Sanitised spaces repulse me. The fact that there are no real dive bars – the truest test of one is stinky washrooms – in Delhi is perhaps my most serious issue with the city. I am shallow like that.

So, I am not quite in my element when J asks if I want sparkling water or still water. J is a server in Megu, a “Modern Japanese Cuisine” restaurant in The Leela Palace, arguably the city’s best five-star hotel.  J, in case you are wondering, is not Japanese. She is from the Northeast, like so many in Delhi’s food and beverage industry.

I am, for a moment, tempted to say sparkling water, but my editor has set me a fixed budget – and I am in no mood to spend from my own pocket.  More importantly, the assignment is not to report on the quality of water – sparkling or still – in five-star hotels.  I am supposed to find out what the beef-eating scene in the city, in the aftermath of the rise of the cow as a political animal (I couldn’t have not used that phrase), is like.

After a few sips of still water, I proceed to finally order a steak of beef (not buff).  Just that I figure that it is way above my budget. However, there are, J helpfully points out, beef starters too that just about come within my range, or aukaat, as the despicably ugly Delhi word goes.  After much calculation I finally settle on “Wagyu Slices Ishiyaki, Stone Grilled” – a signature Megu dish, J tells me.

Now, I had done my research and knew Wagyu is a breed of Japanese cow, but I ask nonetheless: “This is beef, and not buff, right?” J assures, me with a smile that it is indeed beef. “It’s imported from Japan, sir.”

By now, I am starting to enjoy my still water. “Do you have no Kobe on the menu?” I ask like a true connoisseur.  Kobe, for all you non-aficionados, is the highest and most expensive variety of the Wagyu cattle. Kobe, according to beef buffs, makes for the best steak. “No Kobe, sir; too difficult to import”, she tell me.  The difference between the Wagyu I will be eating in a while and Kobe, J explains, is the amount of marbling. Marbling, simply put, is the fat found within a cut of meat and between the muscle fibers. So basically, higher the marbling, better the steak.

The Ishiyaki turns out to be excellent; J grills the meat in front of me on a piece of river stone.  Just that it is very little. I go back home and order a vegetarian thali for dinner. No, the vegetable thali isn’t penance; it’s just the cheapest option for a full meal.

So, beef, one would assume, then is easily available, and the rise of the cow as a political animal, is still limited to the fringes of Delhi?

Well, not quite.

The next day, when I called up Megu – this time as a reporter and not a fussy beef connoisseur – an executive told me they don’t serve beef at all.  “We have never served beef  – we respect all religious sentiments.”  That’s a strange things to say, since Megu’s menu, hosted online on the website Zomato, also states that it serves Wagyu.  Incidentally, an executive in another restaurant of the same hotel, The Qube, told me over the phone that the restaurant served Angus beef, imported from the United States.

A chef in The Taj’s Japanese restaurant, Wasabi, told me that they serve Scottish beef. Scottish beef, according to the chef, is not beef at all; it’s buff imported from Scotland. According to the chef, the restaurant has never served beef in all its years of existence. Fair enough? No, not really, because the United States Department of Agriculture and the global meat industry do not make a distinction between beef and buff at all. Even buffalo meat is called beef.

So how does Wasabi know the meat it has been importing is buff and not beef? When I asked this to the chef, he said he’d check with his head chef and get back. He did get back, but with a flip-flop and not an explanation: “There was some confusion. We serve Indian buff and not imported buff.”

The chef’s somersault is understandable since there is a blanket ban on the “import of beef in any form and products containing beef in any form”. Any form, the owner of a Delhi-based meat importing company told me, includes buffalo meat also. “Since the international meat industry considers buffalo meat as beef, there is no way to possibly import only buff and not beef,” he said.   Curiously, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, in what appears to be in direct contradiction of India’s import laws, let restaurants serve “imported” canned beef.

An executive of the Oberoi Hotel, Delhi, also said that they don’t serve beef – and have never done so.  The public relations officer of Monkey Bar, a place well known for its beef burgers, refused to answer my queries. “We don’t participate in such discussions. We respect everyone’s sentiments and serve good food.” A Wall Street Journal review of the eatery’s popular burger, however, says that the “beef” is flown in from Bangalore.

So is this reluctance on part of restaurants to publicly admit they sell beef a recent phenomenon? (Remember that even possession of beef is a punishable offense in Delhi – and a law has been in place since 1994 that prohibit restaurants from selling even imported beef).  An industry insider tells me that even if people admitted to it a few years ago, the Dadri incident has “put the fear of god” into restaurateurs.

According to Riyaaz Amlani, president, National Restaurant Association of India, the passing of the new laws in Maharashtra and Haryana have led to people exercising more caution. “After the President approved of the new law in Haryana and Maharashtra, the issue is back in people’s consciousness – and restaurants have become all the more careful.”

SK Swami retired as the Joint Secretary, Department of Agriculture, Government of India. Swami, with whom I have corresponded over the phone a few times, will not be happy to hear about my wannabe sting journalist adventure.

He runs an organisation called Love4Cow. The name may sound frivolous but Swami is a serious man, and, he claims, his love for the cow is completely based on scientific and economic grounds.  To be fair, it indeed is.  “Organic farming is all the rage among you kids, but what is organic farming? Will it be possible without the cow?”

Swami has always been patient with me and has very convincingly explained in great detail how the rural economy is irrevocably linked to cows. “This is not about religion; a cow can make a rural family self-sufficient. If you do a cost-benefit analysis, the returns-to-investment ratio is always above one.”

According to Swami, whenever we have tried doing away with the dependence on the cow, we have suffered. “When they started using artificial fertilisers and moving away from using cow dung in Punjab, it led to a disproportionate number of people developing diabetes due to the lack of zinc in their diets.”

Swami is convinced that the popular discussion on beef-eating has been highly distorted. “When an Azam Khan says India is the world’s biggest exporter of beef, he doesn’t know what he is talking about. India exports buffalo meat, not cow meat,” he says.  The media, he tells me, laps us such irresponsible statements and makes an issue out of non-issues. “I have no problems with buffaloes being slaughtered. They buffalo is a completely different breed, but the media does not seem to understand that difference.”

When I point this out to him that the global meat industry does not distinguish between beef and buffalo meat, he says the Americans and Europeans are just “confused”.  The confusion, if one could call it that, though, seems to only work for India.

The problem, according to Swami, is ignorance. “Shobha De, who writes novels about sex, says it’s her right to eat beef, but does she even know what that beef is?”

“The cow is integral to the rural economy, we will oppose any move to kill it; you can do whatever you want to with the buffalo,” Swami says.

Swami’s is a moderate voice. Which is why it perhaps drowns in the sea of extreme voices like that of the Akhil Bharatiya Gau Sewa Sangh. A member of the group tells me there could not possibly be any discussion when it came to Gau Mata. Unsurprisingly, he sees no distinction between the water buffalo and the cow. “There are so many other things to eat. Why do Muslims have to eat beef?”

With the legitimacy extremist groups like Akhil Bharatiya Gau Sewa Sangh have started to enjoy of late (the organisation is an RSS affiliate), it is hardly surprising that the paranoia over beef in even supposedly cosmopolitan Delhi has risen.  Suddenly, no one wants to talk about it for the fear of “hurting religious sentiments”. The reality though, is, the cow has been hijacked by elements who care little about anyone’s sentiments, or for that matter, the economic dependence of rural India on the cow. While for someone like Swami, saving the cow may not have anything to do with religion, for the likes of Manohar Lal Khattar, it is clearly all about religion. Sadly for the country, though, a Khattar will always enjoy a larger audience.