By SHARIK LALIWALA & SABAH GURMAT & PRANNV DHAWAN
Aligarh and Agra and Mumbai: In March 2017, life was going along rather well for S (name changed on request), then 48, a butcher from the neighbourhood of Dodhpur in the western Uttar Pradesh (UP) district of Aligarh. The son of a butcher himself, S, a stout, fearless man, employed two, and earned enough to sustain a household of six children and 2 elderly parents.
S’s life, like thousands of others in the meat and leather trade, mostly Muslim, first began to change in 2015 after a National Green Tribunal (NGT) order, two years before the government of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest who follows a hardline Hindu-first policy, took office as chief minister of India’s most populous state, after which there was a steady acceleration in restrictions.
We counted at least 10 requirements that the government forced on the meat trade, from infrastructure—freezers and geysers to curtains to white-washing premises—to new paperwork from various departments, from the police to food and drug officials.
As the new government orders forced S to invest in licences and infrastructure, his economic decline began.
In 2017, he had to fire both his employees, who cut meat and managed the shop, allowing him time to try and grow the business. One now works in a fruit shop, and the other, about 65 years old, was too old to move on, and ended by begging for a living on the streets.
Restrictions on the sale and processing of meat and its main byproduct, leather, has meant a loss of livelihoods and a chance at upward mobility for thousands of small-time butchers, entrepreneurs, traders, meat-sellers and tanners across UP and Maharashtra, according to our study, conducted over six months across five cities of India’s leading meat-exporting states in 2021 and 2022.
In the first of a two-part series, we draw from fieldwork in Aligarh, Kanpur, Lucknow and Unnao in UP and Mumbai in Maharashtra to explain how majoritarian policies, discriminatory towards those in the meat industry have affected lives and livelihoods in UP and Maharashtra. The second part investigates a similar effect and decline in the related leather industry in UP.
Of UP’s over 200 million people, 19.3% or about 38 million are Muslim. About 11.5% or 12.9 million of Maharashtra’s 112 million people are Muslim.
We found that the new guidelines were too formidable for any small-scale butcher and meat seller. They make the trade of meat undignified, degrade it in the public eye and make lower-caste Muslims prone to harassment from cow vigilante groups, police and bureaucrats.
The only legal way for a butcher to slaughter an animal is by paying new fees and bribes, even as their earnings have dropped because they must now hand over the skin and guts to private slaughterhouses, who have emerged as new middlemen in the trade. An anecdotal estimate provided by some of the butchers we interviewed, indicated fees and bribes have risen 10-fold, from Rs 1,000 to Rs 10,000.
S’s business survives, but only just. “How could I buy a geyser and a freezer and still keep any staff?” he said. “Now I must cut the meat here myself.” His uncle and nephew, who once helped him in trying to expand the business, now assist him merely in keeping it running.
“Earlier, I could visit the shop once in the morning and then either do other work, or work to expand this business (such as overseeing meat supplies),” said S, who spends 12 hours at his stop, up from three to four previously. “Now, I cannot leave.”
Adityanath Seizes An Opportunity
The first setback to businesses like S’s came in May 2015, when the NGT, while hearing a petition to shut down slaughter-houses polluting ground and river water, ordered government and privately owned slaughterhouses shut in UP, India’s largest producer of meat with a tenth of the country’s cattle and 25% of buffaloes, according to the 2019 20th Livestock Census.
From March 2017, Adityanath’s government closed 44 slaughterhouses mentioned by the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB) in a list of “seriously polluting industries which have not installed anti-pollution devices”. Thirty-nine of these 44 slaughterhouses were run by local municipal authorities and provided an affordable and safe opportunity for the local, informal butchers (largely lower-caste Muslims) to slaughter animals.
The government did not upgrade most slaughterhouses, except for one run by the Agra Municipal Corporation. Over the next few months, Adityanath’s government issued guidelines for the trade of meat and ordered the shut down of slaughterhouses and meat-sellers operating without a licence.
Adityanath has repeatedly called for an end to the “illegal” slaughter of cows and restrictions to the meat trade. “We will ensure that all illegal slaughterhouses are shut down,” he said a month before he became chief minister.
Adityanath has frequently repeated the need for these restrictions (here, here and here), arguing that the closure of allegedly illegal slaughterhouses was because the “NGT has been asking for dealing with unhygienic conditions and filth in the state”. He has also advocated for bans on the sale of meat and liquor in Mathura and Ayodhya and on the route of the Kanwar yatra, a Hindu pilgrimage route, citing “public sentiments”.
The UP government also charged alleged beef traffickers with the draconian National Security Act (NSA), 1980, in which an individual can be held in detention—without a chargesheet—for up to a year. In 2020 alone, till mid-August, 55% or 76 of 139 NSA cases were related to cow slaughter, the the Indian Express reported in September 2020; in broadly the same period, the police arrested more than 4,000 on accusations of slaughtering and/or smuggling beef under the UP Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act 1955…
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here