Why are Muslims pushing to make the cow India’s national animal?

NEW DELHI – Several Muslim leaders and organisations in India have called on the government to declare the cow India’s national animal and also uniformly ban cow slaughter across the country to hopefully put an end to a phenomenon that is often at the heart of Hindu-Muslim communal violence in India.

Cattle trade, slaughter and consumption are highly contentious in India, often resulting in mob violence and lynching of those accused of engaging in such acts. Muslims and marginalised Hindus are usually the victims of such vigilante attacks.

The cow is considered sacred by many Hindus as it is referenced in Hindu scriptures and mythology, and is highly valued for its contribution to the agrarian economy and its role as a source of milk.

However, it is the Royal Bengal tiger that has been India’s national animal since 1972, an animal that is protected under the country’s wildlife legislation.

The call, which gained traction around the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha – involving the ritual sacrifice of livestock – on May 28, aims to impose a high-profile nationwide ban on the trade and slaughter of cattle, including bulls and bullocks. This is intended to curb violence by Hindu vigilante groups that target Muslims and other marginalised groups involved in the cattle trade, while also generating goodwill among Hindus.

Laws governing the trade and slaughter of cattle currently vary from state to state, leading to a patchwork of regulations. Most states prohibit or heavily restrict the slaughter of cows and, in some cases, even bulls and bullocks, for religious and economic reasons.

But a few, such as Kerala and West Bengal, and several north-eastern states – which include those governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – continue to permit the slaughter of cattle and the consumption of beef.

This has resulted in the transport of cattle from states where their slaughter is banned to those where it is allowed. However, Muslims transporting cattle – including within state borders for purposes unrelated to slaughter – have been attacked, at times fatally, by Hindu vigilantes claiming to act in the name of cow protection.

Muslims pushing for the national-animal tag for the cow say that if no cattle trade is allowed at all, the chances of such communal flashpoints arising would be reduced.

“No one should be able to sell or buy (cows, bulls or bullocks). Those who want to keep a cow can do so to drink its milk. And once it becomes unproductive, they should hand it over to shelters that the government must run with the millions of rupees that it has for their upkeep,” Arshad Madani, president of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, a widely influential Muslim organisation in India, told The Straits Times.

“Whatever law is enacted for this purpose should be applied uniformly and without discrimination across all states of the country, so that justice, equality and humanity can be ensured,” he added in a post on X.

He is one of many who raised this demand around Eid al-Adha, including common Muslims who participated in signature campaigns to support the cause in Rajasthan and Delhi.

Hindu cow-related vigilante attacks increased sharply after May 2014, when the BJP came to power. According to a FactChecker database that tracked cow-related vigilante violence until 2019, when it was taken down, 127 such attacks were reported across 22 states from 2010. Over 98 per cent of these attacks took place after May 2014, under the BJP’s rule.

“Declaring the cow as the national animal will ease this cycle of suspicion, torture and intimidation because once it’s absolutely illegal to kill cattle across the country, the trade will come to a halt,” said Rasheed Kidwai, a veteran political commentator and author.

The high-profile national-animal tag and a uniform countrywide ban on cattle slaughter backed by strict state enforcement would send the message far and wide among Muslims to stay away from this trade, he told ST.

The demand, however, has put the Hindu nationalist BJP in an awkward position. The party has a longstanding history of demanding strong protection for the cow, and states governed by it in recent years have strengthened their cattle slaughter regulations, including for bulls and bullocks.

However, the BJP has steered clear of granting the cow national-animal status, despite calls from some of its own leaders to do so. In 2025, the government told Parliament it had no plans to enact any law declaring the cow as the national animal.

This position was reiterated by Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal in an interview with the Press Trust of India on May 30. He added that states were free to make their own policy on cattle slaughter.

Any countrywide ban on the slaughter of cows, bulls or bullocks would involve high costs for the BJP. It risks aggravating centre-state tensions, particularly with opposition-ruled states and those where Christians are sizeable in number or in a majority, including Goa, Nagaland and Meghalaya, where the BJP sits in power. These states allow cattle slaughter in some form and permit beef consumption.

Kidwai said a strict countrywide ban on cattle trade and slaughter would indeed rob the BJP of a “potent plank” to polarise voters along what is a key Hindu-Muslim religious divide and gain electoral dividends.

“But I would like to believe that the BJP is a responsible national political party and that it would act upon this call from Muslims, which is a very encouraging sign for our national integration, and put an end to this endemic problem,” he told ST.

The move, however, does not have unanimous support from Muslims across the country or even Christians, many of whom may not want to give up either eating beef or their economic dependence on the animal.

Khasim Shoaib Ur Rahman, a representative of the All India Jamiatul Quresh, an organisation that represents the interests of the Qureshi Muslims, many of whom are involved in the meat trade, told ST that any ban that outlaws slaughter of all breeds of cows, bulls and bullocks is “anti-farmer” as well as “anti-human”.

Many workers in India’s leather industry also depend on hides and skins obtained from animals slaughtered for meat, including cattle and buffaloes. Rahman proposed that Hindus should first identify which specific cow breed is sacred for them. Once determined, the chosen breed should be declared the national animal, followed by a countrywide ban on its trade and slaughter.

However, any countrywide ban on slaughter of cattle is also not guaranteed to end the spate of attacks on Muslims by Hindu vigilantes, who have found other pretexts to attack them, including the sale and transportation of goats or even the selling of chicken briyani.

Sagari R. Ramdas, a veterinary scientist and member of the Food Sovereignty Alliance, a grassroots platform advocating community-led control over agricultural systems, said Muslims’ call to declare the cow a national animal reflects both a sign of desperation and a direct challenge to Hindu cattle owners and vigilantes.

“The Muslim community is basically saying that, ‘You know what, you guys, you deal with your unproductive animals’,” she told ST, noting that many Muslim traders no longer want to fulfil this role and risk their lives.

India’s cattle population was pegged at 193.46 million, according to the last livestock census in 2019. With increasing restrictions on cattle slaughter, many farmers are today compelled to abandon their unproductive cows or unnecessary bulls and bullocks once used as draught animals to avoid feed costs.

These stray animals not only suffer from starvation and lack of water, but have also been responsible for fatal attacks on humans and extensive damage to farms.

Any countrywide ban on cattle slaughter, without the creation of adequate shelters to house millions of old animals, would further aggravate this existing problem of stray cattle. “The threshold of patience for these strays among farmers could be very different then,” added Ramdas.

As a result, the existing market for illegal cattle slaughter, including through the reported involvement of some Hindu vigilantes, could be further strengthened, Ramdas said.

The central and state governments have also failed to set up adequate cow shelters, and many of these shelters, including private ones, have a poor track record of animal welfare. In the absence of shelters, Ramdas argued that a “pathway to humane slaughter” is essential to sustain the dairy ecosystem in the world’s largest milk-producing country. Without such measures, many may be forced to stop owning cows.

“Your production of milk means that you’ve got to have a strategy to deal with all your unproductive animals, especially the more mechanised our agrarian system becomes.”

She added that Hindu farmers, who own the vast majority of cattle, must take a stand to defend an ecosystem that permits cattle slaughter. “If you recognise that your livelihood is interconnected with the fact that your animal needs to be picked up, traded in, transported safely and then finally slaughtered, you should speak up. Why are you silent?”