a cow for its meat because they did not own any. But
why were they allowed to eat beef when the brahmins and non-brahmins
had given it up? Because eating the dead cow's meat was not a crime;
killing a cow was. They could also not imitate the savarnas in giving
up beef-eating, because they "could not afford it. The flesh of the
dead cow was their principal sustenance. Without it they would starve.
In the second place, carrying the dead cow had become an obligation
though originally it was a privilege. As they could not escape
carrying the dead cow they did not mind using the flesh as food in the
manner in which they were doing previously". (Ambedkar, Untouchables:
Who They Were and Why They Became Untouchables, Volume 7 of Writings
and Speeches, 1990)

Having given up the most edible and nutritious part of the cow, and
forcing the outcastes to consume the same, the brahminic caste Hindus
began sacralising the cow, specifically the humped zebu breed found in
the Subcontinent, which finds mention in the Rig veda and is common on
Indus Valley Civilisation seals. The black buffalo was not endowed
with any such sanctity in spite of its more nutritive milk. They also
sacralised and consumed every product and by-product of the cow –
milk, ghee, curd, dung and urine – substitutions for the real thing,
beef. They mixed these five ingredients to make panchgavya, assigned
it therapeutic value, and ascribed a place for it in the
purity-pollution binary. Hence the Manusmriti, a post-Buddhist text
dated around the second century CE, ordains that "a twice-born man so
deluded that he has drunk liquor should drink boiling-hot cow's urine,
water, milk, clarified butter, or liquid cow dung until he
dies"(chapter 11, verses 91-92). Another verse decrees: to make up for
the crime of "stealing raw or uncooked food, a carriage, a bed, the
cleansing is swallowing the five cow-products" (Chapter 11, verse 166,
from the translation by Wendy Doniger, Penguin, 1991). Several Hindu
temples, such as the one at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, serve
panchgavya and cow's urine as prasadam (divine offering) for a price.
Cow's urine has since remained 'sacred' and Murli Manohar Joshi, while
announcing the patent achievement, recalled with pride the
contemporaneity of it: "When I was young and went to Chennai on an
educational tour, I saw people drinking cow's urine straight from the
source. Everybody thought it was dirty. Today, I realise that all
traditional practices from ancient Indian medicine have a strong
scientific base" (The Indian Express, 4 July 2002). And today, that a
patent on cow-urine therapy is being bestowed by the largest consumer
of beef in the world does
not bother the rightwing Hindu fundamentalist Sangh Parivar or Joshi.

The brahmins and brahminic Hindus (dwijas – twice born) have been
consuming cow's urine and other waste for centuries and continue to do
so. The bovine becomes divine – Kamadhenu, gau-maata (the cow as the
mother) – but the dalit-untouchables are rendered subhuman. Ambedkar
says, "In Manu, there is also a provision for getting rid of
defilement by transmission – namely by touching the cow or looking at
the sun after sipping water". Meaning, a dwija, defiled by the sight
or touch of a dalit-untouchable, has simply to touch a cow to be
cleansed. The pollution caused by touching the wrong human being can
be nullified by touching the right animal. Hindus believe that some
330 million gods and goddesses reside in the bowels of the cow. Yet,
when a cow dies, caste Hindus would stay away. Touching the dead cow
and burying it are jobs assigned to the dalit-untouchables.

