Several news organizations including ABC News, report the story captured in the Reuters picture shown here.
Alongside life-size posters of Hindu nationalist leaders, Indian political activists can now buy lotions, potions and pills to cure anything from cancer to hysteria to piles - all made from cow urine or dung.
A new goratna (cow products) stall at the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) souvenir shop is rapidly outselling dry political tracts, badges, flags and saffron-and-green plastic wall clocks with the face of former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
“You won’t believe how quickly some of the products sold out,” Manoj Kumar, who runs the souvenir shop along with his brother, Sanjeev, said.
“The constipation medicine is a hot seller.”
But the biggest seller is a “multi-utility pill” that claims to cure anything from diabetes to piles to “ladies’ diseases”.
But what business does the BJP political party have in selling cow piss?
BJP spokesman Siddarth Singh says the stall aims to promote village industry, one of the biggest employers in India.
“If you go back in the history of India, this belongs to our culture,” he said.
“There’s no commercial value to us. Village industry in this country needs to be promoted.”
Who would have ever suspected that cow piss could be used to garner votes? If U.S. politicians ever find out…
This also brings me to the topic of the sacred cow. So many questions about cow worship were hurled at us Indian Americans while growing up. This bottle of urine just causes the memories to come “leaking” back into my mind. It doesn’t help that there is so much misinformation when it comes to the place of the cow in Hinduism.
…during the Second World War, American soldiers were given the following advice [As I see India, Robert Trumbull, London, 1957, p.241] -
“American servicemen in Calcutta were instructed that if a traffic situation arose in which the driver had a choice of striking a cow or a human, hit the human and proceed without stopping to a police station.”
Beliefnet.com attempts to shed light on the topic:
This might as well be cleared up now. The Hindu does not worship the cow, has never worshipped the cow, and is not likely to ever worship the cow. To continue to propagate this delusion is only indicative of ignorance and laziness, but the Hindu has nothing to do with it. The cow is not even sacred, in the way it has been misunderstood by Europeans. The cow is literally taboo, a very different animal indeed from the sacred cow of popular delusion. Taboos in sociological terms are both positive and negative, as in taboos that must be respected and deferred to, as well as taboos that deal with what is abhorrent.
The cow is Aghanya—that which may not be slaughtered. It is true that later sects began to call the cow “the mother” and even wrote some dubious scripture to support this, but it was a rather childish transference of reverence from the mother to the cow because both provide milk! The “milk-debt” was culturally a very strong more, and it was felt that it would not be fair to leave the cow out of its share of respect for contributing to your health. Nevertheless, the cow was originally only Aghanya.
This set of circumstances arose for many reasons. Strange as it may seem, the Vedic age was a beef-eating one, and animals were constantly being slaughtered. The reaction against flesh foods set in with the advent of Jainism and Buddhism, and a remarkable cultural revolution took place, in that, a predominantly flesh-eating country became a predominantly vegetarian one. The many pastoral tribes that inhabited India could not afford to sacrifice their cow wealth for meat. In fact, that is the real reason it became Aghanya. The norms of the time dictated that you sacrifice your best animal, usually the stud bull, for the feast when a distinguished visitor came by. As these worthies multiplied in numbers, the quality of the herds began to decline. You could not escape this obligation, as substitution of another animal would be regarded as a deadly insult. To save animals thus marked out, as well as in deference to the new trends, the inviolability of the cow came into being.
And you linguists out there will appreciate the following:
The scriptural reason for this obsession with cows and their protection is even stranger. Vedic Sanskrit is not the classical Sanskrit that exists today. It is an older, more difficult form of the language and one of the words for “light” that is used there is “Go.” Now Go primarily meant “light,” but it also meant “cows.” In classical Sanskrit, the word means only the bovine friend. Thus, on the basis of a forgotten meaning of a word, Indian culture has wrapped itself round the protection of the cow and rendered it a sacred taboo. “Protector of the Go,” in the Vedas meant the keeper of the light—not a cowherd! And all the admonitions about protecting the Go mean something else altogether, and makes a great deal more sense, too. However, it was too late, and the word came to mean, with all its nuances, cow protection and cow reverence! A change in language renders a single word archaic, but the impact on a society is amazing.
