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Bovines all the way!

One of the peculiar features of the Indian way of tackling a problem is that instead of nipping it in the bud, we allow it to grow first and when it reaches alarming proportions, we suddenly wake up to it and start fumbling around erratically looking for readymade solutions.

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Rajesh Kumar

One of the peculiar features of the Indian way of tackling a problem is that instead of nipping it in the bud, we allow it to grow first and when it reaches alarming proportions, we suddenly wake up to it and start fumbling around erratically looking for readymade solutions. 

 Rooting it out never seems to catch anybody’s fancy. Stray animal issue afflicting the state is a telling example.

Prior to the cow slaughter ban, even a sight of stray cows/ bulls loitering around on state roads or entering farmers’ fields was a rarity. Only wild animals including blue bulls, monkeys, boars et al used to give them sleepless nights, but never the bovines, as is the case today, whose population has burgeoned exponentially in the post ban period.

With nowhere to go, at least initially when enough cowsheds had not come up in sufficient numbers, an overwhelming sea of animals that got unleashed spread out in all directions. States obsequiously opened up their borders to accommodate truckloads of these that came knocking down their doors. Himachal being too docile to resist a somewhat forced import of animals, too, fell in line resulting in a huge influx of animals into its territory, though surreptitiously – a task which wouldn’t have been possible but for the connivance on part of state’s delinquent officials.

Animals which couldn’t be accommodated in pounds dispersed in open spaces, right under the skies, on to our roads, in our fields and where not jeopardising human lives with many lost in fatal road accidents. Many more were forced to abandon whatever little cultivable landholdings they had to sustain themselves for the fear of crop destruction by them.

As if the agony caused was not enough, government’s latest decision to penalise farmers who would be found releasing their unproductive animals into the open has come as a bolt from the blue. Though the proportion of such cows is minuscule in contrast to what is being infiltrated into the state, singling them out, as if they alone are responsible for the present mess on roads, is preposterous. Already down with their destinies, the irrational move has only rubbed salt to their wounds and amounts to impropriety on the part of powers that be.

Instead of taking moral responsibility for its own failure in plugging state borders effectively, the way powers have started demonising state farmers most contemptuously by criminalising their act, is condemnable indeed.

Are farmers guilty?

In a not so distant pre-ban scenario, a farmer seldom abandons his animals into the open, not even those past their milch age; instead bore with them with love and care just like his other family members till they die their natural death. But when infiltrated animals start wreaking havoc in fields and sustainability becomes a big question, he stops cultivating them at all. From these very fields he got his copious supply of grass and chaff required to feed the animals round the year besides two seasonal crops for his own sustenance. How can then his simple act of abandoning unproductive cows owing to his being unable to feed them anymore due to lack of resources, ever be deemed as crime?

His only crime perhaps being that he left them in the hands of destiny simply because his own future was in jeopardy; that he did dare to call a spade a spade and show the mirror to a complacent government that failed blatantly in checking border infiltration – something that forced him to take the drastic step; and last his repeated requests for reprieve simply fell on deaf ears all these years.

Whose fault is it that the government never took it as a wake-up call when first distress signals had started pouring in? On the contrary, when an aggrieved farmer rose in protest to give a legitimate vent to his oversaturated desperation, it suddenly woke up from slumber and in a bid to brush under the carpet its own inadequacies started penalising him instead. Is it fair?

It is sad that a farmer is only being made a scapegoat in this nefarious blame game played out brazenly at the altar of morality, which has flagrantly stood him in the dock pleading innocence for the crime he perhaps never committed. By shifting the whole share of the blame on his shoulders, the government is only doing disservice to the farming community. The overture can never be condoned by any standard of morality. Tattooing animals or putting florescent bands around their necks is only a patch up work done to show to the outer world that it was doing enough in the direction.

Either the government should provide him animal maintenance allowance as a policy matter or stop penalising him at all till a robust mechanism in not put in place to containing their unbridled population on the roads. And why only him, why not a government job to the next of kin of those also, who had died in road accidents or order girdawari to assess crop damage caused by stray animals and provide due compensation to all those affected?

Animals better themselves? 

Perhaps not despite the fact that it was primarily for their sake and welfare that the whole country was taken hostage by the powers that be, besotted with an obsessive idea of saving them come what may. Simply huddled inside and packed like sardines thousands of cows in utterly congested shelters are crying for a bare minimum breathable space, which is nowhere to be found in many of the 150 cowsheds the state today boasts of. How many of them do get ample food/water at the hands of caretakers is another grey area that needs attention besides maintaining proper hygiene for them therein.

Thousands of cows are roaming freely outside the sheds and are nobody’s babies either. With no one around to empathise with them, they are feeding on filth, many of them infirmed, injured and bleeding. Is this what for they had been given a fresh lease of life? Candidly speaking, the kind of treatment presently being meted out to them could be anything but a dignified approach towards preserving their beings in a most sacrosanct manner. 


Nowhere to go

  • Prior to the cow slaughter ban, even a sight of stray cows/ bulls loitering around on state roads or entering farmers’ fields was a rarity. Only wild animals including blue bulls, monkeys, boars et al used to give them sleepless nights, but never the bovines, as is the case today, whose population has burgeoned exponentially in the post ban period
  • With nowhere to go, at least initially when enough cowsheds had not come up in sufficient numbers, an overwhelming sea of animals that got unleashed spread out in all directions
  • States obsequiously opened up their borders to accommodate truckloads of these that came knocking down their doors. Himachal being too docile to resist a somewhat forced import of animals, too, fell in line resulting in a huge influx of animals into its territory, though surreptitiously – a task which wouldn’t have been possible but for the connivance on part of state’s delinquent officials
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