With officials cracking down, the number of
animals slaughtered during the Gadhimai festival has dropped sharply over the
years.
By Bhadra Sharma
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Devotees
waited with livestock to be slaughtered during the Gadhimai festival in
Bariyarpur, Nepal,
on Tuesday. Credit Rebecca Conway for The New York Times
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BARIYARPUR,
Nepal — The animals were
bused to southern Nepal in the thousands: rats, starved goats and pigeons
stuffed in bags.
But that was just part of the sacrifice. A
few hundred butchers then gathered on Tuesday with curved knives to decapitate
water buffalo during what is believed to be the world’s largest ritual slaughter,
the weekslong Gadhimai festival in the town of Bariyarpur, near Nepal’s
southern border with India.
As the butchers hacked away in a closed arena
about the size of a soccer field, devotees tried climbing walls topped with
barbed wire to catch a glimpse.
“It’s always fun to behead animals,” said Ram
Aashish Das, who said he had slaughtered 30 buffalo this week. “If the
tradition is so bad, why are so many people coming here?”
For centuries, the story goes, thousands of
animals have been sacrificed in the town every five years to appease the
goddess Gadhimai, who many believe has the power to grant wishes. Hindu pilgrims
have long made it a point to come witness the slaughter. (Though killing cows,
a sacred animal to Hindus, is prohibited in parts of India and Nepal,
slaughtering water buffalo does not carry the same taboo.)
But this year’s festival has played out
differently. Nepal’s central government refused to fund the event, citing a
Supreme Court ban on supporting animal sacrifices. In recent days, activists
and police officials have gathered along Nepal’s border with India, from where
many of the animals are illegally smuggled, and tried to block trucks from
passing through.
Their efforts have paid off. In 2009, during
a particularly brutal festival, up to 500,000 animals were slaughtered. Five
years later, the number was reduced to 30,000. And on Tuesday, this year’s
heaviest day for sacrifices, about 3,500 buffalo were killed, activists said.
Those numbers will increase when the rest of the sacrificed animals are
counted, but are unlikely to reach 30,000.
“The suffering of these animals is so
upsetting,” Alokparna Sengupta, Humane Society International’s managing
director in India, said in a statement. “They have endured exhausting journeys
to get here and are paraded in front of a baying crowd as all around them they
witness other animals being decapitated, one by one.”
Ms. Sengupta said her group had pleaded with
the head priest at the Gadhimai temple to cancel the festival, reminding her of
a pledge the temple made several years ago to end it, but that “he has chosen
to do nothing as far as we are aware.”
On Monday, a day before the killings started,
Manoj Gautam, a Nepali animal rights activist, filed a contempt-of-court case
against the government and the temple committee for not doing more to stop the
gathering. In 2014, India outlawed transporting animals across the border to
the Gadhimai festival. Shortly after, Nepal’s Supreme Court banned officials
from supporting the festival.
But those rulings have not fully curbed its
popularity in Nepal, a mountainous, majority Hindu nation.
Early this week, hundreds of thousands of
devotees, many from some of India and Nepal’s poorest villages, arrived in
Bariyarpur on tractors and packed buses. Some walked barefoot for miles to pray
to the goddess. Before the killings began, event supporters chased animal
rights activists from a hotel, yelling at them that the tradition was an
integral part of their religion.
“People come here with animals and fear that
something bad may happen if their promise to the goddess is not delivered,” said
Birendra Yadav, the secretary of the festival’s organizing committee. “We are
not encouraging people to sacrifice animals, but neither can we reject it.”
Locals believe the Gadhimai festival started
around 265 years ago, when a Nepali farmer called Bhagwan Chaudhary had a dream
that his problems could be solved if he offered blood to the goddess Gadhimai.
For the initial sacrifice, he lanced five points on his body.
Since then, the metrics have changed, with
animal blood replacing human blood, and Mr. Chaudhary’s descendants assuming
leadership positions in the temple. Today’s Gadhimai festival has become so
popular that wealthy businessmen and politicians have constructed welcome signs
along the road leading to Bariyarpur.
Despite security patrols along Nepal’s porous
border with India, dozens of trucks arrived in town carrying animals shriveled
from dehydration and lack of food. Buffalo were transported using tractors.
Goats and pigeons were moved in containers strapped to the roofs of buses.
Though the festival lasts a few weeks, the
slaughter typically takes place on the last two days. It begins with a
sacrifice of the “pancha bali,” a set of five animals: a rat, a goat, a
buffalo, a pig and a chicken.
At the entrance to the main arena, which was
not accessible to the public, butchers carrying kukri knives whooped Tuesday
morning as the temple’s committee read out their names. The crowd cheered as
the men stepped inside the enclosure, where thousands of buffalo were eating
grass and hay, to start the sacrifice.
About six hours later, when every buffalo had
been killed, the butchers emerged from the arena with blood-soaked feet.
“Only good and happy people come here,” said
Jaya Kumar Ram, a Nepali pilgrim standing outside the enclosure. “Because of
blessings from the goddess, I have four children now and they are all in good
health.”
As evening fell, festival organizers began
preparations to move the carcasses.
They would bury the heads near the temple
complex, and ship the skins and meat for sale in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.
Then they would transform the field once again, into a ground for soccer and
cricket matches.
Kai Schultz contributed reporting from New
Delhi.
Correction: Dec. 6, 2019
An earlier version of this article referred
incorrectly to Humane Society International’s managing director in India. The
official, Alokparna Sengupta, is a woman.