And yet, today we witness in India an episode that against this
backdrop defies explanation. In Dulina, Jhajjar district, Haryana, two
hours from the capital, New Delhi, five dalits were lynched by a mob
on 15 October. The dalits were reportedly sighted skinning a cow, but
the local Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) rumour mill, in collusion with
the police, spread the word that the dalits had slaughtered the cow
(The Indian Express 17-18 October). Within three hours, a mob – of
four to five thousand according to the police – gathered near the
police station where the dalits were sheltered, pulled them out, burnt
two of the them alive and lynched the other three with stones and
sharp implements. At least 50 police personnel, three sub-divisional
magistrates, the deputy superintendent of police of Jhajjar and
Bahadurgarh and the block development officer watched the carnage. It
was the last day of the Dussehra festivities, and the Sangh Parivar of
which the VHP is a member – which has been working overtime to raise
the consciousness of Hindus on issues bovine – found it easy to
mobilise villagers from the surrounding areas to "avenge the killing
of the cow-killers". A post-mortem report of the cow was ordered by
the superintendent of police, Mohammad Akil, and a case filed against
the dead dalits under the Cow Slaughter Act 1960. It was reasoned by
the SP that if the post-mortem proved that the cow was alive before
the dalits skinned it, "it will show how the mob got emotional when
they saw an act like this". The priest of the local temple, Mahendra
Parmanand, was quoted as saying: "If they can kill our mother then
what if we kill our brothers who kill her". The cow, Kamadhenu, is the
mother being referred to. And we need to console ourselves: at least
in death a brahmin priest was referring to the dalits as brothers. The
VHP justified the killings saying, "According to Hindu shastras a
cow's life is very important".

Here is a country where the imagined murder of a cow can cause more
outrage than the death of a human being. Again, the root of such
attitudes lies in ancient brahminic injunctions. After the brahmins
gave up beef-eating, cow-slaughter was made a punishable crime and
equated with the killing of the brahmin, the ultimate crime. According
to the scholar of Hinduism, DR Bhandarkar:

We have got the incontrovertible evidence of inscriptions to show
that early in the 5th century AD killing a cow was looked upon as an
offence of the deepest turpitude, turpitude as deep as that involved
in murdering a Brahman. We have thus a copperplate inscription dated
465 AD and referring itself to the reign of Skandagupta of the
Imperial Gupta dynasty. It registers a grant and ends with a verse
saying: 'Whosoever will transgress this grant that has been assigned
(shall become as guilty as) the slayer of a cow, the slayer of a
spiritual preceptor (or) the slayer of a Brahman'… A still earlier
record [412 AD] placing go-hatya [cow-slaughter] on the same footing
as brahma-hatya [brahmin-killing] is that of Chandragupta II,
grandfather of Skandagupta… (Some Aspects of Ancient Indian Culture
1940, quoted in Ambedkar 1948).

Commenting on Bhandarkar, Ambedkar notes: "The law made by the Gupta
emperors was intended to prevent those who killed cows. It did not
apply to the Broken Men. For they did not kill the cow. They ate only
the dead cow". Ambedkar, probably, did not reckon with how the law
against cow killing could become an excuse to lynch dalits. He also
perhaps did not know that one day cow-urine therapy would make its way
to the US patent office, that India would have a law that prohibits
cow-slaughter (Cow Slaughter Act 1960), and dalits would be lynched
for dealing with the hide of a dead cow, or that dalits would be
forced to eat shit and piss. What is unfolding against the dalits in
India is something that even the Gupta period, 'the golden age of
Hinduism', would not have witnessed or justified.


MILLI GAZETTE
Jhajjar: A father's photo of a dead son.
The Thinniam 'rebellion'
In Thinniam, what was Murugesan and Ramasamy's crime? They beat the
thappu – a traditional leather drum used by dalits – and went about
the village announcing that Rajalakshmi Subramani and her husband
Subramani had cheated their friend Karuppiah of 2000 rupees. About two
and a half years ago, Karuppiah had paid 5000 rupees to Rajalakshmi
who was then the president of the village panchayat (citizens council)
– though her husband Subramani, a former schoolteacher, was the de
facto president – for a house under a government scheme for his
sister. Karuppiah's sister was never allowed to occupy the house, and
despite repeated requests, neither was the house allotted nor the
money refunded. Eventually, Subramani returned 3000 rupees but
Karuppiah insisted on the whole sum. When Subramani refused to pay up,
Karuppiah decided to tell everyone in the village how he had been
cheated.

