Word: sadhus
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...meat-eating Moslems, on the other hand, slaughter some 1,000,000 cattle each year. Nehru had no patience with the wastefulness of the Hindu reverence for cows but never dared to thin out the uneconomic herds. Indira has also been ambivalent about the matter, and the sadhus (Hindu holy men) felt that near election time they could manage to force her to grant their ban-the-butcher request...
...problems have often been weak, this time she did not cave in. She insisted that under the constitution the issue was one for the states to decide separately, but offered to set up a national panel to study the situation. But nothing has placated the Hindu extremists. Naked sadhus rampaged in the shadow of Parliament as part of the national "All Party Cow Protection Movement," and two holy men have vowed to fast to the death unless she bows to their demand. Last week, after two months of hunger, both men were very weak. When false rumors of the death...
...rush was on. In the lead were the holy men. Many were completely naked, and had pinned their ban-the-butcher pennants in their long matted hair for lack of any place else to stick them. Some shouted, "The cow is our mother!" Dancing like dervishes, the sadhus swung steel-tipped staves, axes and tridents to drive back police. Behind them surged...
There are other brakes on progress: the rigidly entrenched caste system, the antipathy of the educated toward manual labor, the 8,000,000 wandering sadhus or holy men (80% reputed to be frauds) who live in idleness. These and the leaden weight of superstition and ignorance make of Indian life, in Nehru's despairing words, "a sluggish stream, living in the past, moving slowly through the accumulations of dead centuries...
Double-Edged Sword. The "government sadhus," as old-line holy men already contemptuously call them, are expected to return to their own parts of the country equipped to combat such evils as the caste system, official corruption, adulteration of foodstuffs and the disuniting influence of local dialects. They will also try to debunk the sadhu as an object of superstitious awe by presenting themselves simply as do-gooders, rather than miracle men, and interpreting Hindu scripture in terms of social service...