Right-wing Hindu nationalism in India is forcing a number of changes in the use of animals in medical research, food and consumer products.
In May, Indian officials announced they were planning on labeling all cosmetics and personal hygiene products as to whether or not they were “vegetarian.” This came after officials had early proposed labeling medicines as to whether or not they were “vegetarian.” That proposal was ultimately rejected on the grounds that almost all medicine would have to be labeled “non-vegetarian” and might discourage strict vegetarians from accepting them.
But medical research in India has nonetheless been hampered by India’s Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act which centralized the ability to approve or deny experiments involving animals to a single committee chaired by Indian animal rights activist and welfare minister Maneka Gandhi.
A series of laws passed in the late 1990s further granted this Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals the sole power to import large animals. The result is that conducting medical research in India has to go through a number of time-consuming steps that has resulted in a drastic decline in the amount of research being conducted in the subcontinent.
When Gandhi is not busy blocking medical research, she is campaigning for Indians to abandon milk using the same sort of specious arguments cited by folks like Neal Barnard and Robert Cohen in the United States.
Gandhi and others don’t mince words about the purpose of such policies, which is explicitly to counteract fears of a growing Westernization of India. But India is not simply rejecting overt Westernization but rather it is turning its back on modernity in order to appeal to Hindus.
Nothing illustrates that more than the announcement in May that in a country with food problems and high levels of poverty, the Defense Ministry, which had been hit by bribery scandals a year earlier, would devote significant resources to translating an ancient Hindu military text that included folk recipes to make military assets invisible and invulnerable, and allow soldiers to see in the dark.
India Defense Minister George Fernandes actually claimed in all seriousness that information in the text included a recipe for a food substance that would feed a soldier for an entire month on a single serving!
India’s government appears to have abandoned all sense and reason, preferring instead to cater to right wing Hindu voters. Its increasingly tight regulation of animal industries is simply one symptom of that.
Sources:
Maneka kills research. The Economic Times of India, May 22, 2002.
India fashion ‘goes vegetarian’. Jill McGivering, The BBC, May 11, 2002.
India defence looks to ancient text. Shaikh Azizur Rahman, The BBC, May 14, 2002.