Murugesan and Ramasamy accompanied Karuppiah as he went around the
village with his thappu. Inebriated, and thus made bold, they declared
that they would no longer render their traditional caste-based service
as vettiyans (a dalit sub-community involved in burial ground work) to
the caste Hindus if they did not get the money back from Subramani. In
the villagers' words, "They got drunk and made some noises they would
otherwise not make".

Learning of this, Subramani summoned Karuppiah the next morning on 20
May. The entire family beat up Karuppiah, who then quietly returned
home and left the village the same night. He rarely spends time in
Thinniam these days.

The following day, a sober and terrified Murugesan and Ramasamy went
to Subramani's house to apologise. There, obscenities were hurled at
them using their caste name – parayar (dalit) bastards – and Murugesan
was kicked. If the temporary lapse of a drink or two could make them
go around the village speaking disrespectfully of the thevars,
Subramani and Rajalakshmi had methods that would make them acknowledge
the realities that are permanent. Rajalakshmi handed a hot iron rod to
her husband Subramani, who branded Murugesan on his left hand, above
his elbow, on his neck in three places and below the left ear in two
places. Ramasamy was branded above his left knee and on his left
wrist. Then Subramani gave them a thappu and ordered them to go around
the village, this time to announce that what they had tom-tommed was
not true. After making a round of the village, they returned to
Subramani's house where they found dried human excreta in a winnow.
Subramani reasoned that the parayans would come to their senses only
if they ate shit. When they protested, Subramani threatened to brand
them again. Murugesan put the dried shit into Ramasamy's mouth and
Ramasamy fed it to Murugesan. The hands that beat the drum of
rebellion were made to feed shit to the mouths that articulated
protest. Subramani then accused them of damaging the thappu and made
them pay 50 rupees each as compensation.

Many weeks later, the district collector offered the victims 6650
rupees and some rice and kerosene as a 'rehabilitative measure'. The
Lalgudi police went through the routine of filing weak cases under the
Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Scheduled Castes Scheduled Tribes
Prevention of Atrocities Act 1989, known commonly as the Dalit Act. On
Karuppiah's complaint, the police registered cases against six caste
Hindus under sections 341 ('causing hurt voluntarily'), 323 ('wrongful
restraint'), 355 of IPC ('intent to dishonour a person') and 3(1)(x)
of the Dalit Act. The IPC sections can lead to a simple imprisonment
of up to two years and a fine. Section 3(1)(x) of the Dalit Act is a
favourite with the police according to dalit activists and lawyers.
Irrespective of the crime – rape, burning down a dalit house,
stripping and parading a dalit naked or abusing a dalit in public –
the police tends to book everything under 3(1)(x) that deals with
"intentional insult or intimidation with intent to humiliate him in
any place in full view of the public". Under this section, punishment
is minimal and a compensation of 25,000 rupees is to be provided on
conviction, which rarely happens.

The police did add charges under Section 3(1)(i) of the Dalit Act and
sections 324 and 325 of the IPC when Murugesan and Ramasamy, who were
forced to eat human shit, filed a separate complaint. As per Section
3(1)(i), "it is punishable if anyone forces a member of the SC
[scheduled castes] or the ST [scheduled tribes] to drink or eat any
inedible or obnoxious substance". If it can be proved in a court of
law that a dalit was indeed forced to eat an obnoxious substance, the
state pays him or her 25,000 rupees or more "depending on the nature
of the gravity of the offence". Clearly, the Dalit Act, formulated in
1989, has this clause because such practices were prevalent in India.
The law in itself was an acknowledgement of, and a response to, an
existing, established reality.

