New Delhi, India — When night falls
in this gritty capital, gangs troll the darkened streets looking for easy prey
among a portion of the city’s vast homeless population; thousands have been
rounded up and carried off in trucks in recent years.
The police say they have increased
patrols and set up roadblocks in an effort to stop the trafficking. In some
cases, officers have infiltrated gangs in hopes of catching them in the act.
But the brutal kidnappings continue, and the victims — scrawny cows, which are
slowly losing their sacred status among some in India — are slaughtered and
sold for meat and leather.
Cattle rustling, called “lifting” here,
is a growing scourge in New Delhi, as increasingly affluent Indians develop a
taste for meat, even the flesh of cows, which are considered sacred in
Hinduism. Criminals round up some of the roughly 40,000 cattle that wander the
streets of this megacity and sell them to illegal slaughterhouses located in
villages not far away.
Many of the cattle in Delhi are part
of dairy operations and their owners have neither the land nor the money to
keep them penned. So the animals graze on grassy medians or ubiquitous piles of
trash. Others too old to be milked are often abandoned and left to wander the
streets until they die — or get picked up by the rustlers.
Posses of police officers give chase
to the outlaws, but the desperados — driving souped-up dump trucks — think
little of ramming police cars and breaking through barricades. They have even
pushed cows into the pathways of their pursuers, forcing horrified officers to
swerve out of the way to avoid what for many is still a grievous sin.
“These gangs mostly go after stray
cattle, but they will also steal motorcycles and scooters,” one police officer,
Bhisham Singh, said in an interview. “They kidnapped a woman recently and
gang-raped her.”
Behind the cattle rustling is a
profound shift in Indian society. Meat consumption — chicken, primarily — is
becoming acceptable even among Hindus. India is now the world’s largest dairy
producer, its largest cattle producer and its largest beef exporter, having
surpassed Brazil last year, according to the United States Department of
Agriculture.
Much of that exported beef is from
buffalo (India has half of the world’s buffalo population), which are not
considered holy. But officials in Andhra Pradesh recently estimated that there
are 3,100 illegal slaughterhouses in the state compared with just six licensed
ones, and a recent newspaper investigation found that tens of thousands of
cattle are sold annually for slaughter from a market in just one of that
state’s 64 districts. Killing cows is illegal in much of India, and some states
outlaw the possession of cow meat.
Much of the illicit beef is probably
sold as buffalo, an easy way to hide a sacrilegious act. But sometimes it makes
its way to meat sellers in Delhi whose cellphone numbers are passed around in
whispers. Steaks can be ordered from these illicit vendors in transactions that
are carried out like drug deals.
Beef from cattle is also widely
consumed by Muslims and Dalits, among India’s most marginalized citizens.
Indeed, meat consumption is growing the most among the poor, government
statistics show, with overall meat eating growing 14 percent from 2010 to 2012.
Anuj Agrawal, 28, said he grew up in
a strictly vegetarian Hindu household but tried chicken for the first time in
his teens when he was at a restaurant with friends. He now eats every kind of
meat, including beef steaks and burgers. “Once you taste meat, you’re not going
back to just fruits and vegetables,” Mr. Agrawal said.
He says many of his friends have
made similar transitions. But he never eats meat with his grandparents: “I
would be excommunicated if I did, so I go pure ‘veg’ when I’m with them. I want
to inherit something.”
To some extent, the growing
acceptance of beef is a result of the government’s intense focus on increasing
milk production, which has led to a proliferation of foreign cattle breeds that
do not elicit the same reverence as indigenous ones, said Clementien Pauws,
president of Karuna Society for Animals and Nature, an animal welfare agency in
Andhra Pradesh.
“Cows are all about business and
money now, not religion,” Ms. Pauws said. “They’re all taken to
slaughterhouses. It’s terrible.” This is not to say that eating beef from
cattle is widely accepted. The vast majority of Hindus still revere cows, and
the Bharatiya Janata Party, one of the country’s two major political parties,
has demanded that laws against cow slaughter be strengthened.
Some landlords even refuse to rent
to those who confess to a taste for meat. But the demand for beef keeps
rising, many here say, and with it the prevalence of cattle rustling. Last
year, the police in Delhi arrested 150 rustlers, a record number. This year,
arrests have continued to surge, Mr. Singh said.
Typically, the rustlers creep into
the city at night. When the criminals spot stray cattle and few onlookers they
stop the truck, push out a ramp and use a rope to lead the cow to its
doom. The thieves can usually fit about 10 cows on a truck, and each
fetches 5,000 rupees — about $94. In a country where more than 800 million
people live on less than $2 a day, a single night’s haul of more than $900
represents serious temptation.
One man who has helped the police in
neighboring Uttar Pradesh said the rustlers were often able to bribe their way
to freedom. “Even if they’re sent to jail, they come out in 10 to 15 days and
commit the same crimes again,” said the man, who did not want his name used for
fear of reprisals.
The unfortunate fate of some of
Delhi’s cattle has led some Hindus to establish cattle shelters on the fringes
of the metropolitan region. One of the largest is Shri Mataji Gaushala, where
thousands of cattle live on about 42 acres.
Sometimes, the rescue comes too
late. Brijinder Sharma, the shelter manager, whose office walls are decorated
with drawings of Lord Krishna hugging a calf, showed a video of a truck packed
with cattle that was seized on its way to an illegal slaughterhouse. Many of
the cows had already died of heat exhaustion.
“The social and religious status of
cows has been under attack in India,” Mr. Sharma said. He hopes that his shelter,
which has an annual budget of $5.4 million, underwritten almost entirely by
wealthy Indians who have emigrated to the United States, will help reverse that
trend.
The afternoon feeding at the shelter
attracted a crowd of happy onlookers. Abhishek, a one-named cowhand, called out
among the lowing throng: “Sakhi! Sakhi!” A large cow with huge horns rushed to
the front of the herd, and Mr. Abhishek kissed her on the nose.
The cow responded by licking one
entire side of his face, and Mr. Abhishek beamed.
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