Hindus widely affirm that the cow is sacred and must not be killed or eaten. Revered as go-mata, the cow-mother, the animal is honored as a giver of milk and sustenance, associated with the earth's bounty and with deities such as Krishna the cowherd, and treated as an emblem of non-violence and selfless giving. Protection of the cow became a strong ethical, and in modern times social and political, value, and its slaughter is prohibited in many Indian states, with the specific scope and penalties of those laws varying considerably from one state to another.
The reverence's antiquity is a genuine point of scholarly disagreement rather than settled history. Vedic-era texts describe cattle sacrifice and, according to some historians of ancient India, including the philologist D. N. Jha, whose work on the question proved highly controversial, meat from cattle was consumed on certain ritual occasions in the earliest period; other scholars and most traditional Hindu authorities dispute this reading of the sources or treat the later, strict prohibition as the tradition's own authentic and continuous self-understanding rather than a later development. What is not disputed is that cow protection had become a firmly established value by the classical period and has only strengthened since, including in the twentieth century as a marker of religious and, at times, nationalist identity, a politicization that has itself become a subject of debate within and beyond Hindu communities.