Cow Crush: The Game We Like To Play

In an insecure democracy like ours, cows have a value no greater than the pile of social rubble they leave behind.

If only we are able to winnow the offal of false ideology and feast on the delectable cuts.

We won’t. We love our controversies. We are blind to all but the vision through the prism of rationality intentionally tempered by religion.

There’s a game we are playing these days. It’s called Cow Crush. One person lost his life, but that’s besides the point. The game is larger than the individual. It has riveted our attention for the last one week. The media caters to the players. The players play to the social media gallery. Information is perceived to be exchanged. Opinions are assumed to be formed.

The game goes on. It began in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh and till time of writing has progressed to Varanasi, strangely, also, in Uttar Pradesh.

The rules of the game tell us: Don’t look for facts. Like identify who owned the Dadri cow. Where was it culled, if at all? How did part of it end up at a certain home? Who was the eye witness to the animal’s fateful journey?

What the rules mean: We are merciful people. We are secular people. For us to show our mercy and secular instincts we need an occasion. The occasion needs a victim. So there is a victim. This is a generosity we indulge in with impeccable periodicity as we play the game.

There’s fairness all around. The victim’s family is compensated with more than they could ever earn in generations. The victim’s kin are given their moment under the glare of camera lights. Each utterance of theirs is dished out as a eulogy to our mutual co-existence.

The play unfolds as leaders decide to usher in peace in and around the victim’s home. They come in pairs. One day it was a Hyderabadi gentleman and a hospital owner from Uttar Pradesh. Another day it is a buffalo-lover from Uttar Pradesh who went to the extent of ordering the police to search for some ungulates stolen from his farm house and a person from eastern Uttar Pradesh who will kill for peace.

No, that’s not enough. Not enough play yet in the game. So, we look for angels. We find a youth who saved a cow from a well in Lucknow. We are not bothered by the fact that the youth was a good Samaritan. We focus on his community background to propagate that a cow-eater had turned into a cow-saver. In distant Mumbai, our endeavours dish out yet another miracle: a woman of a particular community in dire straits gives birth to a healthy child in front of a place of worship and shockingly, would be naming the child after the residing deity.

The victim can rest in peace. For now.

For the last one year or so, this game has gained many supporters. It is played with much more vigour and intensity. It is no longer satisfactory if you merely like a cow. Either you disrespect the cow or you protect it. That is how the opposing players are identified, their ideologies defined by their attitude towards a quadruped.

It is inevitable that the game has raised its pitch, we are told. It is inevitable that the game is played out to the full. It is inevitable the outcome is a foregone conclusion, we are also told.

Where two rival parties argue that something is inevitable is to argue for the death of democracy. It is to surrender our right to choice. It is to shut down our functions of free thought.

Time for change is when change becomes inevitable, someone said, and not before. I have the optimism of an ostrich. Is the game past that inevitability?