Mrs Gandhi says, "On the route to Kerala they don't bother with trucks or trains: they tie them and beat them and take them on foot, 20,000 to 30,000 per day." All Kerala's slaughter houses are on the border. "Because they have walked and walked and walked the cattle have lost a lot of weight, so to increase the weight and the amount of money they will receive, the traffickers make them drink water laced with copper sulphate, which destroys their kidneys and makes it impossible for them to pass the water - so when they are weighed they have 15kg of water inside them and are in extreme agony."Ingrid Newkirk, President of Peta, followed one of the caravans of cattle stumbling towards Kerala. "It's a hideous journey," she writes in the forthcoming issue of Animal Times, Peta's journal. "To keep them moving, drivers beat the animal across their hip bones, where there is no fat to cushion the blows The cows are not allowed to rest or drink Many cows sink to their knees. Drivers beat them and twist their battered tails to force them to rise.

If that doesn't work they torment the cows into moving by rubbing hot chilli peppers and tobacco into their eyes."When they finally make it to the slaughterhouses that stand on the Kerala border, the end they confront is unspeakable, Mrs Gandhi says. "In Kerala they also have a unique way of killing them - they beat their heads to a pulp with a dozen hammer blows. A well-intentioned visitor from the West, trying to improve slaughterhouse practice in Kerala, exhorted them to use stun guns, saying that the meat of an animal killed in this fashion (rather than having its throat slit) tasted sweeter. The stun guns that she left behind quickly broke and fell into disuse, but the belief that the meat was sweeter took hold - which explains this horrible method of slaughtering."The sentimental attitude towards animals prevalent these days in the West is alien to traditional India, as to the rest of Asia.

But respect and reverence for all life is fundamental to Hinduism - most Hindus are vegetarians even today - and the prevailing attitude is enshrined in the Gandhian word ahimsa, "do no harm".Yet greed, poverty, ignorance and absence of regulation and supervision have brought India's cows to the point where their treatment is on the threshold of becoming a major international scandal.At root it is a political issue. The ban on cow slaughter has been a fundamental plank of the Hindu nationalists for many decades - but a plank with which to bash cow-eating and cow-slaughtering Muslims, not to improve the lot of the actual cows. The apparent beneficiaries of the agitation, the cows, were of mainly symbolic importance.. The political stability of Indonesia and the credibility of its leader was dramatically thrown into question yesterday when President Abdurrahman Wahid failed to remove his former military chief, General Wiranto, from his cabinet. The political stability of Indonesia and the credibility of its leader was dramatically thrown into question yesterday when President Abdurrahman Wahid failed to remove his former military chief, General Wiranto, from his cabinet. General Wiranto was the head of the military when pro-Indonesian militias mounted a campaign of murder and destruction in East Timor following the territory's vote for independence last August.Mr Wahid returned from a 16-day foreign trip early yesterday.

While abroad, he had repeatedly told General Wiranto to resign after an official inquiry implicated him in the Timor unrest. But after a three-hour meeting with Mr Wahid, Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri and Attorney-General Marzuki Darusman, General Wiranto won his reprieve.Analysts said the climbdown by Mr Wahid sent worrying signals about the stability of Indonesia's first democratically elected government. As recently as Saturday the president pledged to remove the general from his Cabinet, whether or not he agreed to go.After the three-hour meeting, Mr Wahid desperately tried to save face. "I asked him to resign, but he asked to be examined by the law," Mr Wahid said "This is not a compromise.. There is no problem. Wiranto and me are good friends [but] the media perceives us to be enemies."Mr Wahid said he still believed Gen Wiranto should quit, but a decision would be delayed until the East Timor inquiry was over. "If the result of the report implicates him, then he must resign as I had already said before," he said.The military says it was not responsible for the atrocities in East Timor, although it concedes some individual troops took part in the bloodshed. The United Nations says Indonesia's military helped organise, and took part in, the violence.The general insists he is innocent of any wrongdoing , and should be presumed innocent until legal steps are over.