PARADOXICAL PRODUCTS OF PIETY

IT’S a new year, but the debates are old.

- CP SURENDRAN

In January 2024, Nationalist Congress Party leader Jitendra Awhad had declared in Maharashtra’s Shirdi that Lord Ram must have eaten meat during his 14-year exile because he could not have been a vegetarian in the jungle.

Awhad should have curbed his enthusiasm. It is not very wise to project our own appetites and limitations onto others. Lord Ram could have easily survived on fruits, roots and tubers—as countless ascetics have done. We don’t know for sure. It is speculation laced with modern biases.

But in India, speculation fixates on the mythical past, not the probable future. Our sense of time has always been a little warped because we suspect, sadly, that the best has already happened. The future as nostalgia.

Awhad’s remarks added decibels to the cacophony over a proposal to ban meat and alcohol on January 22, the Ayodhya Ram Mandir consecration day. No slaughter of the animals, then. Before we go further, we must clarify: the proposed ban is for that single day, just in and around Ayodhya. Meat delivery, however, is banned indefinitely as an ‘administrative measure’.

One of the great utilitarian philosophers of our time is Peter Singer. He disputes the existence of any god—Christian, Jewish, Islamic or Hindu—because a truly beneficent and omnipotent deity would have protected not only humans, but also animals—which god supposedly created—from pointless suffering.

Singer's gaze turns to factory farms, those grim assembly lines of agony where billions of animals endure lives of confinement before the blade. And while they wait, they are all sentient enough to know it’s the end.