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POV fork

Is this article a POV fork? It seems to have been created following disagreement over Violence related to cow protection in India. Note that even if its a POV fork, doesn't mean it should be deleted, if it covers a valid topic.

Ping @Fowler&fowler:, @Ms Sarah Welch:, @Vanamonde93:, @Kautilya3:, @Jionakeli:, @Capitals00: (sorry if I missed anyone).VR _talk 04:42, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

I'd say, let us resolve the other disagreement, or at least make some progress on it, before we start new discussions. This one is relatively easy to pick apart. Consider the sentence: "By late 19th-century and through the early part of 20th-century, the British administration routinely accused Chamars (untouchables, Hindus) of large-scale cattle deaths by poisoning and of theft for the purposes of obtaining skins for leather trade. According to William Hoey, this diabolical crime led to infected flesh being carried around and was a source of diseases that plagued British India." It is cited to Ramnarayan S. Rawat (2011). Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India. Indiana University Press. pp. 24–45. ISBN 0-253-22262-1. Can we spot any hint of irony, or of a sardonic deadpan manner, in the sentence above? No we can't. Now look at the source. What are they talking about? They are talking about wrongful accusations. In greater detail, the authors say:

"By the end of the nineteenth century, accusations of cattle poisoning against Chamars had become the standard bureaucratic response to large-scale cattle deaths. William Hoey's 1899 statement regarding the criminality of Chamars was not an isolated accusation. The commissioner of Gorakhpur was simply summing up the official view. He had, however, discovered what he believed to be a new feature of Chamars' criminality. Moreover, the association of Chamars with cattle poisoning did not disap-pear with the end of colonialism. A hundred years later, while conducting fieldwork in Lucknow, I read of the very same suspicions against Chamars in a national daily. The news story was trying to account for recent cattle deaths in Lucknow. The sudden increase in cattle mortality had made one officer, Ranjan Dubey of the Lucknow Municipal Corporation's gaushala (cattle shed), suspicious of the Chamars, leading him to accuse them of poisoning cattle for the sake of their hides. Only upon investigation did he confirm, as the local tanner had already told him, the presence of large numbers of polythene bags in the stomachs of dead cows.' In 1899 a white colonial officer accused Chamars of cattle poisoning, while a century later it was a Brahman Indian officer."

There you have it: POV pushing by "research" in scholarly sources published by academic presses. Citing academic sources is not enough. You still have to paraphrase them accurately. The section title says, "This section needs expansion," at the moment of my writing (see here). How can that be expanded? By adding that this story is really a story about the victimization of untouchables both in British times and later, initially by describing them in the framework of 19th century British ethnography, and later through other official and upper-class and upper-caste biases. (@Sitush: has written about 19th century British ethnology (see pages 26, 27, etc of the same source above for description of the ethnography.) Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 08:57, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

• Vice regent: you requested "narrow focus" in Cow protection-related violence in India. Vanamonde93 partially accepted your request, and deleted theft and illegal slaughterhouse section there. This a notable topic, with plenty of reliable sources. If you allege it is POV fork, you need to state of which article and why? Misplaced Pages articles cover topics at several levels of detail, and per WP:SPLIT it is normal to create new dedicated articles, linking them to other articles with WP:Summary. F&f: that section is incomplete, has a "expand section" tag. Misplaced Pages is a collaborative effort. You and others are welcome to summarize WP:RS to that section and this article. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 12:21, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
• Rechecked Rawat source. No OR here. I will embed a quote for easier WP:V. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 17:26, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

• Changing what you had written is not called, "No OR here. I will embed a quote for easier WP:V." We can all see rewriting in the edits: edit1, edit2. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 21:54, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

• You see rewriting. I see expansion. Whatever it takes... our goal is to collaboratively improve the article. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 22:49, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

• Finally getting around to looking at this. I do not think this is a POV fork in any way. The content is, to a lesser or greater extent, supported by solid sources, and as such is encyclopedic in nature. I'm slightly less comfortable with the title/scope of this article. The title as currently written suggests a link between cattle theft and illegal slaughterhouses, and suggests that the article covers this link. However, the content is not doing this. The content covers cattle theft, with slaughterhouses as a (not always directly related) addendum. I would strongly suggest moving the page to Cattle theft in India, a title with a much clearer scope; and if illegal slaughterhouses have been connected to this topic, then that content can be turned into a section here. Vanamonde (talk) 06:01, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

• Indeed. Cattle theft in India proposal makes more sense. Let us wait for couple more days for any additional comments before moving this article. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 23:55, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

