The Beef Debate Is Not About Rights. It's About Adharma And Rootlessness.

Beef, specifically cow meat, is in the news again. The trailer of Kerala Story 2, a film set to be released next week, has a scene where a Hindu woman is force-fed beef. Its context is love jihad, and the weaponisation of love to engineer religious conversion.

As expected, the Left-liberal ranks issued their condemnation of the film instantly, in the strongest possible ways, even before anyone had a chance to see it. Their tone spanned the spectrum from ire to beef bravado to Hindu bashing. The furore was most intense in Kerala where the sale and consumption of beef is legally permitted, and the charge on social media was led primarily by those of Hindu extraction, who exulted in their love for their favourite dish: Kerala porotta and beef curry.

All limits were crossed when Kerala Tourism welcomed tourists to the state with the tagline: "No beef with anyone. That's our recipe for happiness." This apparently witty play on words became a brahmastra for agitating beef lovers because they interpreted it as tacit support of their stance by the Kerala government. Whether that was what the Pinarayi Vijayan government had in mind, or not, is beside the point because this post ended up becoming a lesson on how to hurt sentiments by trivialising sensitive issues.

The time has, therefore, come to present the beef debate in the right perspective for two reasons. First, so that those who don't eat beef understand the argumentation for its ban; and second, so that those Hindus who support cow slaughter realise the deep folly of their stance. Logic has to trump rhetoric if divides in society are to be healed.

The principal argument in favour of beef is a legalistic one where the fundamental right of an individual to eat what is legal transcends everything else. Unfortunately for the beef brigade, this argument doesn't hold because it rejects a Hindu's right to his or her way of life, central to which is a sacred tenet: a ban on cow slaughter.

This is an important point because, hitherto, the counter-argument has usually been a tendency to weakly imply hypocrisy by asking beef lovers why they ignore another part of the Indian Constitution, the Directive Principles of State Policy, which advocates a nation-wide ban on cow slaughter. Or, to link beef consumption with colon cancer.

The workaround to protests by incensed Hindus has always been the same: to employ individuals with Hindu-sounding names to valiantly profess their love for beef in public, in contemptibly mocking terms. This is done with the specific purpose of generating legitimacy for this presumed fundamental right from within the very community which yearns for a ban on beef.

It is an old ploy dating back to pre-independence days. EMS Namboodiripad became a legend amongst Communist cadres because he did the unthinkable: born a Brahmin, he rejected his traditional identity and spent the rest of his political life trying to destroy 'Brahminical Patriarchy'.

Such pro-beef public posturing is also deeply political since it benefits secular parties, who can now contest Hindu tenets and Hindutva without igniting communal flames. If the main war of words is between Hindus, then sit back, pass the popcorn, and watch the secular votes roll in. Divide and rule.

Unfortunately, such efforts don't pass scrutiny either because they fail the moral test. You have to ask: how much of this public posturing is truly love for beef, how much is self-loathing, how much is hatred for a community, and how much is actually contempt for a particular way of life. And then, there is the moral question: does this bravado benefit society?

The answer is, of course, no. Thus, we see that the beef debate is one of those rare occasions when a legal aspect is negated by a moral one.

But how may the issue be tackled, and society gently nudged in the direction of a ban on cow slaughter? For that, we have to try and understand the types we are dealing with here: Hindus who eat beef.

It is a difficult task because reductionism is counterproductive, non-representative, fails to capture the diversity within the pro-beef demographic and includes family and friends whom we love. That self-contradiction is surreally stark because, included in this group, are a large number of devout, god-fearing, temple-going Hindus who follow their customs, traditions, and rituals religiously, but who also eat beef simply because they like it.

It will be difficult to change their minds because they have no persecution complex, no guilt, and are, therefore, devoid of the paranoid victimhood fears one would normally associate with victims of the minority-majority narrative. Their only mistake, really, is zero application of mind, and zero appreciation of what they are doing to their society by consuming beef. But try telling them that their actions are morally abhorrent, and they will either simply shut the words out or react badly against this unwanted intrusion into their happy lives. Good people don't like being told that they have done something wrong.

