The decisive word is 'only'

Several blind men are brought to an elephant and asked what it is. One touches the trunk and says it is a snake. One touches a leg and says it is a pillar. One touches the ear and says it is a winnowing fan, another the tail and says it is a rope. They fall to arguing, each certain, each furious at the others’ blindness.

The parable appears in the Buddhist Udāna, where it is told about sectarian teachers who quarrel over partial views.11 Udāna 6.4 (Tittha Sutta), Khuddaka Nikāya, Pāli Canon. It became the emblem of the Jain doctrine of anekāntavāda — the many-sidedness of reality — which holds that any statement about the truth captures at most an aspect of it. What makes the story useful is its precise diagnosis. Not one of the blind men is wrong about what he touched. Each is wrong only in one claim: that what he touched is all there is.

That claim — that one’s own grasp is the whole — is the subject of this brief.

The common contrast is between one God and many. It is the wrong contrast.

Indian public argument about religious difference usually opposes monotheism to polytheism: the Abrahamic faiths worship one God, the dharmic traditions many. The contrast is inaccurate, and its inaccuracy hides the fault line that actually matters.

The dharmic traditions are not, as a class, polytheistic. Sikhism is uncompromisingly monotheistic; its scripture opens with Ik Onkār, the one creator. Advaita Vedānta, the most influential school of Hindu philosophy, is monist: it holds that only one reality exists at all. Jainism and Buddhism posit no creator god. Hindu devotional practice includes polytheistic, henotheistic and monotheistic strands, frequently within the same household.

What these traditions share is not a number of gods. It is a stance toward the path. The Rig Veda states it in a line that has served as a charter for three thousand years:

ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.22 Ṛgveda 1.164.46.

The line is not polytheist. It asserts that truth is one. What it refuses is the conclusion that the names are therefore wrong — that only one description, one practice, one teacher, can reach it.

Sikhism makes the point decisively, because it is the counterexample that breaks the usual contrast. It is as monotheistic as any Abrahamic faith. Yet the Guru Granth Sahib incorporates the compositions of saints from outside the Sikh tradition, among them the weaver-poet Kabir and the Sufi Sheikh Farid. A monotheism that canonises the words of those outside it is evidence that the number of gods is not what produces conflict.

The variable is exclusive salvation

The Abrahamic traditions, in their classical formulations, make a different and stronger claim. It is not only that God is one. It is that the path to God is one, and that other paths do not arrive.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.33 Exodus 20:3, King James Version.

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.44 John 14:6, King James Version.

The Qur’an states that whoever seeks a religion other than Islam will not have it accepted, and will be among the losers in the hereafter.55 Qur’an 3:85.

Philosophers of religion distinguish three positions on this question: exclusivism, which holds that salvation is available through one tradition alone; inclusivism, which holds that other traditions may reach it, but only by virtue of the one true tradition; and pluralism, which holds that several traditions are authentic responses to the same reality.66 John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (1989); the exclusivist–inclusivist–pluralist typology was first set out by Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism (1983). The dharmic traditions are pluralist or inclusivist by default. The classical Abrahamic positions are exclusivist.

The decisive word is “only”.

Exclusivism, combined with an obligation to bring others to the true path, produces a specific structure. A tradition that holds salvation to lie in itself alone, and holds that it is commanded to share that salvation, cannot regard another tradition as a legitimate alternative without contradicting itself. It can tolerate others as a matter of law or prudence. It cannot respect them as a matter of theology.

This is also why the three Abrahamic traditions are incompatible with one another, and not only with the dharmic traditions. Two exclusive claims to the same God cannot both be true. Their history of mutual conflict over the same holy sites is not an accident of politics. It follows from the structure of the claims.

Judaism is the exception that shows where the line runs

The argument above applies cleanly to Christianity and Islam in their classical forms. It applies poorly to Judaism, and the reason is instructive.

Judaism is exclusive about its covenant but not about salvation. Rabbinic tradition holds that the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come, through the seven Noahide laws rather than through conversion.77 Tosefta, Sanhedrin 13:2; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 8:11. Judaism does not proselytise.