• Not convinced at all that the content is reliably sourced, even to a lesser extent. Reliable sources have been cited, of course, but only very selectively paraphrased to advance a POV, as I showed in the example above, where it was done quite plainly. It has then been tagged with "This section needs expansion," as if that somehow offers protection against not making sure that Misplaced Pages rules have not been broken. I will give more examples. I'm not convinced at all that an article created in the heat of other disputes is needed to describe events of a century ago (see history section) that somehow escaped characterizations of notability in Misplaced Pages for so long. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 01:32, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

• You didn't show anything above! In Cattle protection-related violence article, people want narrow focus based on New York Times etc, no theft/mafia/etc context even if New York Times etc describe the context. In this article, you appear to asking for the contrary, which delights me! I am all for including the context. Specific suggestions and edits that cite sources are welcome. Misplaced Pages is a collaborative WP:Volunteer project. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 04:49, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

• @Fowler&fowler: I'd be interested indeed to see any evidence of source misrepresentation you care to provide; but after having worked on this topic for four years, you will understand that I am slightly wary of that accusation, when it is tossed around by editors to remove content that they do not like (see here for instance). Once again, could you raise specific issues, rather than level accusations of hindu-nationalist POV-pushing at folks who have frequently been the ones holding POV-pushers at bay? Do you really believe, for instance, that "Cattle theft in India" is not a topic which requires an article? Vanamonde (talk) 10:43, 9 July 2017 (UTC)
• To clarify, I do not think that second sentence paraphrasing Hoey is appropriate. It should be fixed, or removed. I simply do not regard it as evidence of systematic POV pushing. Vanamonde (talk) 10:49, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

@Vanamonde93: OK. Give me some time. An hour perhaps and I'll go through the sources. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 11:53, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Take your time, there's no deadline here. The fact that we have separated this from the more current topic, especially, would suggest that we can knock it into shape at our leisure. Vanamonde (talk) 12:16, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

OK, I'm creating a section below, and will go through a small paragraph from the page systematically. Will add an "in use" sign or "underconstruction" and would request no comments there until I'm done. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 13:19, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

@Kautilya3:, can you please explain how this is not a POV fork? Jionakeli (talk) 16:37, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

What is a POV fork of? -- Kautilya3 (talk) 16:40, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Please check the reason by Vice regent. I believe it can be merged with Cattle slaughter in India. Jionakeli (talk) 17:27, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Move to Cattle raiding in India

One solution to the above is that we move this article to Cattle raiding in India and limit its scope accordingly. We already have articles on Cattle raiding and Cattle raiding in Kenya. The "illegal slaughterhouses" part should just be moved to Cattle slaughter in India (its already there, actually).VR _talk 04:44, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Oppose. We need to use titles that reflect the sources and COMMONNAME terms there. Cattle raiding title doesn't. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 12:21, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Sources check of a small paragaph

Let's start with the first paragraph in the History section which at this moment looks like this. Here are the individual sentences or sentence fragments:

