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DARKY, Would Hindus sacrifice a cow instead of a bull or any other animal.
Some Facts.
In Hinduism, the cow is revered as the
source of food and symbol of life and may never be killed. Hindus
do not worship the cow, however, and cows do not have especially charmed lives in India. It is more accurate to say the
cow is taboo in Hinduism, rather than sacred.
In ancient India,
oxen and bulls were sacrificed to the gods and their meat was eaten. But even then the slaughter of milk-producing cows was prohibited.
Even when meat-eating was permitted, the
ancient Vedic scriptures encouraged vegetarianism. One scripture says,
"There is no sin in eating meat... but abstention brings great rewards." (The Laws of Manu, V/56)
Later, in the s
piritually fertile period that produced Jainism and Buddhism, Hindus stopped eating beef. This was mostly like for practical reasons as well as spiritual. It was expensive to slaughter an animal for religious rituals or for a guest, and the
cow provided an abundance of important products, including milk, browned butter for lamps, and fuel from dried dung.
Some scholars believe the tradition came to Hinduism through the
influence of strictly vegetarian Jainism. But the cow continued to be especially revered and protected among the animals of India.
By the early centuries AD,
the cow was designated as the appropriate gift to the brahmans (high-caste priests) and it was soon said that to kill a cow is equal to killing a brahman.
Babur, who invaded India all the way from Kabul and established the Mughal Empire in India, despite being an orthodox Muslim had
banned Cow Slaughter in his empire. All
successive Mughal Emperors Humayun, Akbar, Shah Jahan, Jehangir and then even Ahmad Shah had banned Cow Slaughter in their kingdoms. Hyder Ali and Tippu Sultan who ruled the Mysore State in the present day Karnataka had made cow slaughter and beef eating a punishable offence and the crime would be punished by
cutting off the hands of the person who committed the crime.
The Mughal Emperor Babar in Tuzuk-e- Babari while making a will in favor of his son Humayun says that,
Humayun should respect the sentiments of the Hindus and hence should not allow the cow to be sacrificed or killed anywhere in the Mughal Empire. The day any Mughal emperor ignores this will, the people of India will reject him. Aurangzeb ignored this will and that caused the downfall of the Mughal Empire.
Robert Clive on entering India was astonished and amazed to see the success of the agricultural system here.
Cow was an integral part of a Hindu family as was any other human member in the family. He even found that in many places the total number of cattle was more than the number of humans living there.
And
thus was opened the first slaughterhouse of cows in India in 1760 by Robert Clive at Kolkata. It had a
capacity to kill 30,000 cows per day. Indian agriculture had started becoming dependent on west invented artificial products and was forced to give up home grown natural practices. Hindus did not work as butchers at the slaughter houses opened by the British. And of course the British were well known for their divide and rule policies which they practiced throughout their colonial kingdoms then. So what did they do? Well,
they hired muslims as butchers and this was done in almost every slaughterhouse they opened. And
this slowly pushed the muslims into believing that beef eating was their religious right.
And Thanks to Such Religious belief instigated there used to be 70 breeds of cows in the country at the time of independence, today we have only 33 and even among them many breeds are facing extinction.
Today many Muslim don't consider them Muslim until they have consumed cow.