India is where this mattered. Jewish communities lived here for, by documentary evidence, at least a thousand years, and by their own tradition two thousand, without antisemitism from the majority population. The persecution Indian Jews did suffer came from outside — from the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa.88 World Jewish Congress, “Community in India.” https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/IN; on the documentary record, Sayan Lodh, ISGAP, https://isgap.org/flashpoint/india-and-israel-the-need-for-a-nuanced-understanding/

The case isolates the variable. A non-proselytising tradition, exclusive about its own covenant but not about salvation, settled into a pluralist civilisation and was never treated as a threat. What the dharmic world has historically found difficult to accommodate is not monotheism, not foreign origin, and not difference of worship. It is the conjunction of exclusive salvation with the mission to convert.

The civilisational settlement, and where it departs from Savarkar

If exclusive theology is the fault line, the question is what terms of coexistence are available across it.

V. D. Savarkar’s 1923 answer is the best known. In Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? he defined a Hindu as one who regards the land from the Indus to the seas as both pitṛbhū and puṇyabhū — fatherland and holy land.99 V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923). Extract and discussion: https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/veer-savarkar-hindutva-india/38073/ The definition was deliberately civilisational rather than creedal, and it placed Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists inside it. But the holy-land criterion was decisive, and Savarkar was explicit about its consequence: for Indian Muslims and Christians, India could be a fatherland but not a holy land, because their holy places lay in Arabia and Jerusalem.1010 Savarkar, Hindutva, quoted in Dawn: https://www.dawn.com/news/1301496

This brief departs from Savarkar on that criterion. It makes the location of a pilgrimage site the measure of belonging, which is both arbitrary and unanswerable: no Indian Muslim can relocate Mecca. It turns a question that can be settled by conduct into one that can only be settled by conversion.

The better formulation is the one the Supreme Court gave in 1995, when it described Hindutva as ordinarily understood as a way of life rather than a religious dogma — in a judgment that, in the same breath, voided the election under appeal for unlawful appeals to religion.1111 Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo v. Prabhakar Kashinath Kunte, Supreme Court of India, 11 December 1995. Discussion: https://www.legallyindia.com/blogs/the-hindutva-judgements-and-electoral-malpractice-a-recap/ On this reading, Indian civilisation is a set of commitments about how to live, not a set of beliefs about God. Its condition of membership is not what one worships or how. It is respect for the foundational commitments of the civilisation in which one lives.

That condition has a consequence the inclusive reading does not always state. It means that the incompatibility described above is theological, not personal. Indian Muslims and Indian Christians are not bound by the logic of their classical theologies to disrespect anything; centuries of lived accommodation, from Sufi devotion to Dara Shikoh’s Majma-ul-Bahrain, demonstrate that they need not. The settlement asks for conduct, and conduct is available to anyone. The Mughal record makes the point within a single dynasty. Akbar prohibited the slaughter of cows and the eating of their flesh out of regard for Hindu reverence for them — as his own court chronicler, Badauni, recorded with disapproval.1212 ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab-ut-Tawārīkh, vol. 2 (trans. W. H. Lowe, 1884). On Akbar’s farmans prohibiting animal slaughter at the request of the Jain teacher Hiravijaya Suri, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiravijaya His great-grandson Aurangzeb, as governor of Gujarat, had a cow slaughtered inside a Jain temple.1313 Account of Jean de Thévenot (1666), on the desecration of the Chintamani Parshvanath temple in Ahmedabad in 1645: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_Jainism Same faith, same family, opposite conduct. Where it is refused, the refusal is a choice, not a theological necessity.

The hardest test of that condition is the cow.

Where the line is drawn

To a Western observer, the Indian treatment of the cow can appear as a dietary taboo elevated into a political cause, and the argument for eating beef as a straightforward claim of individual liberty: what a person eats is their own affair.

No society actually holds that view. Every society places some animals beyond the reach of private appetite, and it enforces that line in the kitchen as firmly as in the street.

Western readers have an exact example in their own law. In December 2018 the United States made it a federal offence to knowingly slaughter a dog or cat for human consumption — in a backyard as much as in a market.1414 Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act of 2018, enacted in the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (Public Law 115–334), signed 20 December 2018. Bill text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6720/text South Korea banned the dog meat trade in 2024.1515 CNN, 9 January 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/09/asia/south-korea-bill-bans-dog-meat-bill-intl-hnk Neither prohibition rests on ecology or public health. They rest on the status these animals hold within the family: dogs are not livestock but members of the household, and a society that regards them so will not permit them to be eaten. The law does not ask whether the slaughter was performed in public. It asks only whether it was performed.

