Saving Cows and Counting Ploughs: The Biopolitics of Cow Protection

This paper demonstrates the shared genealogy of two facets of the Hindu nationalist platform that are treated very differently by scholars: cow protection and love jihad. Cow protection has been described as a politics of cultural assertion inspired by the ‘sacred cow’, and love jihad, together with related campaigns around widow remarriage and abductions, as a politics of demographic alarm. Tracing their common origins in the early twentieth century politics of Hindu extinction, this essay argues that North Indian cow protection made bovine population an important vehicle for Malthusian debates over poverty, population and (Muslim) hyperfertility that echo in Modi’s India.