The incidents of Thinniam and Nilakottai are of course not
unprecedented. In 2001, at Prichatur, 75 km from Tirupati in Andhra
Pradesh, caste-Hindu men paraded a dalit youth, Murugesh, in a
procession and forced him to drink his own urine for "the crime of
relieving himself in the presence of the upper castes" (Deccan
Chronicle 30 August 2001). Also in 2001, caste Hindu landlords from
Chanaiyan-bandh village in West Champaran, Bihar, tied Dasai Manjhi, a
dalit, to a pole, shaved his head and urinated in his mouth. But it
was the dalit who landed in jail "for felling the timber of his
landlord" (The Times of India 11 July 2001). Lalit Yadav, a minister
in the Bihar state government, held a truck driver Deenanath Baitha
and cleaner Karoo Ram, dalits both, captive for over a month in
June-July 2000. The minister and his cousin removed the fingernails of
the driver and made him drink urine. Lalit Yadav was dropped from the
ministry but remains a free man
today. Again in Bihar, in September 2000, Saraswati Devi, a dalit
woman was paraded naked on charges of witchcraft in Pakri-Pakohi,
Karja block, Muzaffarpur district. A dozen persons tortured her and
forced her to swallow human excreta. After Devi lodged a complaint,
police visited the village but failed to 'nab' the accused.

The spirit of rebellion
The forced consumption of dried shit in Thinniam was preceded by a
moment of 'rebellion' on the part of three dalits. Some commentators
in Tamil Nadu have sought to locate the expression of such protest in
the consumption of alcohol. According to them, it was alcohol that
enabled the dalits to transgress the social boundaries that they knew
would be impossible to break otherwise. It appears that to speak out
against oppression and injustice, Karuppiah, Murugesan and Ramaswamy
could not be sober. Such a line of argument seeks social-therapeutic
values in alcohol.

Murugesan and Ramasamy went to apologise to the thevars, but the
message that the thevars sent is that even the excuse of a drink
cannot justify resistance. If dalit transgression is seen as arising
from 'drunken behaviour' in the night, and is to be forgiven by the
oppressor the next day when the dalits go to seek pardon, the
assumption informing the episode is that a meaningful rebellion cannot
be sustained. A reading that presumes that dalit protest cannot be
articulated when the dalits are sober undermines both the potential of
dalit agency and the possibilities of any long-term liberation agenda
since ventilation of a grievance when drunk need not be seen as
resistance. This is not to make a moral argument against drinking, or
in this case dalits drinking; if the gandhian position against alcohol
is loaded with brahminic morality, so is an argument that seeks to
essentialise a drinking culture with dalit lifestyle.

There are other problems with reading too much into the aspect of
alcohol-stimulation. In India, when drains filled with human excreta
and other wastes get clogged, sanitation workers are required to enter
them bodily. Invariably, these workers belong to a particular local
community of dalits; in Tamil Nadu, it is the arundhatiyars or
sakkiliyars. Exposed to noxious waste clad in nothing but a komanam, a
loincloth, for long stretches of time, it is not surprising that the
influence of alcohol becomes necessary for the municipality worker.
The drinking in the arundhatiyar's case only enables him to continue
to do his work; alcohol does not give him rebellious ideas. The same
is true for dalits employed in the mortuaries of government hospitals.

Brahminising the shudra
The brahmins might have been the progenitors of the caste ideology and
the group that invested sacrality on cow dung, urine etc but today
this ideology has percolated to the dalit. It is a fact that the
'most-backward' shudras (members of the lowest tier of the four-tier
Hindu varna system) such as vanniars or thevars, and even the dalits,
in a Tamil Nadu village have imbibed the practice of cleansing one's
home using gomayam (cow urine) after a death or ahead of a religious
ceremony. It is on this 'common sense' that the Hindutva lobby cashes
in while seeking a patent.