India’s constitutional directive follows the same logic. Article 48 does not direct the State to prohibit the public slaughter of cows. It directs the State to prohibit their slaughter. The Institute holds the same view: the killing of the cow is a transgression against the foundation of this civilisation whether it takes place in a public square or behind a closed door.

Even those who oppose cow protection laws recognise where the line runs. In May 2017, during demonstrations against new central rules on the sale of cattle for slaughter, Youth Congress workers in Kannur publicly slaughtered a calf and distributed the cooked meat.1616 Onmanorama, 28 May 2017. https://www.onmanorama.com/news/kerala/2017/05/28/kannur-youth-congress-workers-slaughter-cattle-public.html Their own party disowned them in the language of reverence. Rahul Gandhi called the act “thoughtless, barbaric and completely unacceptable”, and the Congress suspended those responsible. Randeep Surjewala, then the party’s chief spokesman, said that Indian culture does not harm any living being, “much less” the holy cow that all Indians revere.1717 Deccan Chronicle, 30 May 2017. https://www.pressreader.com/india/deccan-chronicle/20170530/282823601133494; see also Scroll, https://scroll.in/latest/839002/kerala-3-youth-congress-workers-suspended-for-allegedly-killing-calf-during-beef-festival The sanctity of the cow is not the conviction of one party or one sect. It is the conviction of the civilisation, and its opponents speak its language when they are called to account.

For a Hindu household the cow occupies the same position, raised by one degree. She is not a member of the family. She is its mother. The Rig Veda names her so:

mātā rudrāṇāṃ duhitā vasūnāṃ svasādityānām amṛtasya nābhiḥ | pra nu vocaṃ cikituṣe janāya mā gām anāgām aditiṃ vadhiṣṭa || Mother of the Rudras, daughter of the Vasus, sister of the Ādityas, navel of immortality — I say to the people who understand: do not kill the innocent cow.1818 Ṛgveda 8.101.15.

A civilisation built on the cow

The cow’s status is not a doctrine added to Indian civilisation. It is written into its vocabulary.

The Rig Vedic word for battle, gaviṣṭi, means literally “desire for cows”. Wealth was go-dhana, cattle-wealth. The word gotra, which still organises Hindu lineage and marriage, originally meant a cow-pen. A goṣṭhī, an assembly or gathering for discussion, takes its name from the cowshed where people met. The Sanskrit verb gopāyati, “he protects”, derives from gopa, the cowherd: in the language of this civilisation, to protect is etymologically to herd cattle.1919 Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899), s.v. gaviṣṭi, gotra, goṣṭha, gopāya.

The tradition’s most beloved form of God is a cowherd — Gopāla, Govinda. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa, enumerating the forms in which he is supreme, says:

dhenūnām asmi kāmadhuk Among cows, I am the wish-fulfilling Kāmadhenu.2020 Bhagavad Gītā 10.28.

and assigns go-rakṣya, the protection of cattle, alongside agriculture and trade, as the natural duty of the producing classes.2121 Bhagavad Gītā 18.44. In the gambler’s hymn of the Rig Veda, the voice that counsels the ruined man to give up his dice tells him to till his field, for there are his cows, and there his wife.2222 Ṛgveda 10.34.13. The measure of a good life is the herd and the household, named in one breath. The line holds even where the tradition permits meat. Śākta worship has long included animal offerings, and many Hindu communities outside Vaiṣṇava and Jain influence eat meat. The cow stays outside that circle in every one of them.