• 1. "Cattle theft was a common crime in British India, states David Gilmartin."
  • (cited to: David Gilmartin (2003), Cattle, crime and colonialism: Property as negotiation in north India, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, Volume 40, Issue 1, pages 33-56.)
    • I don't have full access to Gilmartin right now, but will note for now that the abstract of the paper reads: "Cattle theft was a common crime in British India, and yet one marked by contradictions. While the protection of property was for many a defining feature of the modern state, colonial administrators were often loath to interfere in the negotiations by which Indians commonly arranged the return of stolen cattle. By examining one important prosecution of cattle theft in Punjab's Karnal district in 1913, this article argues that the state, local communities and individuals negotiated the meaning of property at multiple levels. Property was not a fixed concept, but rather a field of negotiation in which the relationship of state, community and individual were defined." Will come back to this.
      • I now have access to the article. Here is the excerpt for the relevant bit, which as the abstract states, is about the negotiation between two notions of ownership of property, including that of cattle: "(p 35) Property law thus embodied many of the colonial regime's contradictory purposes. Indeed, its importance to the regime lay precisely in the fact that it provided a common framework within which the languages of legal individualism and of indigenous community were brought into mutual interrogation. Colonial property law is thus best seen not as a fixed set of hegemonic principles defined by the state, but rather as a field of negotiation within which colonial state and society were mutually defined. On one level, of course, property law was critical to the legal structures deployed by the British to tie their regime to an emerging capitalist political economy shaping the British empire. Yet, at the same time, property law defined, for both Indians and the state alike, a critical field for negotiating both individual and collective identities. ... To examine the workings of property as a field of negotiation, this article examines another field of property law and property control—the law relating to cattle theft, particularly as it developed in colonial Punjab. ... Cattle were among the most ubiquitous and important forms of moveable property in India, and cattle stealing was among the most prevalent crimes in northern India during the colonial period. Cattle and buffaloes (which were often lumped together in official discussions of this crime) were critical to the practice of agriculture in much of north India, particularly in those areas where animal power was needed to operate wells for irrigation. British officials thus recognised early on the importance of cattle ownership as a critical adjunct of the establishment of a productive agricultural economy, and of clear, revenue-paying rights to land. Yet cattle ownership also held a strong relationship to community values and identities. Early Vedic myths, as Bruce Lincolm argues, gave cattle raiding 'nothing less than cosmogonic significance'. Far more important for British officials in (p 36) the nineteenth century, however, were the connections between cattle raiding and the solidarity of local communities. Particularly among pastoral and semi-pastoral groups in the Punjab on the fringes of agricultural settlement, cattle stealing had long involved the competitive raiding of community grazing grounds, and was, as some British officials suggested, a practice associated with the protection of clan livelihood and the defense of community honour. Physically undertaken largely by young men, 'who show off their prowess by lifting the finest animals they hear of', cattle stealing was viewed by many local leaders as far from criminal. 'The heads of villages and even the chiefs of clans,' the British reported, 'connive at the practice, and participate in the profits'. In the late nineteenth century almost all the leading men of the pastoral bar, the arid interfluvial tracts of the western Punjab, including many of those recognised as key administrative intermediaries by the British, were rassagirs—men who protected networks of cattle theft. 'To be convicted of cattle stealing,' a mid-nineteenth century British administration report in the Punjab thus noted, 'leaves no social stain, apparently, on the character of an individual.' 'Indeed, British reports suggested that cattle lifting was in many areas closely integrated into structures of community organisation and indigenous tribal authority. ... Some British officials professed to be shocked by this situation. Imbued with nineteenth century ideas of political economy, these officials saw high levels of cattle theft as indicative of the generally low moral level of the population, suggesting a lack of understanding and appreciation for the true value of private property. Such an appreciation was vital, in the eyes of many officials, in defining the foundations of colonial political authority. Suppression of cattle theft was thus critical for the transformation of Punjabi society into a land of law-abiding cultivators'." Whatever its connections to community norms, cattle theft was thus, in this view, a crime not only against individual Punjabis and their property, but also against the basic principles that defined the colonial Raj as a modem state." (p37) But if these views were widely held, they also jostled against the political importance attached by the British to maintenence of local, community-based authority in the Punjab—and against the complexities of cattle stealing itself...."
        • Is it accurate to paraphrase the complex point David Gilmartin is making as, "Cattle theft was a common crime in British India says David Gilmartin?" It does a disservice to Martin's scholarship to cite a statement such as this to a complex, nuanced, point about ownership and theft, which interrogates the very notion of theft.
• 2. The crime came to be known as "cattle lifting" (like shop lifting).
  • Cited to Rosanna Masiola; Renato Tomei (2015). Law, Language and Translation: From Concepts to Conflicts. Springer. pp. 45–46. ISBN 978-3-319-14271-5.
