Beef Festival' in India Sets Off Outrage

A “beef festival” organized last month by Dalit (or
low-caste) student groups at Osmania University in the south Indian city of
Hyderabad ended up not only provoking the very violence and repression it
sought to draw attention to, but uncovered other pathologies deeply embedded in
Indian social life.

What started out as a debate over the
validity of the cow — to many Indians, the holy cow — as a source of meat was
overwhelmed, on the day, by a conflagration of vehicle-burning and teargas,
and, in the days that followed, by a firestorm of upper-caste outrage,
conspiracy theory, and, most strangely (but revealingly), by sickening
misogyny.

As I wrote in an essay on the subject in January, cow slaughter, and
therefore the consumption of beef, is a practice abhorrent to most Hindus. But
beef is eaten by India’s sizeable Muslim and Christian minorities, and
historically by some of the lower-caste groups within Hinduism’selaborate and often repressive hierarchy of castes, an
ancient social order that has only been partially vanquished over six decades
by the egalitarian Indian Constitution of 1950. Nevertheless, beef-eating
in India has become something done in the shadows. There are laws in many Indian states restricting or banning cow slaughter;
most restaurants and multinational chains (including McDonalds Corp.) don’t serve beef for fear of offending
Hindu customers; and mixed-community spaces, such as office canteens or hostel
messes, don’t serve it either.

This “food fascism” was what
some student groups of Osmania University sought to challenge in having a
festival that served beef on campus to all those who cared to eat it. But this
was like waving a red flag in front of the bulls — the bovine metaphor seems
appropriate — of right-wing student groups dedicated to the cause of
“cultural nationalism,” such as the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi
Parishad, the student wing of the Bhartiya Janata Party, India‘s second-largest political party. The Hindu reported April 16:

The ‘beef festival’ organised
by Dalit students’ organisations in Osmania University campus turned violent on
Sunday evening. Police had to lob teargas shells and resort to lathicharge to
separate rival student groups opposing the festival. […]

Enough steam was built up in
the preceding days of the event with Dalit groups describing it as reclamation
of their cultural rights, while the rival right wing groups distributed
pamphlets condemning cow slaughter. In view of the attacks by Akhil Bharatiya
Vidya Parishad (ABVP) activists during a similar event in EFLU last April, the
festival was planned on a larger scale this time with participation of
intellectuals and professors supporting the demand of inclusion of beef in the
hostel menu.

Sensing trouble ahead of the
D-day, police officials convinced the organisers to order food from outside
instead of preparing it in the campus. Accordingly, beef biryani was brought
from outside and served to the gathering near the NRS (Ambedkar) Hostel at
about 5 p.m. […] After a lull, rival students group began throwing stones and
attacked media vehicles. A private TV channel’s vehicle was totally burnt down,
while another’s was partly damaged, also injuring a technician. But, much to
the relief of the police, the festival organisers wound up the feast to prevent
further trouble.

An alternative interpretation of the
festival was provided by the Organiser (“the oldest and most authentic
weekly of India”), run by the Hindu group the RSS, which saw the event as a deliberate ploy on
the part of Dalits and “Leftists” to inflame the religious sentiments
of Hindus. In an article under the headline “Beef Festival Hosted By Left Communalists To Taunt Hindu
Sentiments Foiled By ABVP,” N Nagaraja Rao wrote:

Dalit students groups of OU
supported by some senior faculty and city-based academics had organised the
festival to celebrate the Dalit food culture, which includes eating beef. […]

Now the debate is, despite
all the disingenuous claims of the organizers of the Beef Festival at Osmania
University, the event was indeed a foolish provocation aimed at caste-baiting.
When the alliance of beef-eaters — Dalits, Muslims and Christians — resorted to
this curious form of protest to advance their demand that the university hostel
serve beef, it was their unstated intention to provoke upper-caste Hindus for
whom the cow is an object of veneration. Thus the Beef Festival organisers did
(sic) was to make a provocative public show of their eating beef and underlying
motive was entirely political. How eating beef publicly leads to Dalit
emancipation and assertion of their rights is a million dollar question? (sic)
[…]

Human society is neither
random nor capricious. The regularities of thought and behaviour called culture
are the principal mechanisms by which we human beings adapt to the world around
us. Practices and beliefs can be rational or irrational, but a society that
fails to adapt to its environment is doomed to extinction.

