By SHARIK LALIWALA & SABAH GURMAT & PRANNV DHAWAN
Kanpur, Lucknow and Unnao, Uttar Pradesh: A (name changed on request), was once a link between the bustling tanneries of the western Uttar Pradesh (UP) city of Kanpur and major shoe manufacturers, such as Bata and Red Tape, sending them up to 500 cleaned, salted and treated animal hides in every truckload.
Swarthy and diminutive, A, a fourth-generation arhatiya was one of 500 middlemen based in Kanpur’s once-booming Pech Bagh market, full of warehouses storing and selling hides for over 120 years. The warehouses are still there, except they are used now to sell wholesale garments. As for the arhatiyas, there are no more than 50, he said.
A said he would earn Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakh per order till about a decade ago, when the first challenges came in the form of large, company owned slaughterhouses. Then, he said, came the blow that felled 90% of the arhatiyas, a tightening of the laws against cow slaughter, after a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by chief minister Yogi Adityanath—who also ordered the closure of hundreds of unlicensed slaughterhouses—came to power in 2017.
Where once a good quality hide could fetch up to Rs 1,500, today it gets him less than Rs 700-800. “So, our job as arhatiyas is finished, since the tanneries buy directly from large, private slaughterhouses,” said A.
Currently, a significant chunk of activities previously carried out by cattle-traders, arhatiyas, labourers — involved in obtaining, transporting and salting raw hides – have gone over to large corporate slaughterhouses that do the salting and tanning and sell the hide directly to leather manufacturers.
A is still one of the last few arhatiyas left but will continue, he said, until his sons complete their engineering and managerial studies. Once they do, he will bid farewell to his ancestral profession.
With the election (and re-election in 2022) of a Hindu nationalist BJP government in UP, India’s most-populous state, there have been several means of de facto (lynchings, extrajudicial encounters, arbitrary demolitions of property, curbing of dissent) and de jure marginalisation (laws against alleged forced conversions, “anti-gangster legislation” against alleged cattle smugglers, laws banning the sale and slaughter of cattle, imposition of the national security act against alleged cattle smuggers) of the state’s Muslims.
Working-class Muslim communities have faced the brunt of violence and State and non-State hostility, through overt communal action or discrimination. Overt acts of violence and hate-crimes have been widely documented, as have the decline of predominantly Muslim-owned businesses and those providing employment to Muslim workers statewide, such as brassware, Banarasi silks, and the meat trade.
The first part of this series explained how majoritarian government policies have affected lives and livelihoods in the meat trade of UP and Maharashtra. The second part investigates a similar effect and decline in UP’s leather industry, predominantly Muslim-owned, in the regions of Kanpur and Unnao. Both are based on a study that we conducted over six months between 2021 to 2022.
Once popular as the ‘Manchester of the East’ and India’s ‘Leather City’, the region, especially the Muslim-majority Kanpur cantonment assembly constituency, once abounded with tanneries and businesses dealing with finished leather goods.
Kanpur’s Jajmau neighbourhood was home to over 400 tanneries until 2018, after which more than half were shut down. A combination of factors related to environmental pollution, policies of the union and state governments, both run by the BJP, and cow-slaughter laws have sent the industry into decline.
Muslims Singled Out As Polluters
Leather exports from the country’s central region (including the Kanpur-Unnao belt) declined 8% over seven years, between 2015 and 2022, according to the latest available data from the Council for Leather Exports (CLE).
O P Pandey, an executive member of the CLE said exports fell from Rs 7,200 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 4,900 crores over five years to 2020.
Although the problem of industrial pollution via effluent discharges had long plagued Kanpur and Unnao, the campaign against pollution gathered judicial steam from 2014. That was the year that Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, and the Supreme Court decided to refer the MC Mehta cases—as litigation connected to pollution in the Ganga river was collectively known—to the National Green Tribunal (NGT)…
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here