    • This source, which is authored by two academics in the Department of English Translation at an Italian University, has a half-page devoted to India, a part of its final section. It states: "The conclusive section of our comparative case study on cattle stealing is emblematic of loss of traditions and identity in a world of rising hunger and crime. Increasing meat consumption has meant that holy cows are a target for unscrupulous thieves. Although these animals are mangy and scrawny, they are left to freely roam the streets, making them easy prey. In India there is another English term, which is informal and denotes shoplifting. There are people who volunteer to shelter these animals at night and receive funds from wealthy Indians for this. There is also a large shelter outside the metropolitan area where thousands of cattle live. This is a recent report from the Delhi Journal in the New York Times: "Cattle rustling, called 'lifting' here, is a growing scourge in New Delhi, as increasingly affluent Indians develop a taste for meat, even the flesh of cows, ..."
      • I frankly don't know what to make of this, although this is not POV. "Lifting" is a old term of British English, and by descent, of Indian English, and of Australian English. Its usage in British English with respect to cattle predates its occurrence in "shoplifting." Here's OED: "lift v. 8. slang. To take up (a portable object; cf. 1d) or drive away (cattle) with dishonest intentions; in wider sense, to steal; to steal something from (a shop, etc.); to rob. Compare with: shoplifting n. Examples: (First attested use) 1529, ... 1722 A. Ramsay Tale Three Bonnets i. 7 Thieves that came to lift their Cattle. 1814 Scott Waverley I. xviii. 271 Donald Bean Lean never lifted less than a drove in his life." This article is written in Indian English. I'm a little mystified why two Italians and an American reporter are being cited for usage that is very old, older than the beginnings of American English, older than the arrival of the British in India. What then does "The crime came to be known as mean?
• 3. "and it (i.e. the "crime" of the first part of the sentence) was practiced by thieves, by organized mafia and by armies during conquest."
  • (Cited to Ranajit Guha (1999). Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Duke University Press. pp. 151–156. ISBN 978-0-8223-2348-8.)
    • This is distortion of Ranajit Guha's subaltern classic. It was what made me suspect other issues. It is now public domain and you can read the relevant pages 151 to 157 on archiv.org: page 151 of Guha at Archiv org. But just to guide you, very briefly Guha is describing the Santal Revolt or Santal hool (a tribal language term) of 1855 in British India. He is making the point that cattle-lifting or confiscation, which was a feature of the actions on both sides (Santal and well as British) was not a crime. Here are some quotes: "(p 153) (an) insurrection, twenty-four years before the hool, had followed the same pattern. It had started off with cattle-lifting, and grain and cattle were the objects pillaged most, as the campaign against the rebels was to demonstrate on that occasion too. Russell, the Jungle Mahal Magistrate, recovered 1,200 heads of cattle and 6,000 maunds of grain in the course of his military operations in one sector alone.'" ... The pattern of plunder thus did not quite correspond to what the men of property had feared it would turn out to be. ... For the peasant, as a rebel, was out not to rob but to destroy the authority of his enemies by expropriating them. ... (p 154) No, 'these peasants did not band together to go stealing', as Lefebvre rightly observes. It was not their purpose to appropriate resources by petty crime. Their 'basic aim' was 'to destroy' their enemy's resources and with these his authority by means of a special form of activity of the masses. They distinguished this activity from other types of violence in name by calling it `ulgulan' in Mundari, 'hool' in Santali, ... (p155) In the perception of the insurgents, plunder was thus identified as spoils rather than as criminal acquisition. (p156) It is precisely because of this quasi-military, hence political, character of plunder that cash and other objects of conspicuous consumption which fell into the hands of the insurgents tended to be treated not as articles of theft but as booty to be shared out amongst all or centralized for use by the leadership in their work for the uprising. (p157) ...There was nothing in the character, mass or velocity of this violence that did not distinguish it clearly from crime." How then did this become a part of a page on "Cattle theft" and come to be considered a crime here?
• 4. "Cattle theft were a source of riots and civil disturbances. Hundreds of riots erupted in colonial India over cow slaughter."
  • (Cited to Donald Eugene Smith (2015). South Asian Politics and Religion. Princeton University Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-1-4008-7908-3.)
    • Here is the relevant portion from page 22. The section is about "Religious Pluralism in South Asia." It says: "Religious pluralism is a basic characteristic not only of South Asia as a whole but of each of these three countries. In India the minorities include the Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and others. In Pakistan there are sizable numbers of Hindus, Christians and Buddhists. In Ceylon the largest minorities are the Hindus, Christians and Muslims. What is the nature of these communities and how are they related to religion? First, religion provides each group with a focal point of identity and social solidarity, and large areas of its culture are intimately associated with religion. A member of the Muslim community may be an atheist, but the social institutions, personal laws, customs, traditions, history, art and literature which have helped to mold his individual and social existence have been closely related to Islam. Secondly, religious symbols represent group interests and group self-esteem. In undivided India hundreds of communal riots erupted over the killing of a cow by a Muslim or the passing of a noisy Hindu procession in front of a mosque. In 1963-1964 a chain reaction of very serious Hindu-Muslim riots in India and Pakistan followed the theft from a Muslim shrine in Kashmir of a hair revered as a relic of the Prophet Muhammad. Religious symbols continue to be emotionally powerful in unifying the group in the face of real or imagined threats from other groups, and are frequently used to disguise conflicts based on economic interests. The Sinhalese Buddhist who declares that Buddhism must be restored to its rightful place in Ceylon is saying, in part, that his community must enjoy unrivaled dominance in the fields of education and government service."
