An impoverishing politics: Cruel food and farm licence raj destroys livelihoods across the board in BJP ruled states
This is not an article about Hindus and
Muslims and cows and beef. It’s about livelihoods being cruelly taken
away, possibly because of prejudice, equally because of a creeping
licence raj for a particular sector.
Aale Naavi Qureshi walks around with a laminated copy of a licence issued on January 17, 2015, by authorities in Noida, UP. It permits him to continue running his traditional meat shop that sells mutton and chicken. The licence is valid for five years until 2020. But three days after BJP came to power in UP in March this year, the police came round and asked him to upgrade the shop to include tiles, geysers and new pipes.
He did so, spending Rs 3 lakh. Yet he was told that his licence was no longer valid (something open to a legal challenge). Now out of work for nearly six months, this large man weeps and says that the government wants us to educate our children when we have to pull them out of schools – “Send me to the border to fight our enemies, find me some other work, or kill us all.”
Dilshad, who once owned three small tempos that carried meat to
butcher shops from the Ghazipur slaughterhouse in Delhi, has lost two
vehicles to the financiers and finds little use for the third.
Production is down to half at Ghazipur as the entire supply chain is
hit. In the past the labour that carted animals made Rs 500 a day. Now
many have returned to their villages. Dilshad’s family has taken to
selling bananas on a cart.
The crisis hitting small butcher shops, cattle farmers and transporters of meat in the arc of states around Delhi – Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh – is a tale of slow death with an occasional lynching such as that of Pehlu Khan thrown in. Last week the Rajasthan police closed investigations into six people named by dairy farmer Pehlu Khan in his dying statement following a mob attack in April this year.
But the story is not just about cows and buffaloes but about mutton, chicken and fish as well. It’s also not just about Muslims but Dalits and some Gujjars as well. Meet Jaggu who ran a pork meat shop in Noida; also shut down for five months leaving him no choice but to work as labour. Meet Imamuddin, who would collect fish from a pond, carry it in a basket on his head and then squat on a pavement and sell it in a semi-urban part of UP. He is being asked for a licence, from whom he does not know, from where he does not know.
What he does know is that other street hawkers are not being asked to run in hoops in the manner in which those dealing in non-vegetarian food, raw or cooked, are. He points out that many of his fellow fish mongers are Hindus. At the subsistence level at which Imamuddin and Jaggu survive, the real oppressor is the police not the politicians who obviously don’t care.
There is a Kafkaesque illogicality about the process meat shop owners are being subjected to. Alfaiz Moinuddin also walks around with a licence he shows to anyone who would care to listen. In Loni, Ghaziabad district of UP, he has been asked to connect his shop to sewer lines that do not exist and therefore the shop lies closed. He stresses that many employees were non-Muslims.
While their livelihood has been seriously threatened, there is income generation for police and petty bureaucracy who keep demanding bribes at every stage of the process after which the shop may still remain closed.
Cattle farming too has become a risky business. Shaukat Ali from Alwar district of Rajasthan, recently faced the trauma of ten milk producing cows being taken to a gaushala by police and cow vigilantes as they were being moved between state borders. In the gaushala the cows were not milked properly resulting in their udders being blocked and subsequently infected. After paying bribes, the family got their cows released but found them sick so is tending to them. They now request Hindu cattle farmers to sit in front of the vehicles when cattle has to be transported.
From farming to exports, these individual stories highlight the acute distress a systematic assault on the meat business has caused. It’s happening across religious lines, with sections of Hindus also becoming collateral damage in what appears to be actually targeted at Muslims. Dalits, who work as labour in the meat business and tanneries are hit; middle caste farmers who cannot sell old cattle are impacted.
Whichever way one looks at it, the only people who benefit would be those who gain from extortion and/ or are ideologically driven. As we can see, it’s moved beyond beef, to all things non-vegetarian. Since it makes for poor economics, presumably it’s about making a symbolic gesture against people who are not seen as voters of the new rulers of states in the cow belt.
The suggestion that this is motivated by a desire for civic cleanliness rings hollow: the biggest hit on the meat business has come from UP, where the constituency of the chief minister is disease ridden and packed with garbage.