Such brahminisation of the shudras has a telling effect on the dalits.
Much of the physical violence on dalits in rural India is perpetrated
by the shudra castes. Though this does not absolve the brahmin of a
role in such violence – the brahmin historically has never had to get
physical to defend his rights or others' rights, but has had the
privilege of letting others slug it out and watching the fun from a
safe distance – we need to be alive to how it is on the basis of
assumed caste superiority that the thevar in Thinniam or the gounder
in Nilakottai makes a dalit eat shit or drink piss. The shudra-thevar
does not act in the name of Hinduism or as a Hindu; he acts as a
thevar, or more specifically invoking his subcaste identity as a
piramalai kallar. It is the 'social nausea' – to use Ambedkar's phrase
– of the dalit that makes the shudra react with such intolerance to
any dalit assertion. This nausea is expressed in the form of caste.

While the mainstream media and the 'secularists' run shy of such
instances of caste-based aggressions, they find it much easier to
focus on episodes of violence where the obvious faces of Hindutva –
Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal,
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Shiv Sena, Bharatiya Janata Party –
are involved. These outfits are seen as representatives of a militant
form of pan-Indian Hinduism from which the secular brigade – that
otherwise indulges in caste – seeks to distance itself, not realising
its own role in creating and sustaining these social monsters. In
Thinniam, where no such Hindutva outfit was involved, and where
Subramani and his family had no significant affiliation to any
political party, the aggression was simply a result of a
thevar-supremacism. Subramani and his family do not identify
themselves as 'Hindu' nor do they act in the name of 'Hinduism'. If
they did, the RSS-type Hindus would distance themselves from such
'caste Hinduism' more forcefully than the secularist Hindus would. For
instance, the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch chief, S Gurumurthy, viewed the
VHP-Narendra Modi actions in Gujarat as un-Hindu and even 'Islamic'.
In his perverse understanding of the carnage in Gujarat, 'Hinduism is
getting Islamised' (Outlook 23 September 2002).

Ezhavas in Kerala, gounders in Tamil Nadu or jats in Haryana do not
victimise dalits to defend 'Hinduism' as much as they do to secure
their caste supremacy. And when the dalits of Meenakshipuram (in
Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu) famously embraced Islam in 1981,
they did it not to escape Hinduism, to which they anyway did not
belong, but to liberate themselves from the oppression of the thevars.
The Hindutva groups descended on the area, and on Tamil Nadu in
general, only after the Meenakshipuram conversion. The assertion of
caste supremacy by the shudra groups is today being increasingly
expressed through Hindutva outlets like the VHP and Bajrang Dal – as
seen from the experience that the targets of Hindutva are invariably
the dalits and Muslims. In fact, Hindutva, as we have seen it since
the 1990s, is basically an organised, pan-Indian expression of
casteism to which even 'Dravidian' parties like the DMK and shudra
outfits like the Telugu Desam Party lend legitimacy. A casteism backed
by brahmins and other upper castes but acted out by the shudras.

Research and Analysis Wing
If the harassment of dalits has a pattern, so does the effort to
formalise the practice of caste Hindus drinking cow-urine and dung.
There was much groundwork done before Joshi could make his
announcement about the patent. Already 200 cow urine therapy centres
have been established in 18 Indian states, most of them in Gujarat and
Madhya Pradesh. The target is 10,000 such centres. The Cow Urine
Therapy and Research Institute set up in Indore claims that cow's
urine can cure diabetes, blood pressure, acidity, asthma, psoriasis,
eczema, AIDS, piles, prostate problems, arthritis and migraine. This
gau-mutra (cow urine) distillate is already being sold across the
counter as 'Kamadhenu Ark'. There is even a 'Gaumutra Hospital' in
Lucknow.

The Gujarat government has in place a 'Gau Seva Ayog' that hopes to
improve cow reverence and promote the benefits of its various
excretions. Last year, it talked about a "cow dung and urine
revolution".