But the motivations of the Left-liberals (for want of a better word) are clearer. For them, beef is a symbol of defiance against a whole host of hate objects, including the Bharatiya Janata Party, Hindutva, the 'Brahminical Patriarchy' they seek desperately to smash, and the traditions that birthed them. Eating beef and gloating about it on social media is a stout middle finger to all of the above. It also makes their day.

They want to argue. They want to slur. They want to show solidarity with kindred spirits of other faiths who, in their view, are abject victims of everyone's pet bugbear: 'Hindu majoritarianism'. Try arguing with them and they shift goalposts like grasshoppers, avoid answering any direct question, invoke false equivalences, and invent strawman arguments. Well, if such puerile commentary offers them so much satisfaction then, evidently, maturity is not their strong suit. It is also a timely reminder of that old maxim: never wrestle with pigs.

Strangely though, their prime mover is sheer ignorance of subject matter. They do not know, for example, that Sanātana Dharma has just two primary injunctions and one commandment. Its followers are banned from killing Brahmins and cows; and they are duty-bound to conduct the last rites of their elders, and of ancestors both known and unknown.

This solemn duty to perform such rites is a symbolic acknowledgement of the force of karma: that actions taken in the past have ramifications well into the future. It is a metaphor for the continuum of life, unrelated to whatever ideology, faith, or caste an individual may subscribe to. Similarly, a ban on killing Brahmins is a metaphor for preserving knowledge. Our scriptures say that knowledge is truth, by which logic, the destruction of knowledge is a rejection of truth, and that is an irrational act.

So too, protection of the cow, a duty which is founded on the 'Kamadhenu' concept, with multiple layers of meaning. At a prosaic level, it merely teaches us to not destroy that which nourishes us. But go deeper, and some stimulating allegories emerge.

In the Vedas, the cow is a symbol of cosmic creation and divine nourishment. In the Vana Parva of the Mahabharata, the story of Kamadhenu miraculously producing an army to protect Sage Vashishtha from King Vishwamitra elevates the concept spiritually: that tapasya, spiritual power, is superior to royal power.

Elsewhere, Kamadhenu represents selfless giving without expectation, and a manifest abundance of Brahman, ultimate reality, in material form. Indeed, the concept evolves further to become the nurturing aspect of the divine, or the infinite, that sustains creation and rewards righteousness. What a beautiful way of looking at things.

The moral aspect is as explicit and unambiguous as its inference: a protected cow is a primary indicator that Dharma prevails in our land.

But the beef warriors are wholly ignorant of this key concept because they have cut their roots. They have rejected our civilisational ethos, rejected Dharma without ever having understood it, and presently inhabit a zany, self-concocted purgatory filled with woolly-headed theories and soothing echoes of their bizarre views. Entry to outsiders, the truth, or reason, is forbidden.

Yet, in the irony of ironies, their social existence is dependent on interaction with the very entities they irrationally shun because it is from precisely this vituperative engagement that they gain their intellectual nourishment.

It won't be long before someone says that their Adharma is fuelled by Dharma! What else can one say about people who gleefully get their thrills and pleasures by wilfully hurting the sentiments of others. In their warped world, intolerance is tolerance. That's what happens when the truth falls victim to ideology. How else can a person love their land while rejecting its core culture and traditions?

The problem is that they have gone so far out on a limb that they run the risk of turning into feral beings devoid of compassion. Perhaps some already have, which is why the tendency to not care for the sentiments of others is becoming increasingly entrenched in certain circles.

That is not good for society. The divides are now starting to hurt. Badly. And regrettably today, the issue is most prominent amongst those who were born in a Dharmic fold. For that reason alone, it is now imperative that cow protection be taken up on a war footing, at the grassroots level because, only when people stop perceiving a cow as either food or as a political weapon, will Dharma truly return to this sacred land.