Milking cows as bad as slaughter: How Dadri lynching killed my story

When acts of intolerance go unchecked or unchallenged in a society, people become afraid to speak freely. I can vouch for this after a leading English-language national daily decided not to publish an article that they had asked me to write.

Over the last couple of years, I have been experimenting with a vegan diet, which is based on the principles of veganism. As the UK-based Vegan Society defines it, “Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.”

This principle makes a vegan diet very different from a vegetarian diet. For not only does a vegan not eat meat or fish, which requires killing animals, he or she also does not eat any food product that comes from an animal. So you will never find eggs, honey and milk on a vegan’s food plate.

For me, the toughest challenge became avoiding food that contained milk or milk products. Things such as curds, paneer preparations, most mithais, kheer, sewai, halwa and other traditional Indian desserts were now in the forbidden list, as were cheese, cakes, pastries, ice cream.

Currently, almost two years into my experiment, I successfully avoid eating these items most of the time but I still take liberties and consume some foodstuff that contain milk and even eggs.

Friends, family, and acquaintances became aware of my vegan experiment, and among them was an editor, who asked me to write about it for her newspaper.

She told me that it did not matter that I was not a "real" vegan and still consumed some amount of animal products and asked me to write about the challenges I was facing in trying to be a vegan.

The article I submitted, contained these lines:

Veganism becomes appealing the moment you realise that, when it comes to causing suffering and pain to animals, a vegetarian diet is not so different from a non-vegetarian diet. For vegetarian Indians, the main culprit is milk.

The logic is simple - you cannot drink cow’s milk without killing her baby. To claim that the cow produces enough milk for her babies and humans is a convenient fiction. After a male calf is born, sooner rather than later, he is sent to the butcher.

A female calf is allowed to live but only because she is a future source of milk. When, after repeated forced pregnancies, the cow stops producing milk she is slaughtered too. No wonder vegans call milk “liquid meat”.

This has been the reality since man first began drinking cow’s milk 7,500 years ago. The industrial mass production of milk in modern dairies, where the aim is to extract it from the cow as cheaply as possible, is even more dehumanising and cruel.

Cows are not viewed as living, breathing beings capable of experiencing love, empathy, sadness and pain, but merely as milk-producing machines to be discarded and killed as soon as they stop being productive.

I got a mail from the newspaper’s copy-editing desk saying that they wanted to "rework" these paras and asking me if the direct link between dairy farming and the killing of cows and calves held true for India too.

I mailed back assuring them that it did and that, if required, I could back this with documentary proof. Later, I had a chat with the editor who had asked me to write the piece and she agreed that the point I was making in these lines was central to explaining why vegans do not consume milk.

It was then that she indicated what the problem was without spelling it out in as many words, and the proverbial penny dropped – in the aftermath of the murder of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri over false allegations of beef eating, they were reluctant to highlight the link between cow-slaughter and milk consumption.

She did hold out hope, promising to take up the matter with the editor-in-chief, but eventually the paper decided not to publish the piece. I was, however, paid in full for my efforts.

There is the possibility that my piece was turned down not because of any reference to cow slaughter but because it was not written well enough – maybe my half-baked, neither-here-nor-there kind of veganism did not sound convincing to the chief editor.

And, maybe my editor was being polite in not revealing this as the real reason.  

But I am fairly certain that that was not the case. Had I agreed to "rework" the offending paras, the piece would certainly have been carried by the newspaper.

One hears of acts of self-censorship by the media in countries ruled by authoritarian governments and military dictatorships, so this episode came as a revelation.

The lynch mob that killed Mohammad Akhlaq was ostensibly enraged that he had killed a calf for its meat. Ironically, the ripple effect of that act of violence prevented me from highlighting the main reason behind cow slaughter in India.