Gujarat truly is a laboratory for Hindutva. According to a news
report, cow urine is already being sold in 200 outlets in Indore. In
Jaipur, Rajasthan, the rightwing Hindu fundamentalist RSS runs the Gau
Seva Sangh, which claims to have at hand the one element that will
guarantee protection against the horrors of nuclear radiation: cow
dung. Cover the roof of your house or better still, lather yourself
with cow dung as a protective shield. At the Krishi Expo 2002, an
agricultural fair held in June in New Delhi, there was a stall where
every product – tea, toothpaste, hair oil, porridge, tonics,
fertilisers, insecticides, 'beauty' soap, shampoo, incense sticks –
was manufactured from panchgavya. The producer was the Kanpur Gaushala
Society.

In December 2000, a 'National Workshop on Scientific Dimensions of
Gauseva' was held in Indore. According to the official report on the
seminar, "Cow was given the status of mother and worshipped and
honoured by celebrating festivals and religious functions. The present
society is based on science. Now people need information and data
based on research. Most of the tested practices of cow therapy,
Panchgavya, Agnihotra and milk miracles are rejected as myth or
mythological adventures". It concludes, "It is therefore necessary to
blend science, spiritually [sic] and wisdom". Such a blending has
resulted in the patent for CUD.

More recently, the National Commission for Cattle, constituted in
September 2001 when Jayendra Saraswati of the Kanchi Sankara Math
threatened a fast unto death over the "neglect of the country's cow
population", in its report running into 1500 pages and four volumes,
suggested the constitution of a Central Rapid Protection Force to
control cow slaughter; the amendment of the Prevention of Terrorism
Act (POTA) to detain gangs who smuggle cows; the prohibition of
cross-breeding with imported cattle; demanded the scrapping of the
subsidy on tractors and mechanical appliances for agriculture and
encouraging instead the use of bullocks, the constitution of a
permanent National Development Commission on Cows, and the
introduction of the "panchgavya therapy" (Milli Gazette 15 August
2002).

Almost in anticipation of the NCC's recommendations, the patent for
CUD and other related developments, the RSS launched a 'Rashtriya
Jagran Abhiyan' in 2001 to awaken 'national consciousness'. One of the
pamphlets that was issued for the exercise was The Protection of Cow
Clan, which contained these ideas: ghee made from cow's milk saves the
environment from atomic radiation; the sound of a cow's lowing
automatically cures many mental disabilities and diseases; cow's urine
contains copper which turns to gold on entering the human body; cow
dung and urine are the best cures for stomach diseases, heart
diseases, kidney ailments and tuberculosis; the urine of a virgin cow
is the best; foreign cows lack the properties which Indian cows have;
the Hindu gotra system applies to the cow-clan too.

It is not as if only the Sangh Parivar is a proponent of the sacred
and therapeutic values of cow urine and dung. In Upleta, Rajkot
district, Gujarat, 700 woman workers of the Congress protested the
Bharatiya Janata Party's 'Gaurav Yatra' (tour of pride) by 'cleansing'
the 1.5-km stretch traversed by the BJP chief minister Narendra Modi's
chariot with cow urine.

Jhajjar was merely the culmination of all these events in the
'cow-belt', as the plains of north India are somewhat derisively
called.

For every Saraswati Devi who is branded a witch and forced to
consume shit, there is an Ulpeta-like celebration of the 'properties'
of the cow's excreta. India is equally the land where a prime minister
(Morarji Desai) boasted of drinking eight ounces of his own urine
every morning and where Sankan of Nilakottai is forced to drink the
urine of caste Hindus for asking for a piece of a land that he has a
right to. A land where state-sponsored consumption of cow urine and
dung complements the state's indifference to force-feeding of dalits
with shit and piss.

Responding to the Thinniam incident, Monica Vincent, a Chennai-based
lawyer, recalls Nelson Mandela's words in Long Walk to Freedom, "At a
certain point, one can only fight fire with fire." But how does one
react to shit like this? In the context of legalised and
state-sponsored racism – apartheid in South Africa – Mandela talked of
fighting fire with fire; but can the dalits of India fight shit with
shit?

http://www.himalmag.com/2002/november/perspective_2.htm