[The changes in the cattle industry mirror what’s happening nationally for many of India’s 172 million Muslims, for whom lynchings, hate speech and anti-Muslim rhetoric from a host of legislators from Modi’s party have taken a toll. In Mahaban, Muslim cattle traders say their way of life is being slowly strangulated by the policies of a government and its allies intent on establishing Hindu supremacy.]
By Annie Gowen
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Buffaloes
are penned outside a cattle fair in Pinjari, India, on May 4 before being
taken away for slaughter in
the state of Uttar Pradesh. (Poras Chaudhary/For
The Washington Post)
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MAHABAN,
India — In the year since an
extremist Hindu monk was tapped to lead one of India’s biggest states, the
country’s Muslim cattle traders have seen their lives change in ways they could
not have imagined.
First, mobs of Hindu vigilantes emboldened by
the monk’s victory began swarming buffalo trucks on the road, intent on finding
smugglers illegally transporting cows, which are sacred to the Hindu faith and
protected from slaughter in many places in India. Some Muslim men have been
killed by lynch mobs, as recently as June 18.
Then dozens of slaughterhouses and 50,000
meat shops were closed, severely limiting access to red meat, a staple of the
Muslim community’s diet. Hundreds from the Qureshi clan, Muslims in the meat
trade for centuries, lost their jobs.
Recent moves led by the Hindu nationalist
party of Narendra Modi to tighten “cow protection” laws have contributed to a
15 percent drop in India’s $4 billion beef export industry, until recently the
largest in the world, disrupting the country’s traditional livestock economy
and leaving hundreds without work at a time when India needs to add jobs, not
lose them.
The changes in the cattle industry mirror
what’s happening nationally for many of India’s 172 million Muslims, for whom
lynchings, hate speech and anti-Muslim rhetoric from a host of legislators from
Modi’s party have taken a toll. In Mahaban, Muslim cattle traders say their way
of life is being slowly strangulated by the policies of a government and its
allies intent on establishing Hindu supremacy.
“It’s undeniable that the last four or five
years, it has become much worse for Muslims in India,” said Nazia Erum, the
author of a recent book about Muslim families. “It’s okay to hate now. Hatred
has been given a mainstream legitimacy.”
A
dangerous drive
Bhurra Qureshi, 40, loaded the last of the
buffaloes on the truck, having negotiated the terms of their passage from the
village’s livestock market to the meat-processing plant in Aligarh, about two
hours away.
He was happy to get $80 to transport the 14
hulking black buffaloes because his hauling business was way down. Buffaloes
can be legally slaughtered in this part of India, where cows cannot, and it is
buffalo meat that drives India’s beef export industry. But when he climbed into
the rig, Qureshi’s mind turned to the pitfalls of the drive ahead.
There is new danger on State Highway 80, the
only way to Aligarh. Once a sleepy backwater of religious pilgrims and camel
carts, it has become a minefield of Hindu zealots waving bamboo sticks and
police allegedly exacting hefty bribes.
“I’m always apprehensive before I start,”
Qureshi said. “My wife asks me to stop driving and do something else, but I
tell her I know no other work.”
Traders who run buffaloes legally — buffaloes
are not revered in India as cows are — have been beaten and thrown in jail, and
their animals and trucks confiscated by Hindu activists or the police, risks
that have contributed to a 30 percent rise in transportation costs in the past
year, according to Fauzan Alavi, vice president of the All India Meat and
Livestock Exporters Association.
To buy “peace on the highway,” as he put it,
these middlemen are paying less to the farmers in livestock markets and
charging more to the meat exporters upon delivery.
Qureshi piloted the rusty truck through the
village, past its three mosques, past tiny shops, past out-of-work men on
stoops, past the sherbet-orange Hindu temple. He hung a left at the cow shelter
at the end of the road, a sort of Humane Society for bovines, overflowing these
days since farmers can no longer sell their old cows to smugglers because of
the government crackdown and have begun turning them loose in the streets.
His first test came at the railway junction
at Bichpuri, where khaki-uniformed police officers stopped the truck and asked:
“What are you doing? Where are you taking this truck?”
To Aligarh, he told them politely. They waved
him on, but a man on a motorcycle followed the truck and exacted a small bribe.
Even as India attempts to move beyond its
rigid social order of caste, critics charge that elite upper-caste Hindus, many
of whom eschew meat, are increasingly imposing their vegetarian culture on a
country where many eat meat and where buffalo is a cheap source of protein for
Muslims and those from lower castes. Modi once derided India’s soaring meat
exports as a “pink revolution.”