How the Vedas came to be read as sanctioning slaughter

The modern claim that the Vedas sanction the killing of cattle entered public argument largely through European translation, and the purposes of that enterprise are on the record. The Boden Professorship of Sanskrit at Oxford, for decades the seat of English Vedic scholarship, was endowed under an 1811 will which stated that a critical knowledge of Sanskrit would enable the founder’s countrymen “to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian Religion”.2323 Will of Lt-Col. Joseph Boden, 15 August 1811, quoted by Sir Monier Monier-Williams in the preface to his Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899). Text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boden_Professor_of_Sanskrit Max Müller, whose edition of the Rig Veda underlay the most widely read English translation, wrote to his wife in 1866 that the translation of the Veda was “the root of their religion”, and that to show Indians that root was “the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it”.2424 F. Max Müller to Georgina Müller, 1866, in The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller (1902). Quoted at https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Max_M%C3%BCller

The wedding hymn shows what that reading did. Rig Veda 10.85.13 describes the bridal procession of Sūryā: aghāsu hanyante gāvaḥ. Ralph Griffith, working from Müller’s text, rendered it “in Maghā days are oxen slain”.2525 R. T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda (1889–92), 10.85.13; on Griffith’s use of Müller’s text, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_T._H._Griffith Sāyaṇa, the fourteenth-century commentator of the Vijayanagara court, read hanyante in its sense of driving: the bullocks are goaded to draw the bridal cart.2626 Sāyaṇa’s reading as discussed by R. N. Iyengar, https://groups.google.com/g/bvparishat/c/krsqrPsRfJM/m/pCXljMICDQAJ; text and rendering at https://www.siva.sh/rig-veda/mandal-10/85/13 The Arya Samaj commentators read the cattle as the bride’s dowry, driven ahead of her to her new home.2727 Commentaries of Pt. Jayadev Sharma and Harisharan Siddhantalankar on Ṛgveda 10.85.13: https://vedicscriptures.in/rigveda/10/85/13 The custom the verse describes has not died. In Rajasthan a cow still travels with a daughter to her husband’s family, and a cow from that household travels in turn with her own daughter when she marries. When a man’s wife dies, it is said gvadi bhāg gī — the gvadi has broken.2828 Sitaram Lalas, Rajasthani Sabad Kosh, p. 753, s.v. gvadi. https://www.rajsabadkosh.org/SabadKoshPage.aspx?PageNo=753 The phrase holds the family’s line and the line of its cows as a single thing: the loss of a wife is spoken of as the breaking of both. A gift that accompanies a bride for three thousand years was translated into a slaughter.

The affirmative texts are unambiguous. The Yajur Veda commands gāṃ mā hiṃsīr aditiṃ virājam — do not harm the cow, the inviolable, the radiant.2929 Śukla Yajurveda (Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā) 13.43. The Rig Veda names her aghnyā, “not to be killed”, and calls for the punishment of those who would harm her.3030 Ṛgveda 10.87.16. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa declares rāṣṭraṃ vā aśvamedhaḥ — the aśvamedha is the realm itself — reading the great medha rite as the consolidation of the state.3131 Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 13.1.6.3. Yāska’s Nirukta glosses adhvara, a name of the sacrifice, as that in which there is no injury.3232 Yāska, Nirukta 1.8. The Mahābhārata describes a royal sacrifice at which no animal was killed.3333 Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Nārāyaṇīya section, on the sacrifice of Uparicara Vasu.

The Institute reads the contested Vedic verses — those describing bulls prepared for Indra, or offerings made to Agni — in the line of Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj commentators: as symbolic, and the medha rites as consolidation rather than slaughter.3434 Dayananda Saraswati, Ṛgvedādibhāṣyabhūmikā (1878). For Arya Samaj commentary on the Vṛṣākapi hymn, see Swami Brahmamuni on Ṛgveda 10.86.14: https://xn—j2b3a4c.com/rigveda/10/86/14 We state this as our reading, and set out our reasons. The slaughter reading claims support from Pāṇini’s sūtra on goghna, a word for an honoured guest, which it renders as “one for whom a cow is killed”.3535 Pāṇini, Aṣṭādhyāyī 3.4.73, with the Kāśikā and Nyāsa: https://sanskritdictionary.com/panini/3-4-73; Manusmṛti 5.41. That is a mistranslation, and it does not survive Pāṇini’s own grammar. The Dhātupāṭha gives the root han two senses, injury and gati — movement, reaching, receiving: hana hiṃsāgatyoḥ. The slaughter reading takes only the first. Pāṇini places goghna under sampradāna, the case of the recipient; on that reading the guest is the one to whom a cow is given. Pāṇini uses han in the sense of approach elsewhere (upaghna āśraye), and the Kāśikā specifies that goghna denotes a guest and not a caṇḍāla — a restriction that makes sense only if the word marks honour rather than slaughter.3636 Anirban Chakraborty, “Cow Slaughter in Vedic Yajña: An Investigative Study for the Underlying Truth,” in Umesh Kumar Singh et al. (eds.), Conflict Management in Vedic Traditions, WAVES International Conference 2025, World Association for Vedic Studies, pp. 238–243; citing Dhātupāṭha, Curādi 1736, and Aṣṭādhyāyī 3.3.85. Where the Rig Veda does use goghna in the sense of cow-slaying, it is of the weapon Rudra is begged to keep far from the people.3737 Ṛgveda 1.114.10.

