Modern India stuck between a cow and the Constitution
The prime minister has finally spoken, saying heed the words of the president of India. How fragile the concept of India has become, that the primary minister of the nation has to quote the person in whose name the nation is run, to justify the deafening silence of, what must be, his very own beliefs.
The lacunae of the system is that, from the makers of the law to those who are charged with upholding them, in most instances, are personally not in agreement with the basic tenets of their charge. Take for example the "lowly" traffic constable at the intersection who has been charged with the responsibility of nabbing those who jump the signal. What is it that motivates him to "challan" the offenders – his job, his orders from above, or is it his conviction? When not in uniform does he believe that wearing a helmet on a two-wheeler is a must? When driving in the middle of the night on an empty stretch of road, will he stop and wait for a red light to change? Likewise, has the tax official personally never transacted in the absence of a cash memo? Has the judge never lied to look good?
So has society wholly imbibed the principles of civic righteousness whether enforced or not by the law of the land? It probably has not because the high flaunting laws are either a legacy of colonial masters or "enlightened" intellectuals who framed the Constitution. No wonder then that the cow did not get enshrined in the preamble to the Constitution. It could so easily have been written as - We the people of India, sons and daughters of the Holy Cow, having solemnly resolved… but it was not and for a reason.
The primary and most obvious being that cows (quoting Wikipedia) are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, and are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, most commonly classified collectively as Bos Taurus. Humans, and that presumably applies to all the citizens of India, on the other hand (again quoting Wikipedia) are the only extant members of the hominin clade, a branch of the great apes characterised by erect posture and bipedal locomotion, manual dexterity and increased tool use, and a general trend toward larger, more complex brains and societies.
The second and possibly the more important reason, why it was not so written in the Preamble, was because popular religious beliefs were kept out while framing the Constitution of India.
But the prime minister himself, because of his training, because of his life long commitment to being a pracharak of the RSS, has to adhere to the concept of bovine ancestry when it comes to being a Hindu that is Indian. He is stuck between a cow and the Constitution… the mother figure of his belief and the figurative mother lode of the nation. So the people of India on either side of the cow debate must understand his inability to comment on such a fractious issue. On the one hand, as the prime minister of the country he has to conduct himself in sync with the erect postured, complex brained animal with bipedal locomotion that the Constitution expects him to be, on the other how can the Hindutva proponent ignore the plaintive mooing of the large domesticated ungulate that he has been taught to call mother. So he keeps his silence and keeps everyone guessing as to who or what he is.
But dare not anyone doubt the prime minister’s patriotism. He is a Hindu and there is no question about it, nor should he be apologetic about it, after all it was Veer Savarkar himself who coined the term Hindutva as Hindu nationalism to differentiate it from Hindu religion. The logic probably being that while all Hindus need not be Hindustani all Indians need be Hindu.
Guru Golwalkar, the then chief of the RSS, on August 14, 1947, wrote that the Tricolour will never be respected and owned by Hindus. He added that the word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country. Yet the prime minister faced with the evil choices – to keep quiet, to tweet or to quote the president… chose the third.
The prime minister would not have been in this unenviable position of silent belligerence if the ardent suggestion by the RSS in 1950 had been accepted by the Constituent Assembly. They had opposed the Indian Constitution asking for Manusmriti – the Hindu law book to be made the law of the land. Then every Indian including the PM would have had no qualms in being identified as calves of the divine cow.