When Yogi Adityanath — known for his inflammatory
statements about Muslims — came to power in the state of Uttar Pradesh last
year, he ordered slaughterhouses closed, and 50,000 meat shops also shut their
doors. Some but not all of the butchers were unlicensed, part of India’s
thriving informal economy.
The move has had broad repercussions for the
2,200 Muslims of Mahaban, a third of whom lost their jobs. The local
slaughterhouse run by the municipal council was closed, along with four meat
shops. Since then, Adityanath’s government has made it harder for
slaughterhouses to reopen, rescinding laws that required municipalities to run
them and mandating that they be moved outside cities for hygienic reasons.
“The government has sent a message: Whatever
facilities we were providing to Muslims, we’re not going to provide them
anymore,” said Yusuf Qureshi, president of the All India Jamiatul Quresh Action
Committee, a civil society group.
Adityanath’s chief spokesman defended the
move, saying officials were enforcing environmental norms mandated by the
courts in 2015. He also noted that the state is modernizing its 16,000
madrassas, or Islamic schools.
“Adityanath ordered a crackdown on illegal
slaughterhouses. It was not an ‘anti-Muslim’ drive,” Mrityunjay Kumar, the
chief spokesman, said in a statement to The Washington Post. “There was some
disruption, but then nobody can make a case for unlicensed butcher shops. After
the initial hiccups, the meat business is back on track.”
But villagers disagree, and during the Muslim
holy month of Ramadan, known as Ramzan in India, the traders were outraged that
their evening meal did not include beef. The town butcher, Yunis Qureshi, who
closed his shop last year during the crackdown, now sells fried snacks on the
side of the road.
“We’ve been forced to become vegetarians!” he
said.
Worse, he said, the government’s actions have
deepened the divide in the village between Hindus and Muslims.
“Ever since this government has come in, I
feel like people look at me and see a Muslim for the first time,” the butcher
said. “They’ve shut down our businesses, changed the food we eat. . . .
Of course we’re going to feel persecuted because we’re Muslims.”
'We
don't go after innocents'
As Bhurra Qureshi’s truck rattled through the
small town of Iglas, he was glad to see that the dusty lot where the Hindu cow
vigilantes normally lie in wait, next to a sign that says “Yogi’s Army” — with
bamboo sticks at hand, saffron scarves obscuring their faces — was empty.
“We don’t go after innocents,” Bobby
Chaudhary, a leader of the vigilantes, said in a later interview. “We go in
groups so there is no need to beat them. We catch them and call police.”
A few miles after that post comes the Aasna
police station, where two dozen traders said in interviews that police officers
have begun demanding bribes and beating them if they refuse to pay. Outside,
officers man a barricade and wave the truckers to stop. Inside, beyond the
temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, an officer sits behind a desk, writing
dozens of tickets.
The traders have fistfuls of these tickets
for offenses such as reckless driving or speeding, even though the police have
no radar equipment and the closed-camera television monitor shows only the
front of the station, where the trucks are already stopped. One day in May,
half of the screen was obscured by a giant spider.
“We are estimating,” explained R.N. Tiwari,
the sub-inspector in charge, who denied that he or his officers roughed up the
traders or asked for money above the ticketed amount.
“Everybody says we take more money, but we
don’t,” Tiwari said. “Whatever tickets we cut, that is the money we take, and
that goes into government coffers.”
He said police are just following state
officials’ orders: “We’ve been told to cut as many tickets as possible.”
Qureshi alleged that officers attempting to
negotiate a bribe recently beat him with a baton and forced him to squat like a
chicken, with his arms woven through his legs and gripping his ears — a common
punishment for schoolchildren. He left the station humiliated, wondering again
whether he should leave this line of work.
Just as Qureshi approached the city limits of
Aligarh, he was stopped again and asked for cash by a state police officer
parked in a black sport-utility vehicle under a highway overpass. (The officer
later denied taking money.)
By the time Qureshi arrived at the gates of
the meat-processing plant, the temperature had soared to 105 degrees, but his
face shone in relief. He had had to pay only $6 in bribes this trip, which
dented but didn’t wipe out his day’s pay of $80. He would drive again the next
day, Qureshi said, and began pulling the buffaloes off the truck. He was
smiling as the animals lumbered to their fate.
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