Maharashtra's Qureshis lose out in beef ban

While the beef-eaters could adjust their diets, the legal defeat was deflating for the Qureshi community

A grim video has been circulating among farmers across the sunbaked plains of Maharashtra travelling from one cellphone to the next via WhatsApp.

In the video, a man stands with his two trusty bulls at a cattle market. A crowd surrounds him, transfixed by his emphatic lamentations. He cries out that his beasts of burden are old and unable to work and that his meagre savings are nearly gone. He needs to sell the animals, but none of the usual buyers – the Hindu middlemen who sell the bulls to Muslims for slaughter – are buying. Without the money from the old bulls, he says, he will never be able to afford new ones.

“How am I supposed to keep farming?” he shouts. “Should I just hang myself here in this market?” The threat does not feel empty. This particular expanse of central Indian hinterland has achieved international notoriety for suicide – since 2011, about four farmers a day, on average, have taken their own lives.

The BJP, which had already swept into power across much of the country, also won elections in Maharashtra, a state that includes the cosmopolitan city of Mumbai. By March, the party had revived and passed a long-stuck piece of legislation – the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act – that bans the slaughter of “cow progeny” and makes the sale and even possession of beef punishable with prison sentences of up to five years.

The law has closed off the cattle supply chain, a source of livelihood for more than one million Maharashtrians of every religion, according to labour union representatives. To non-Indians, it may come as a surprise that there is much of a beef industry in India at all. Roughly 80 per cent of its 1.25 billion people call themselves Hindus, a third practice some degree of vegetarianism, and according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, India has the lowest meat consumption rate in the world.

But India also has the world’s largest “bovine inventory” – as it is called by industry analysts - with just over 300 million cattle and water buffalo. Buffalo meat, known as “carabeef,” is India’s most valuable agricultural export, recently beating out basmati rice by a slim margin.
The ban on beef was upheld in April by the Bombay High Court. While those who ate beef could adjust their diets, the legal defeat was particularly deflating for the hundreds of thousands of members of the Qureshi community in Maharashtra. In India’s jigsaw puzzle of castes, many of which are linked to specific jobs, the Qureshis, who are Muslim, are the piece responsible for cattle slaughter.

Almost all members of the community use Qureshi as a last name, so many go by a single first name. Badshah, a 50-year-old father of two who used to sell offal to local restaurants, hasn’t made money since the ban took effect. “I can’t even write my own name. Most of us can’t,” he said, referring to Qureshis. “I’ve spent my whole life doing the same thing. When there’s a beef ban, it’s like saying there is a Qureshi ban.

Badshah and hundreds of other Qureshis work in the Deonar slaughterhouse in Mumbai and live in the slum across the road. Ramzan, a butcher, still works at a small shop, but he is the only employee left. “We were selling 250 kilos of meat a day,” said Ramzan, who predicts the shop will have to close by year’s end. “Now that it’s only buffalo, it’s down to 40. People think beef is better because bulls work hard in the fields and develop better meat.”

The shelves of Vyankatesh Abdeo’s office are lined with 48 potions, pastes and powders, all made from cow dung, cow urine or a blend of the two. One collection of large bottles is filled with bright yellow liquid and bears the label “Fresh urine (purifies and rectifies the body).” Tins of “dung pack,” with instructions to apply on the face and body while bathing, fill an adjacent cabinet. Abdeo is the central secretary, Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

The group has organised mass actions around social issues that matter deeply to the kind of voter who brought the BJP to power: discouraging Hindus from converting to other religions, preventing interfaith marriages and stopping the slaughter of cows and their progeny.

“This is a Hindu nation. In Hindu society, we see the cow as our mother. Its killing or the killing of its progeny is intolerable,” said Abdeo. “This ban is one of our biggest wishes fulfilled. People must be re-educated as to the many uses of cattle products as well. The cattle products Abdeo is referring to are those that can be harvested from both cows and bulls while the animal is alive, primarily urine and dung. He believes that over the course of the next decade, the market for those products could soar, rivalling the amounts made on the parts taken from slaughtered cattle such as meat, leather and gelatin.

Abdeo and Maharashtra’s minister of agriculture, Eknath Khadse, said in interviews that they see opportunities for a new and thriving industry in which urine and dung from cows and bulls can be used as fertilisers, herbal medicines, cosmetics, nutritional supplements and, as cow dung has been used for eons, a cooking fuel and building material.

While no official survey has been done, Mohammed Ali Qureshi estimated that 5,00,000 or more people, many of whom are Qureshis, have lost their jobs because of the state ban. Milind Ranade, a senior organiser for Sarva Shramik Sangh, one of India’s oldest and most established labour unions, agreed with Qureshi’s job loss estimate but stressed that while most of those who lost their jobs may be Muslim, far more Hindus’ livelihoods may be put in jeopardy by the ban.

“The BJP wants this to be seen as a communal issue because it rings well with their vote base. And of course, it is a way to punish Muslims,” he said. “But what of the millions of Hindu farmers who sold cattle as a key source of income?”

Livestock census

There have been bans on beef in other states for decades – the Maharashtra ban was the 11th – but there is no body of research on the economic effects. One result could be more buffalo slaughter. Exports of buffalo, which are not revered, rose 16 per cent during BJP’s first six months in office, compared with the same period a year earlier.

According to India’s most recent livestock census, buffalo make up just over a third of the national bovine inventory, yet their proportions are significantly higher in states like Haryana and Punjab where beef bans have been in place since shortly after independence in 1947.

At Deonar, the number of buffaloes being slaughtered is rising: about 300 a day, up from 90 before the ban. Indian buffalo meat is already prized in the Arab and East Asian markets. Last year, India exported $4.3 billion of beef, ostensibly all from buffalo, because India has never allowed the export of cattle meat, even before the recent law was passed.

Still, a Mumbai exporter of buffalo meat with 25 years of experience said that it was well known in the industry that cattle meat regularly made its way into exports. With the Bombay High Court’s imprimatur now on the ban, the sense that a popular movement or legal attack can overturn it is waning.

Before the appeal in the high court was rejected, Sarva Shramik Sangh and the statewide Qureshi community were able to draw thousands of protesters to the centre of Mumbai. The union planned another rally, on May 5, advertising to journalists that it expected 1,00,000 to descend on the city from all over the state. Fewer than 100 people showed up.

International New York Times