The implication of the last sentence
about adapting to the environment seemed to be that unless “the alliance
of beef-eaters” adapted to the wider Hindu environment of
beef-eating-as-taboo, Indian civilization would be doomed. Among the
participants at the festival who freely accepted Nagaraja Rao’s charge that the
underlying motive for the festival was “entirely political” was the
Dalit poet and feminist Meena Kandasamy, who explained in an essay called “A Cowed-Down Nation“:

[The organizers of the
beef-eating festival] fought the “food fascism” that kept beef out of the menu
[…] and criticised the imposition of caste-Hindu dietary diktats on Dalits
from within the confines of a seemingly neutral educational institution. When
they rapped “Beef is the secret of my energy” with all the soul of an outlaw
anthem, it sounded like the secret heartbeat of an anti-caste cultural
revolution. […]

There is no point getting
offended if someone enjoys beef in all its juicy glory. Since nobody is being
force-fed, tolerance means digesting the idea that just as cows are meant to be
milked, cows are also meant to be meat. There cannot be a shred of doubt that in a racist nation which advertises vaginal skin-lightening creams,
the large, naive eyes and flawless complexion make the cow an attractive
mother. Men take pride in being mummy’s boys, but it is high time Hindutva
organisations and secular, state-run universities stop being swayed by bovine
sex appeal, step out of their Oedipus complex and remind themselves that cows,
at least the fertile ones, are only mothers of calves.

News of the festival provoked outrage
from supporters of Hindu nationalism on social media. But what was most
revealing about this strain of reaction was its singling out of Kandasamy for
abuse. Although she explained in a Twitter post that the “beef fest motive was
NOT to hurt. it was to assert the right to eat what students wanted to
eat,” what she received in return was a heap of sexually charged invective from upper-caste men.

The comments showed how nationalism,
racism, egotism and misogyny often exist on the same continuum, and that the
same elites that want to control what should be done to the bodies of cows often also want to control — sometimes in the coarsest and
ugliest ways — the bodies of women. One might say that by standing up for the
right of Dalits to eat beef in a public space, Kandasamy was acting less as a
provocateur (as she was accused by many of being) and more as a scapegoat, a
figure on whom a society projects its own sins. What she brought into the open
was the persistence of caste in
India as a source of everyday, even casual, violence, and of gender violence as
a widespread response in situations of caste tension. As the writer Annie Zaidi wrote
in DNA:

What newspaper or television
headlines don’t always say is where that negative incident — violent or not —
comes from. It comes from a society where random acts of oppression and
discrimination go unpunished. It comes from the flesh and bone of the body of
caste.

That, sadly, is the body in
which most Indians remain trapped. Go look at some videos made by community
members at the Video Volunteers website. In one, you see school-kids being
segregated at meal-time. In another, you see a young Gujarati talking of having
to go to the next town for a haircut because he isn’t allowed to enter local
barber-shops. A tap is washed by a little girl because a Dalit woman has just
used it. A Sikh father talks of how his son and pregnant daughter-in-law were
killed because it was an inter-caste wedding. A farm worker is left handicapped
after being attacked with a sickle for drinking water from a pot. This series
of video clips, less than a minute each, is part of a campaign called Article
17. You can view them here.

Perhaps you’ve had your fill
of bad news. But if you don’t look, you deny yourself a full portrait of India.

Meanwhile, the news channel CNN-IBN reported last week that men from right-wing
Hindu groups had conducted a ritual in Hyderabad “to purify the campus of
Osmania University” after its desecration by beef consumption.

Some would say, however, that in
situations like this, the ideal of purity is much more inimical to peaceful
coexistence than the perception, or reality, of pollution.

(Chandrahas Choudhury, a novelist, is the
New Delhi correspondent for the World View blog. The opinions expressed are his
own.)

To contact the author of this blog
post: Chandrahas Choudhury at [email protected]