The Dharmaśāstra tradition, for its part, treated cow-killing as a sin requiring elaborate penance; the Manusmṛti lists it among the upapātakas rather than the five mahāpātakas.3838 Manusmṛti, chapter 11; Bühler translation: https://sacred-texts.com/hin/manu/manu11.htm

Our principal reason is coherence. The Vedic corpus names the cow aghnyā, commands that she not be harmed, and calls for the punishment of those who harm her. A reading on which the same corpus also prescribes her slaughter for the hospitality of guests requires the texts to contradict themselves at their centre — to name the cow inviolable in one verse and serve her in the next. The tradition’s own hermeneutics, from Mīmāṃsā onward, seek the reading that keeps the corpus consistent. On that principle the Institute holds that the slaughter of the cow has no place in Vedic practice, and that the readings which find it there have mistaken the letter of a few verses for the meaning of the whole.

The sanctity of the cow deepened across three millennia, from Vedic inviolability through Dharmaśāstric penance and Purāṇic devotion to its modern form. In 1921 Gandhi wrote in Young India:

The central fact of Hinduism is cow protection. Cow protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution.3939 M. K. Gandhi, Young India, 6 October 1921. Compiled by the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Government of India: https://dahd.nic.in/related-links/annex-ii-6-views-mahatma-gandhi-cow-protection

The Constitution of India directs the State, in Article 48, to take steps for “prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle”. In 2005 a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court upheld a total ban on the slaughter of cows and their progeny, holding the prohibition reasonable and observing that cow slaughter is not an essential practice of Islam.4040 Constitution of India, Article 48; State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat, (2005) 8 SCC 534, decided 26 October 2005. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/55842/

That last finding is the civilisational settlement in legal form. Respecting the line costs Islamic practice nothing it requires.

A sanctity that a civilisation has chosen repeatedly, against economic pressure and over three thousand years, is a stronger foundation than one it was simply born with. It is a decision, renewed by each generation, about what it will hold sacred.

The counterargument

The case against this reading

Theology is not destiny. The strongest objection to this brief comes from Christianity’s own history. Its classical doctrine was as exclusive as any described above, and Europe fought wars over it. Yet modern Christian-majority societies built constitutional orders that do not rank citizens by religion, and the Catholic Church, in Nostra Aetate (1965), declared that it rejects nothing that is true and holy in other religions.4141 Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, 28 October 1965, §2. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html If a tradition can hold an exclusive creed and still practise pluralism in public life, then the incompatibility this brief describes is not fixed. It depends on whether a tradition has done the work of reform. Indian Christians whose loyalty is to this land, and not to another civilisation, already stand inside the settlement.

The objection is correct, and the brief accepts it. It is the reason the settlement is framed as a demand for conduct rather than for belief. In India, the accommodation of Islam to this civilisation has come from Muslims, not from Islam — from custom, not scripture. The Mehar Muslims of western Rajasthan revere Pabuji, the Rathore hero who died recovering a Charan woman’s cattle, as a pīr.4242 On Pabuji and his veneration by the Mehar Muslims of Rajasthan as a pīr: https://rajras.in/ras/pre/rajasthan/art-culture/folk-deities/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pabuji Hindus and Muslims alike come to the shrine of Bhathiji in Gujarat, a warrior who left his own wedding to free a village’s cows.4343 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhathiji Akbar’s prohibition on cow slaughter came at the urging of Jain teachers and in deference to Hindu reverence, not from any Islamic text. None of these practices has a basis in Islamic theology. All of them have their basis in the civilisation around it. That is why the condition of the settlement can be met by every Indian, whatever their creed.

