[The Hindu nationalist government
postponed plans for a national student exam on cows that critics said used
specious claims and substituted religion for science.]
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Suhasini Raj
NEW DELHI — Indian students were hitting the books hard in preparation for a big test on cows, reading that India’s cows have more emotions than foreign ones, and that their humps have special powers.
But facing widespread ridicule,
this weekend the government abruptly postponed the first exam based on a new
curriculum, pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist
government.
Students at public universities and
public schools had been asked to bone up on material that scientists and others
dismissed as baseless, accusing the government of promoting religious
pseudoscience about cows, which Hinduism considers sacred, to unwitting
students.
Critics said the curriculum,
devised by the National Cow Commission set up by Mr. Modi’s government, was an
especially bold move by his ruling party to push its ideology and undercut the
secularism that is enshrined in India’s Constitution but seems to be
increasingly imperiled with each passing day.
“This is very weird, this exam,”
said Komal Srivastava, an official for the India Knowledge and Science Society,
a nonprofit educational group. “They can say anything about cows: that
radiation is reduced by its dung, which is unscientific. If we want to teach
kids about cows, it has to be scientific knowledge and not mythology.”
India is 80 percent Hindu, but it
is also home to large Muslim, Sikh, Christian and other religious minorities.
Since Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, his party has embarked on a steady,
intense and divisive campaign to make India more of an overtly Hindu state.
Government bodies have
rewritten textbooks, lopping out sections on Muslim rulers. They have
changed official place names to Hindu from Muslim. And a little more than a
year ago, the Parliament passed a
citizenship law that openly discriminated against Muslims, provoking
searing nationwide protests that lasted until Covid-19 hit.
Cows have become a special flash
point. Since Mr. Modi came to power, Hindu nationalist lynch mobs have killed dozens of people in the name of
protecting cows. The victims are usually Muslims or other members of
minorities, and the killers often get away.
Many academics see the fact that a
government body tried to push a curriculum on cows — one that included many
completely unsubstantiated claims — as evidence that the government has
increasingly fallen under the sway of Hindu
supremacist groups like the R.S.S., in which Mr. Modi and many top
officials were once active.
In 2019, Mr. Modi’s government
established the National Cow Commission with the express purpose of protecting
cows. Its website lists, among other objectives,
“proper implementation of laws with respect to prohibition of slaughter and/or
cruelty to cows.” Many Indian states, but not all, ban the slaughter of cattle.
The study material in the new
course was designed by the cow commission, which falls under the Ministry of
Animal Husbandry and Dairying, and was widely
circulated online in several languages, including English. The first
online exam was supposed to be Thursday.
The material has chapters on cow
entrepreneurship and sayings from Hindu scriptures. The course delves into
breed improvement, bioenergy from cow dung, pesticides, medicines from cow
urine, the concept of promoting cow tourism, using cow dung instead of plaster
of Paris for ecological reasons and the difference between Indian and foreign
cows. The commission is headed by Vallabhbhai Kathiria, a surgeon and former member of
Parliament from Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
The Indian cow, or zebu, does
differ from the cow breeds familiar to the West. The zebu, easily recognized by
its big shoulder hump and pronounced dewlap, is more tolerant of heat and
drought, and more resistant to some diseases, though it produces less milk.
The material that students were
asked to absorb for the exam, however, made baseless claims, like one that
inside the hump of the Indian cow “there is a solar pulse which is known to
absorb vitamin D from the sun’s rays and release it in its milk.” Hump-less
“Jersey” cows, the material said, don’t have such powers.
Another part of the curriculum said
that indigenous cows were “emotional toward humans and other living beings,”
but that in foreign cows, “none of these feelings were exhibited.” Indian cows
are “alert” and “strong,” the material said, but foreign cows are “lazy.”
The test was not made mandatory,
but India’s University Grants Commission, a federal agency, encouraged students
— in fact, all citizens — to study the material and take the exam as an
extracurricular activity.
Critics across the country urged
the cow commission to call off the exam, saying students would feel pressured
by the government to take it. They said parents would urge their children to
take the exam, because the government was planning to issue a certificate that
could be helpful to the students’ future careers. The commission also dangled
prize money for top scorers.
Pureesh Kumar, an official at the
commission, said it wanted only “to educate people on cows’ benefits other than
milk” and share its scientific findings.
He said any student was free to
take the exam. Already, 500,000 people had registered, some from abroad,
including the United States.
But on Saturday, the commission
announced that it was postponing the exam, without providing a future date. Mr.
Kumar said that it had been delayed for administrative reasons, and that the
decision had nothing to do with the controversy.
Like those in many other countries,
schools in India have been sucked into the nation’s ideological battles.
The government recently ordered
publicly funded universities to get permission for holding online conferences
if they discussed certain national security issues or those related to “internal matters,” which many professors said could mean
just about anything. After this, too, set off intense criticism, some
government officials indicated they were reconsidering the restrictions.
Nivedita Menon, a professor of
political theory at one of India’s premier educational institutions, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, said the government was trying to “completely undo research
and critical thinking.”