cow slaughter in India-its legacy

The slaughter of the cow in india and our Govt's refusal to pass a total ban on it ,would go down as one of the historical example of the failure and weakness of a race to stand up for his Dharma and establish righteousness in an issue that has aboslutely no merits and has been only twisted and contrived to extract election mileges..
contrary to popular perception invaders and kings who have ruled our country have shown great sensitivity and tolerance to this one act. Not one but several Mughal rulers imposed a total ban on cow slaughter to respect Hindu and Jain sensititvies..[The clash within: democracy, religious violence, and India's future By Martha Craven Nussbaum]...
The legacy of cow slaughter owes its origins to The British Empire which carried out its large scale practice ,mainly for satieting its huge army contingents. They then managed to project it as an essential principle in the practice of free religion for the Muslims..by this ingenious stance they managed to kill 2 birds with a stone[as they have often done against our fat-headed race]..they got away with being saddled with the blame of this practice and secondly..sowed the seeds of a perennial conflict; the flames of which would be forever fuelled by this pseudo-secularist ideology..
It is interesting to note that the anti cow-killing movement[1880-1884] almost upturned this boat as people cutting across religious lines took part in a vociferous agitation against them and that actively included Parsis,Muslims and Sikhs. (i have often wondered why our history text-books never mentioned this "secular' protest while they unabashadly dedicate chapters to notorious rulers who have been enemies of our culture like Babar, Aurangzeb,jehangir and almost creating demi-god impressions about them in our impressive minds..possibly it would amount to saffronization of textboot..lucky that the cow rarely comes saffron in its hide color]well thats a different story altogether)
The legacy..as usual continued and for the pat 5 decades our successive govts used[rather abused] this principle of secularist freedom to selectivley allow slaughter of cows in our country.In 1966 Indira Gandhi refused to bring on the legislation even on the table despite nationwide protests which led to police violence and deaths..
In the present scenario slaughter for meat continues large scale in Kerala ,West Bengal and North Eastern states..there are more than 32000 unlicensed abbattoirs in our country where the animal is transported to and killed in a gruesome and utterly unhygenic manner..millions of cattle heads are made to walk across the vast Gangetic plains of Bihar,jharkhand and West Bengal for illegal transportation to bangladesh for slaughter..
On this backdrop i would write a series of posts on this practice..there are severeal aspects from which to look at it..ethical, economic,political,demographic as well as karmic..
i for one feel there should be a healthy national debate on the issue and if passed a total , blanket ban imposed on it...

Hinduism and the mordern intellectual

I have often wondered as to why the mordern society has so much disillusionment with the Hindu religion..and why are we;as a people;are so very apathetic to both,its concerns and oppurtunities.
It probably has to do with the abstractness of the religion;its refusal to bring orderliness;heirarchy and cannonization which suffocate the intrinsic freedom that the disciple needs to reach the intangible Supreme.Despite its periodic decay in the form of casteism,ritualism and dogmas; Hinduism has been the most honest religion to its people.it has presented the Lord as the abstract, the many faceted and the compliment of good and evil..it has refused to classify creation into Satan and God,to create a hierarchy of preisthood, an orderliness of organized sainthood and certificates of miracles...instead it has shown the saint within the human;evil as a play of the Lord and miracles as a natural manifestation of the Purusha.
The mordern intellectual ;in his effort to classify the subtle, to satisfy the intellect and give a gross form to spirituality [e.g. ten commandments,holy book,one saint,one pilgrimage,etc]has ofen found a stoic silence from Hinduism . He has then created its own form [Godmen;who are all fake,rituals that lack meaning,some festivals that lack spiritual gravity but have a lot of peripheras,etc ,etc]
if only they kept this intellect aside and made an effort with an open mind, to recieve what a spiritual Master has to offer [for me all this intellectual gymnastics ended with the part 1 and 2 course of the Art Of Living]..they would realize and only gasp at the good fortune to be born in the land of India and as a Hindu...