Protect the cow, export the beef

 The BJP-led governments at the Centre and in several states have made cow protection a defining political motif, backed by strict laws, moral sermons and street-level vigilantism. Yet running alongside this rhetoric is a stubborn economic fact: India continues to export beef in massive quantities, year after year, even under uninterrupted BJP rule.

Critics have flagged this contradiction periodically. What is striking is not the allegation itself, but the inability of the ruling ecosystem to answer it. The latest voice to revive the charge is Avimukteshwaranand Saraswati, the controversial self-styled Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath. He is no liberal critic and no friend of secular politics. Precisely for that reason, his intervention is awkward for the BJP. When a figure speaking from within the Hindu religious space questions beef exports under a government that proclaims cow protection as dharma, the charge acquires a different weight.

He is not alone. Swami Agnivesh repeatedly questioned the moral incoherence of banning beef consumption at home while exporting it abroad. Congress leaders such as Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh have cited official export figures to underline the same point in Parliament and in public debate. Civil rights activists have raised it after every spike in cow-vigilante violence. The argument resurfaces because it is never settled.

The response from the saffron brigade has been conspicuously muted. There is no sustained rebuttal, no ideological explanation, only occasional technical evasions about buffalo meat and trade classifications. That silence speaks volumes. An honest defence would expose the central truth: cow protection is enforced downward, through coercion and fear, while beef exports are protected upward, for revenue and foreign exchange.

This is not a legacy anomaly. It is a conscious choice. Until the BJP explains why beef is sinful on the plate but profitable on the ship, the allegation will stick.