The cow has been invoked to justify violence against people. This is the objection critics will raise first, and it requires a direct answer.

This civilisation has a long and honourable record of sacrifice for the cow. Across Karnataka stand hero stones raised from the ninth century onward for men who died defending villages against cattle raids.4444 On the turugol hero stones of Karnataka, c. 800 CE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasarahalli_inscriptions_and_hero_stones In Marwar, the Charan tradition remembers women who gave their own lives to stop the theft of cattle, and Pabuji Rathore left his own wedding to recover the cows of a Charan woman, Deval, and died in the fight.4545 In Praise of Death: History and Poetry in Medieval Marwar, doctoral thesis, Leiden University, on Pabuji, Deval and Charan traditions of self-sacrifice to prevent cattle theft: https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item:2962971/view He is worshipped to this day. These are the heroes of the tradition, and the Institute honours them without reservation.

What they did was defend the herd against armed raiders, at the cost of their own lives, in an age when there was no state to call on. That duty now belongs to the state. In 2018 the Supreme Court issued directions against lynching and described such acts as mobocracy.4646 Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, Supreme Court of India, 17 July 2018. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/71965246/ Where cattle theft goes unpunished and the protection laws already on the statute book go unenforced, the anger that follows is real, and the failure is the state’s. The criticism belongs to the incompetence of a state that leaves its own statutes unenforced, not to the citizens it has failed to protect. The remedy is enforcement.

The analogy this brief drew earlier holds here as well. An American who slaughters a dog for food is prosecuted under federal law; an American who kills him for it is tried for murder. Both outcomes are the law working. Pabuji rode out against armed raiders because there was no state to ride out for him. That is no longer so: the burden he carried now rests with the state. When the state fails to carry it, when theft goes unpunished and its own statutes go unenforced, it creates the conditions in which citizens take the law into their own hands, and it shares in the responsibility for what follows.

What this brief holds

The incompatibility between India’s dharmic traditions and the classical Abrahamic faiths lies in one word. It is not “god”. It is “only”.

Indian civilisation can accommodate any god and any form of worship, because its theology of the path does not require it to exclude them. What it asks in return is conduct: respect for the foundational commitments of the society in which one lives. That is a demand any Indian can meet regardless of belief, which is precisely what distinguishes it from Savarkar’s holy-land test.

The cow is the hardest of those commitments for outsiders to understand and the clearest for insiders to feel. Its protection belongs to the law and to persuasion — the route Article 48 and the Supreme Court have already taken — and never to the mob. The settlement is pluralism with one condition, enforced only by legitimate means. Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing.