The butchers and slaughterhouses are on their knees, ready to comply with reasonable rules. They insist their crisis should not be viewed from an identity lens but an economic lens. Still, one can’t miss the nasty prejudice determined to impoverish people who are part of a traditional profession practised across the world.
Aale Naavi Qureshi walks around with a laminated copy of a licence issued on January 17, 2015, by authorities in Noida, UP. It permits him to continue running his traditional meat shop that sells mutton and chicken. The licence is valid for five years until 2020. But three days after BJP came to power in UP in March this year, the police came round and asked him to upgrade the shop to include tiles, geysers and new pipes.
He did so, spending Rs 3 lakh. Yet he was told that his licence was no longer valid (something open to a legal challenge). Now out of work for nearly six months, this large man weeps and says that the government wants us to educate our children when we have to pull them out of schools – “Send me to the border to fight our enemies, find me some other work, or kill us all.”
The crisis hitting small butcher shops, cattle farmers and transporters of meat in the arc of states around Delhi – Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh – is a tale of slow death with an occasional lynching such as that of Pehlu Khan thrown in. Last week the Rajasthan police closed investigations into six people named by dairy farmer Pehlu Khan in his dying statement following a mob attack in April this year.
But the story is not just about cows and buffaloes but about mutton, chicken and fish as well. It’s also not just about Muslims but Dalits and some Gujjars as well. Meet Jaggu who ran a pork meat shop in Noida; also shut down for five months leaving him no choice but to work as labour. Meet Imamuddin, who would collect fish from a pond, carry it in a basket on his head and then squat on a pavement and sell it in a semi-urban part of UP. He is being asked for a licence, from whom he does not know, from where he does not know.
What he does know is that other street hawkers are not being asked to run in hoops in the manner in which those dealing in non-vegetarian food, raw or cooked, are. He points out that many of his fellow fish mongers are Hindus. At the subsistence level at which Imamuddin and Jaggu survive, the real oppressor is the police not the politicians who obviously don’t care.
There is a Kafkaesque illogicality about the process meat shop owners are being subjected to. Alfaiz Moinuddin also walks around with a licence he shows to anyone who would care to listen. In Loni, Ghaziabad district of UP, he has been asked to connect his shop to sewer lines that do not exist and therefore the shop lies closed. He stresses that many employees were non-Muslims.
While their livelihood has been seriously threatened, there is income generation for police and petty bureaucracy who keep demanding bribes at every stage of the process after which the shop may still remain closed.
Cattle farming too has become a risky business. Shaukat Ali from Alwar district of Rajasthan, recently faced the trauma of ten milk producing cows being taken to a gaushala by police and cow vigilantes as they were being moved between state borders. In the gaushala the cows were not milked properly resulting in their udders being blocked and subsequently infected. After paying bribes, the family got their cows released but found them sick so is tending to them. They now request Hindu cattle farmers to sit in front of the vehicles when cattle has to be transported.
From farming to exports, these individual stories highlight the acute distress a systematic assault on the meat business has caused. It’s happening across religious lines, with sections of Hindus also becoming collateral damage in what appears to be actually targeted at Muslims. Dalits, who work as labour in the meat business and tanneries are hit; middle caste farmers who cannot sell old cattle are impacted.
Whichever way one looks at it, the only people who benefit would be those who gain from extortion and/ or are ideologically driven. As we can see, it’s moved beyond beef, to all things non-vegetarian. Since it makes for poor economics, presumably it’s about making a symbolic gesture against people who are not seen as voters of the new rulers of states in the cow belt.
The suggestion that this is motivated by a desire for civic cleanliness rings hollow: the biggest hit on the meat business has come from UP, where the constituency of the chief minister is disease ridden and packed with garbage.
The butchers and slaughterhouses are on their knees, ready to comply with reasonable rules. They insist their crisis should not be viewed from an identity lens but an economic lens. Still, one can’t miss the nasty prejudice determined to impoverish people who are part of a traditional profession practised across the world.
