Stray cattle menace no mere footnote in UP poll

Saba Naqvi
Senior journalist

One of the hot-selling items in rural Uttar Pradesh is a battery-operated cattle prod stick with a sharp-pointed end, designed to push stray cattle off fields where they devour and destroy standing crops. This is a common sight across the state: abandoned bulls, cows and livestock wandering into fields while farmers go racing after them with sticks, lathis and now battery-operated Made in China cattle prod sticks. There are day vigils and night vigils against cattle referred to as ‘awara pashu’ in villages across the state. It is a tragically farcical outcome of the original stated purpose of cow protection by those who currently run the state and are facing a tough election.

If the BJP loses many seats in rural UP, it would in large part be due to the human-vs-cattle struggle across the state. Ask disgruntled farmers why they would abandon the BJP when they are getting free rations and the answer is preceded by some invective in the varying local dialects and then the reply comes that what will we do with five kilos of ration when saand (bulls) are eating up five quintals of our crops.

There is indeed a constituency of the very poor who would remain with the BJP because of the free rations just as there is support among those at the top of the social-economic pyramid who back the party for what they describe as a strong national leadership and a “Hindu first” ideological orientation. It is social groups between the very top and the extreme bottom that are in turmoil and chunks are shifting their votes away from the ruling BJP. The final result will be determined by the scale of the shift in what is a neck-and-neck battle.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken cognisance of the problem and announced at a rally on February 22 that some arrangements would be made after March 10, when the election results will be declared, to tackle the stray cattle menace. He promised to bring in a new system to help farmers earn from cow dung. Days after the prime ministerial promise, the UP government issued a communique saying the problem is mostly solved and it declared 44 of the 75 districts in the state “free of stray cattle”. And so, the farce continued. A few days after the prime ministerial speech, farmers in the Awadh region’s Barabanki district released hundreds of cattle at the rally site of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Clearly, they did not believe the cattle menace had vanished because a government statement said it had.

There are larger issues about failed promises and the crisis of Hindutva that the raging cow/bull issue in UP reflects. After coming to power in 2014, PM Modi had promised to double agricultural income by 2022, but the reverse has happened. Yet, the faith continued and in the 2017 state elections that took place just three months after demonetisation was announced, people genuinely believed the PM would clean up black money and punish the rich and corrupt.

In the time since, data shows that the rich have become richer and millions more Indians have fallen beneath the poverty line. The most troubling aspect of covering UP is to encounter pockets of such acute poverty, that the politics being done on the back of such desperate human indices, seems almost callous. Some data from the recently published National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) should trouble us. According to this data, the infant mortality of Uttar Pradesh is 50.4 per 1,000 live births, far worse than figures in war zones such as Syria and Iraq. Among the children who live, close to 40 per cent are stunted, worse than figures in the poorest countries in Africa. That is why 59.6 out of 1,000 children die before they reach the age of 5 in India’s most populous state.

Working malnourished children, anaemic mothers, overworked and underpaid fathers are part of the landscape of Uttar Pradesh that gets poorer and poorer as we head east, away from the relative prosperity of the western parts of the state. When human beings are struggling, they cannot be expected to care for cattle once it stops being productive, especially when there are no common grazing grounds in a story that also has an environmental dimension.

In the past, farmers would have sold unproductive cattle to a slaughter-house that would have recycled it for meat, leather and ingredients used by the pharmaceutical industry to make medicines. But the clamping down on slaughter and the attack by cow vigilantes on transportation and trade of cattle has led to the current scenario. As people cannot risk transporting animals to states with less stringent application of anti-slaughter laws, they just set them loose and hungry animals subsequently wander in fields eating crop.

A state government communique states that 572 gaushalas are run by self-help groups under the Uttar Pradesh Gaushala Act of which 394 are active, besides which they claim to have set up 6,000 temporary gaushalas. Whatever the intent, the gaushalas are clearly over-burdened/insufficient and cases of corruption have emerged. In the course of the campaign, Priyanka Gandhi had also attacked the Yogi government on the conditions of gaushalas in the state following horrific reports of poor treatment and starvation of the animals, including a report of cattle and cows being buried alive.

Cow slaughter has been banned in most Indian states for decades. What some BJP-ruled states have done is made existing laws more stringent and applied them vigorously even as the phenomena of cow vigilantes have been allowed to go unchecked. If we recall the names of individuals lynched by cow protection brigades, we can see that it was perceived to be an anti-Muslim policy promoted vigorously by the RSS/BJP/VHP/Bajrang Dal.

But it actually turned out to be an anti-people policy that has ruptured the natural cycle of the rural economy and is harming everyone, including the BJP itself. The cow/bull problem and the manner in which it is impacting electoral choices will undoubtedly create what is called a dharamsankat (crisis of faith) for the RSS/BJP. For whatever policies they put into place have certainly not protected the cows either, who are now chased out of fields by electric prods and often pushed to starvation in fenced spaces. It’s a cruel story of the human/animal interface and both are currently struggling in Uttar Pradesh.