Notes

1. Udāna 6.4 (Tittha Sutta), Khuddaka Nikāya, Pāli Canon.
2. Ṛgveda 1.164.46.
3. Exodus 20:3, King James Version.
4. John 14:6, King James Version.
5. Qur’an 3:85.
6. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (1989); the exclusivist–inclusivist–pluralist typology was first set out by Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism (1983).
7. Tosefta, Sanhedrin 13:2; Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 8:11.
8. World Jewish Congress, “Community in India.” https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/IN; on the documentary record, Sayan Lodh, ISGAP, https://isgap.org/flashpoint/india-and-israel-the-need-for-a-nuanced-understanding/
9. V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923). Extract and discussion: https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/veer-savarkar-hindutva-india/38073/
10. Savarkar, Hindutva, quoted in Dawn: https://www.dawn.com/news/1301496
11. Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo v. Prabhakar Kashinath Kunte, Supreme Court of India, 11 December 1995. Discussion: https://www.legallyindia.com/blogs/the-hindutva-judgements-and-electoral-malpractice-a-recap/
12. ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab-ut-Tawārīkh, vol. 2 (trans. W. H. Lowe, 1884). On Akbar’s farmans prohibiting animal slaughter at the request of the Jain teacher Hiravijaya Suri, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiravijaya
13. Account of Jean de Thévenot (1666), on the desecration of the Chintamani Parshvanath temple in Ahmedabad in 1645: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_Jainism
14. Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act of 2018, enacted in the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (Public Law 115–334), signed 20 December 2018. Bill text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6720/text
15. CNN, 9 January 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/09/asia/south-korea-bill-bans-dog-meat-bill-intl-hnk
16. Onmanorama, 28 May 2017. https://www.onmanorama.com/news/kerala/2017/05/28/kannur-youth-congress-workers-slaughter-cattle-public.html
17. Deccan Chronicle, 30 May 2017. https://www.pressreader.com/india/deccan-chronicle/20170530/282823601133494; see also Scroll, https://scroll.in/latest/839002/kerala-3-youth-congress-workers-suspended-for-allegedly-killing-calf-during-beef-festival
18. Ṛgveda 8.101.15.
19. Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899), s.v. gaviṣṭi, gotra, goṣṭha, gopāya.
20. Bhagavad Gītā 10.28.
21. Bhagavad Gītā 18.44.
22. Ṛgveda 10.34.13.
23. Will of Lt-Col. Joseph Boden, 15 August 1811, quoted by Sir Monier Monier-Williams in the preface to his Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899). Text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boden_Professor_of_Sanskrit
24. F. Max Müller to Georgina Müller, 1866, in The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller (1902). Quoted at https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Max_M%C3%BCller
25. R. T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda (1889–92), 10.85.13; on Griffith’s use of Müller’s text, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_T._H._Griffith
26. Sāyaṇa’s reading as discussed by R. N. Iyengar, https://groups.google.com/g/bvparishat/c/krsqrPsRfJM/m/pCXljMICDQAJ; text and rendering at https://www.siva.sh/rig-veda/mandal-10/85/13
27. Commentaries of Pt. Jayadev Sharma and Harisharan Siddhantalankar on Ṛgveda 10.85.13: https://vedicscriptures.in/rigveda/10/85/13
28. Sitaram Lalas, Rajasthani Sabad Kosh, p. 753, s.v. gvadi. https://www.rajsabadkosh.org/SabadKoshPage.aspx?PageNo=753
29. Śukla Yajurveda (Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā) 13.43.
30. Ṛgveda 10.87.16.
31. Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 13.1.6.3.
32. Yāska, Nirukta 1.8.
33. Mahābhārata, Śānti Parva, Nārāyaṇīya section, on the sacrifice of Uparicara Vasu.
34. Dayananda Saraswati, Ṛgvedādibhāṣyabhūmikā (1878). For Arya Samaj commentary on the Vṛṣākapi hymn, see Swami Brahmamuni on Ṛgveda 10.86.14: https://xn—j2b3a4c.com/rigveda/10/86/14
35. Pāṇini, Aṣṭādhyāyī 3.4.73, with the Kāśikā and Nyāsa: https://sanskritdictionary.com/panini/3-4-73; Manusmṛti 5.41.
36. Anirban Chakraborty, “Cow Slaughter in Vedic Yajña: An Investigative Study for the Underlying Truth,” in Umesh Kumar Singh et al. (eds.), Conflict Management in Vedic Traditions, WAVES International Conference 2025, World Association for Vedic Studies, pp. 238–243; citing Dhātupāṭha, Curādi 1736, and Aṣṭādhyāyī 3.3.85.
37. Ṛgveda 1.114.10.
38. Manusmṛti, chapter 11; Bühler translation: https://sacred-texts.com/hin/manu/manu11.htm
39. M. K. Gandhi, Young India, 6 October 1921. Compiled by the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Government of India: https://dahd.nic.in/related-links/annex-ii-6-views-mahatma-gandhi-cow-protection
40. Constitution of India, Article 48; State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat, (2005) 8 SCC 534, decided 26 October 2005. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/55842/
41. Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, 28 October 1965, §2. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html
42. On Pabuji and his veneration by the Mehar Muslims of Rajasthan as a pīr: https://rajras.in/ras/pre/rajasthan/art-culture/folk-deities/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pabuji
43. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhathiji
44. On the turugol hero stones of Karnataka, c. 800 CE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasarahalli_inscriptions_and_hero_stones
45. In Praise of Death: History and Poetry in Medieval Marwar, doctoral thesis, Leiden University, on Pabuji, Deval and Charan traditions of self-sacrifice to prevent cattle theft: https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item:2962971/view
46. Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India, Supreme Court of India, 17 July 2018. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/71965246/