When the humanising aroma of Lucknow’s Tunday Kababi reminded editors of their solemn duty towards Indian culture, the fate of the Yogi Adityanath government’s drive against illegal slaughterhouse was sealed in a major section of English press. Tunday kebab is such a precious part of Indian culinary culture that every English newspaper reading Indian, vegetarian or non-vegetarian, must try to protect it. Somehow reverence for cows is not a part of Indian culture and only the vernacular buffoons regard cows as anything more than a mammal to be slaughtered for delicacies.The kebab-culturalists should give a clarion call for uniting to save Tunday kebab from living cows, or for that matter, from those sinister dark skinned buffaloes.

Kebab romantics shouldn’t be distracted by homilies of the constitution, never mind that its provisions are sometimes useful for our brigade too. Especially when we raise the spectre of its provisions being subverted. But, some of the sermons in it – as in the Directive Principles of State Policy- are so bovine that they are labelled Gandhian. Don’t be stuck with the thought that the tag had utility for some of our causes too. It seems nativist moorings got expressed in Article 48-“The State shall take steps for preserving and  improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter, of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.’’

These moments of beef kebab solidarity also call for some pragmatic measures. We shouldn’t care about what National Green Tribunal, that judicial address for our Jantar Mantar green activism, asked UP government to do long back- close illegal slaughterhouses and regulate meat shops.

And you know how we trapped that renegade Gaurav Sawant, executive editor of India Today, with charges of frivolity when our actual grouse was against the majoritarian cows being taken care of at Yogi’s place in Gorakhpur. We managed to delude ourselves with the idea that we can’t stand frivolous news. We know with impish glee that we love it- from following the baby shower functions of celebrities to Delhi Chief Minister’s movie reviews, if not his updates on loose motions. We lap up stories about public figures playing with their Labradors or German Shepherds, but to think of UP CM attending to his communal cows at 3 am is too scandalous. Again don’t be derailed from the kebab track with the fact that Yogi was only doing what a lot of people in agrarian and pastoral Indian plains do early in the morning.

The important thing to raise the alarm against is the cow and what the mammal means for a section of people who are also somehow living in this country- the rustic majority. Even talking about Hindi writer Mahadevi Verma’s moving story about her cow Gaura would be too saffron for our Chomsky reading liberated souls.

You must know that by discrediting the everyday idiolect and habits of millions of religiously inclined people is how we became so predictable that even the Prime Minister saw through it. Remember how he decoded our script very well during his visit to Japan in 2014. After gifting the Bhagvad Gita to Japanese Emperor Akihito in Tokyo, PM Narendra Modi said something that revealed how our kebab-secular tribe in the media has demonised the use of religious texts, symbolism and the vocabulary of the vast majority in a country which is predominantly religious in its outlook. “For gifting, I brought a Gita. I do not know what will happen in India after this. There may be a TV debate on this. Our secular friends will create ‘toofan’ (storm), that what does Modi think of himself? He has taken a Gita with him that means he has made this one also communal”, he quipped.

We provided him with enough evidence the same day to prove that he was right. Amit Baruah, one of our men covering the PM’s visit to Japan, filed a report in  The Hindu showing how removed people in the English press are, from the ways in which millions of Indians really speak. Ignoring the fact that such religious metaphors are part of everyday conversation for  Indians, Baruah thought it was newsy enough to begin his report with Modi’s use of such vocabulary.

“If the Hindu female pantheon was likened with a ministry, then education was with goddess Saraswati, money with Lakshmi, security with Mahakali and food security with the goddess Annapurna. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India was the only country in the world where god was conceptualised in the female form,” wrote Baruah.

There are people who argue that in the process of imposing the arrogant protocol of non-believers on a country of believers, we beef enthusiasts unwittingly aided the rise of Modi at the first place. Social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan has observed: “Modi was therapeutic for a generation that felt that elite modernisation was a hypocritical affair conducted by groups which used words like ‘secular’ to dismiss the thought processes of a middle class more rooted in religion. By articulating such anxieties, Modi soothed their wounded subconscious. And this ‘wounded class’, tired of pseudo secularism, elite cronyism and majoritarian hypocrisy, voted him to power.”

When we house warming party revellers mock the puja performed at Yogi’s Kalidas Marg residence in Lucknow, we distance ourselves from a large number of Indians for whom grih-pravesh rituals are regular affairs. But, most likely, they may be vegetarians too – a sign of them being not liberated enough to be of our ilk.

Our comrades in media space have been working as gatekeepers of kebab- democracy ensuring that the everyday grih-pravesh banality doesn’t sneak into its cerebral realms. But, it seems the anarchy of social media would threaten us, it’s already doing so. As adman and social commentator Santosh Desai has argued, that digital space has allowed the majority to get itself heard without the filters of squeamish political correctness.

The ‘common sense’ that we kebab-democrats have injected in English media chatter and the assumptions of the ‘educated’ has taken care of being distant from the commoners as far as possible. The electoral defeats that we have suffered and the general approval of government’s moves among the natives show that despite being bloated with all talk of people’s voice, and beef-kebab of course, the actual act of people speaking becomes indigestible for us. So a safe way to secure Tunday kebabs from the living cows and dark buffaloes is to talk among ourselves, listening to people isn’t that encouraging.