There is something quixotic about a nation of 1.3 billion people being convulsed over the slaughter of over-aged cows that would otherwise starve to death, or die horribly after eating plastic from a rubbish bin.

But there is nothing farcical about the absolute ban on the slaughter of cows imposed by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in every state where it has captured power, and its surreptitious use of vigilante groups to enforce it.

Every veterinarian who has studied the Hindu attachment to the cow has railed against the ban for being cruel and perverse. India has more than 300 million cattle – a third of the world’s bovine population – but only 3 percent of its arable land. The fodder it grows is sufficient for at most 60 percent of its livestock. About 140 million cattle are therefore chronically undernourished. A huge number of usually over-aged cattle or male calves made redundant by the tractor are, as a result, driven into the forests to starve to death.

The export of beef has provided an alternative. As a result there are more than 3,500 slaughterhouses that export 2 million tonnes of ‘beef’ a year, though most of this is officially classified as water buffalo. The trade provides more than two million jobs, mostly to Muslims and Hindu dalits (the former Untouchables), a safety valve Modi’s government is determined to close.

The apparent explanation for this perverse compassion is that India is a mainly Hindu country, and Hindus worship the cow. But that does not explain why another BJP-led coalition government, that ruled the country from 1998 till 2004 under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, never raised the issue. The answer is to be found in a quiet retrogression that has occurred within the Hindu nationalist movement, collectively called the Sangh Parivar, in the past decade.

Like other ideological movements that seek power democratically, the Sangh Parivar has been racked by a struggle between its parliamentary wing, the BJP, and its organizational wing, headed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS). In 1998-2004 the parliamentary wing was ascendant. Today it is the RSS that is calling the shots.

Banning the slaughter of cows has been a major goal of the RSS since its inception in the 1920s. But until Modi became prime minister it had failed to find a leader in the BJP who would make it a part of his national policy. This was because of the relentless pressure exerted by India’s voting system, which forces parties to dilute their ideology and enter into coalitions.

The need to do this became apparent in 1991 when, after eight years of stoking Hindu sentiment over the need to replace a derelict mosque supposedly built over the birthplace of the Hindu God Rama with a temple, the BJP secured only 20.4 per cent of the national vote and won only 120 out of 544 parliamentary seats.

Vajpayee, and his deputy LK Advani, therefore set out to secularize the BJP by inducting retired civil servants, army officers and politicians from other political parties. This strategy brought a BJP-led coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, or NDA, to power in 1998, and again after a snap election, in 1999. On the pretext of having to accommodate its coalition partners, Vajpayee kept diehard Hindu ideologues favoured by the RSS out of cabinet. The latter did not take this lying down.

Within weeks of the formation of the government in 1998 they raised a hue and cry against conversions to Islam and Christianity, and began a campaign to re-convert Muslims and others back to Hinduism. Two RSS offshoots, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or the World Hindu Council, and the Bajrang Dal, the army of the monkey God Hanuman, began to attack Christian priests and nuns and vandalize churches, daring Vajpayee to take action against his own parent organization, the RSS.

Vajpayee criticized the lawlessness, and even undertook a fast to force state governments to take stern action, but fought shy of criticizing the RSS directly. The conflict came to a head when cadres of the Bajrang Dal set fire to the car in which an Australian Christian missionary and his two sons were sleeping, burning them alive.

Vajpayee took immediate action. Mass arrests followed and within three years the main culprit was in prison for life while his accomplices had received lesser sentences. He called a conclave of the BJP’s coalition partners and set up a National Coordination Committee as a counterweight to the RSS. This gave India one of its best governments since Independence. But the radical elements in the RSS never forgave Vajpayee for his ‘treachery’.

They took their revenge when the NDA suffered a surprise defeat in 2004. As two of the BJP’s coalition partners later conceded, its main cause was the 2002 communal carnage in Ahmedabad that Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, had been either unable, or unwilling, to prevent. But the RSS insisted that the cause was Vajpayee’s betrayal of the ‘Hindutwa’ ideology. Nine years later the party pushed aside former deputy prime minister LK Advani who had succeeded Vajpayee, and chose Modi to lead them into the 2014 election. From then on it has been the RSS that has set the agenda for the government.

(Source: chathamhouse)