"The cow," Mahatma Gandhi once said, "is a poem of pity." Last week India's sacred animal brought not pity but violence to the very doorstep of government. The occasion was a rally of 125,000 Hindus, who had come from all over India to pressure the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi into enacting a national ban on cattle slaughter. Converging on a traffic circle near Parliament, the demonstrators at first listened peacefully to speeches. Then a sadhu (Hindu holy man), a member of Parliament, sprang onto the speaker's stand. He had just been ushered out of the Lok Sabha,...
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