Each religion’s cultural and ethical framework is distinct. Dietary habits and historical contexts have influenced perceptions of violence across different religions
To specifically associate violence—as was done on the floor of the Lok Sabha on July 1, 2024—with Hinduism, showed that not all our leaders have had time to intimately know and understand the Indian ethos. This is understandable if one remembers that Indians can be Hindu, Muslim, Christian (duly baptized) and others.
An argument between the honourable Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the leader of the opposition reflected the differences, albeit in a rather acrimonious manner.As the Speaker explained, the Hindu goes to the extent of touching an elder’s feet and not merely bending. On the other hand, Islam does not permit bending to anyone, except Allah the Merciful.
A Christian is different and shakes hands to convey the warmth of his feelings.The scale of violence indulged in also varies from ethos to ethos. Christians are habituated to meat-eating, except on Fridays, when they do not go beyond a piece of fish. The Muslim also likes his meat without restrictions even on Fridays. This dietary preference might have been forced upon these communities because their origins began in the deserts of West Asia, where vegetation was (and continues to be) sparse. Even Europe, where Christianity flourished, could not easily grow crops during the winter. In the process, the world’s consumption of animals is an estimated 100 million killed a year, according to a database prepared by Poore and Nemecek in 2018.
The Hindu, for the information of our leadership, largely grew up where vegetation has been plentiful.
He could, therefore, choose to be anything from a strict vegetarian or an omnivore. However, he owes his vegetarianism to his belief in the transmigration of the soul, unlike the Christian who believes in a single life until Doomsday when God would send him to either heaven or hell depending on his performance on earth or even in the grave.The Hindu on the other hand believes that when his father, mother, relations, and near and dear ones depart from the world, it is only their bodies that perish; the soul is imperishable and enters new bodies to carry on with its respective new lives gained after rebirth.
The Hindu would, therefore, be afraid that if he or she eats meat, it could be the product of the killing of some deceased relation, who might have been reborn as that particular animal or bird that was killed for his culinary pleasure. I too hesitate to eat meat whenever I imagine how I would feel if my progeny were to be killed for the pleasure of someone else’s food. Pray, tell me, who is perpetrating more violence, the meat eater or the vegetarian? Incidentally, I am a Hindu.
The diet or food habits of an individual, if given to the consumption of meat, may also transfer to his social as well as professional conduct and behaviour. This question is well answered by the history of Europe. This continent, throughout its history, has fought 896 recorded wars. Europeans were fighting and killing each other as tribes, much before the Greek and Roman Empires came into existence.
The Athens-Sparta wars, the Peloponnesian War, the expansionist wars of the Roman Empire, etc., are part of Europe’s history and need not be retold here. But it is Europe’s obsession with war and killing from Achilles to Putin (or Zelensky) that needs to be emphasized and reiterated. From sticks to stone hammers, bronze and later iron and steel, armour and edged weapons like the dagger sword and spear, Europe kept developing and improving the tools of killing.
The 19th and 20th centuries saw the explosion of technological development and innovations. The age of iron, steel, coal and steam came to the world. Railways steamships, the telegraph and then the radio, automobiles, machine guns, tanks, airplanes and the submarine came into being. All this enabled European nation-states to muster, equip, arm, transport and command more men than ever before in their history, with deadlier firepower and killing capacity.
In the past 75 years alone, the invention of the atomic bomb, guided missile, the internet and cyber warfare have changed war and its dimensions like nothing else has.
Our contention that Europe has been the land of war, war and more war is easily proved by the sheer number of human beings who have perished because of European wars. Even if we were to leave aside all its ancient and medieval wars, the two World Wars (together) alone consumed 130 million lives. Even a relatively small power like Italy under its dictator Benito Mussolini was ready to jump into wars of aggrandizement owing to delusions about its armed might. Those delusions occurred as a result of the phenomenon of “armed suasion”: for quite some time Italy was believed to be the most formidable air power in Europe. Be that as it may, there is no denying that Europe, a meat-eating continent has been the land of war. To accuse Hindus of violence, therefore, is nothing but a moral travesty.
(The writer is a well-known columnist, an author and a former member of the Rajya Sabha; views are personal)
