Venue: Seminar Room, Australia India Institute, The University of Melbourne
Presenters: Dr Yamini Narayanan
India is uniquely placed in having cow protection laws that criminalise slaughter and beef, but intriguingly, is also the leading global exporter of beef, producer of milk, and the largest producer of leather in Asia, all of which can only be sustained through the mass slaughter of cattle. Based on a two-year empirical study of cow protection in India, this paper argues that India’s contradictory realities as regards cattle, and particularly its milk/beef trade, is sustained by a ‘state of exception’ facilitated by the intersections of informality and religion.
Often strategically produced by formality or formal development, informality can be used to dismantle democratic governance and equitable social structures to privilege violence, oppression, and even warlike conditions that exploit the labour and bodies of the poor, women, minorities - and animals. Likewise where religion is invoked as a justification for protectionism, religion itself needs to be made complicit in sustaining India’s cattle industries. Religion is conceptually and empirically important to understand how cattle are located in the shadow 'gray space' between formal/informal development in India.
In its concluding analysis, the paper argues that cow protectionism currently operates as a single-issue campaign, which typically works only if embedded clearly in a larger discourse, in this case, animal rights. Thus conceptualised, cow protectionism may offer real potential to animal rights advocacy through the conceptualisation of universal animal and human rights, and a responsive climate policy in India.
Dr Yamini Narayanan is an ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University.
from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/7396-south-asia-research-seminar-beef-trade-in-india-intersections
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