An average Indian of today, rooted in his (supposedly) traditional Hindu religious heritage, carries the misconception that his ancestors, especially the Vedic Āryans, attached great importance to the cow on account of its inherent “sacredness.” The “sacred” cow has come to be considered a symbol of community identity of the Hindus whose cultural tradition is often imagined as threatened by the Muslims who are thought of as beef-eaters. The sanctity of the cow has, therefore, been announced with the flourish of trumpets and has been wrongly traced back to the Vedas, which are supposedly of divine origin and the fountainhead of all knowledge and wisdom. In other words, some sections of Indian society have traced back the concept of ‘holy’ cow to the very period when it was sacrificed and its flesh was eaten.

Since the Brāhmaṇical injunctions against beef eating led to the veneration of the cow in the mediaeval period, it tended to become a political instrument at the hands of rulers. The Mughal emperors (e.g. Bābar, Akbar, Jahāngīr and Aurangzeb, and so on), thus imposed a restricted ban on cow slaughter to accommodate the Jaina or Brāhmaṇical feeling of respect for the cow (Ram 1927: 122–3, 179–90). Similarly Shivaji, sometimes viewed as an incarnation of God who descended on earth for the deliverance of the cow and brāhmaṇ, is described as proclaiming: “We are Hindus and the rightful lords of the realm.