      • Is this really about what it is being used to cite? I don't think so. Besides in this case, Smith is careful to include "the passing of a noisy Hindu procession in front of a mosque," and, in general, make the point that the religious symbols are used to disguise conflicts with nonreligious origins.
• 5. "The British administrators passed laws aimed at preventing cattle theft and their illegal slaughter."
  • (Cited to Anand Pandian (2009). Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Duke University Press. pp. 107–110. ISBN 0-8223-9101-5.)
    • This source has a sensitive account of the characterization of the Kallar caste as criminal in British India. It is talking about something else. Here are some quotes from pages 107 to 111: "p107 Criminals, like animals, savages, and children, were widely imagined by late nineteenth-century observers as reckless and impulsive creatures largely insensible to moral persuasions. Both the English Habitual Criminals Act of 1869 and the Indian Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 were conceived in this intellectual milieu. Within urban England, inveterate delinquents were spatially segregated from the putatively honest working class. In India, allegedly criminal castes and tribes were physically segregated from the peasants and landholders of the Indian plains." (p108) ... The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 took habitual crime in India as the immemorial tradition of independent and endogamous groups living in and preying from the margins of rural society. The act singled out a number of groups of itinerant traders, forest dwellers, and putatively professional thieves in north India for special surveillance, spatial constraint, and extraordinarily rigid controls, granting provincial officials the authority to confine entire communities to prescribed places of residence. Individuals who violated these spatial constraints were liable to rigorous terms of imprisonment. Such measures, extended to the Madras Presidency of south India in 1911, arguably worked upon the animal nature or biological being of suspected criminals. ... At the outset of the twentieth century, the Madura District held a reputation "from a police point of view by far the heaviest and most troublesome in the presidency." Much of this was due to theft in the region, a crime largely attributed to Kallar men. Repeated efforts to combat cattle rustling proved completely ineffectual, as perpetrators routinely outran the scattered men of the state. (p109)...The number of registered Kallars peaked at 39,056 in 1932, representing well over half of those subject to the Criminal Tribes Act throughout the Madras Presidency." Those registered under section l0(1)(b) of the act could not leave their (p110) villages for any reason between sunrise and sunset without first acquiring a written passport, be it to work, trade, or simply visit relatives. A much smaller number registered in addition under section w(i)(a) were required to report for a roll call every night at the nearest police station at both 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.—most of these men likely spent each night sleeping as best they could in station house doorways rather than trekking several miles twice nightly. ... Punitive jails, compulsory schools, army regiments, rural cooperatives, plantation labor colonies, and Kallar villages themselves formed a "incarceral archipelago" within which each and every Kallar man, woman, and child could be confined if necessary." ... No evidence of guilt justified these extraordinarily invasive measures. The Criminal Tribes Act punished tendencies rather than crimes, submitting the vagaries of unrestrained inclination to the full force of legal violence. (p111) On the eve of Indian independence in 1947, native delegates to the Madras Legislative Assembly repealed the Criminal Tribes Act not for having successfully humanized its targets, but rather for having reduced the state and its own officers to the "monstrous" and "inhuman" cruelty of animals." The moral evolution of an independent nation would need to be fostered by other exercises in restraint."
      • How are these pages, concluded by the author in the last two poignant sentences, are being used to cite the sentence fragment, "The British administrators passed laws aimed at preventing cattle theft and their illegal slaughter?"
  • (Also cited to :B. B. Chaudhuri (2008). Peasant History of Late Pre-colonial and Colonial India. Pearson. pp. 159 note 31. ISBN 978-81-317-1688-5.</ref>
    • Here is footnote 31: "**Page 159 footnote 31. We get an idea of the wide-ranging powers and responsibilities of a muqaddam from Spear's description of them on the basis of some early nineteenth century official records, including the well-known report on the 'village republics of north India by Metcalf. Apart from the collection of the state revenue, a muqaddam had to look after maintenance of 'peace' in the village, settlement of assorted disputes, prevention of crimes including cattle-lifting, punishments of the offenders, generally in consultation with the village panels (the assembly of five) and the vital 'corporate village expenses. (Percival Spear. A History of Delhi under the Later Mughals, Delhi: Kanishka Publishing House. 1988, ch.VI.) Habib's study shows how the muqaddam increasingly consolidated his personal interests, at the cost of the cultivators of small resources. It was expectations of purely personal gains that 'tempted' moneyed persons' to buy this office as a good investment for their money'. (Habib, 'the Agrarian System, p. 134). In fact his links with the well being of the village as a whole were becoming increasingly tenuous. ..."
      • This is a footnote. As far as I can tell it is about late Mughal Delhi—as evidenced by the title of Percival Spear's book—not British Delhi. The British annexed the territories around Delhi in 1810, and Delhi itself formally in 1858. The footnote itself occurs on page 116-117 where the author is talking about the Mughal taxation system. Moreover, Misplaced Pages has a page Muqaddam, which cites the Indian historian Irfan Habib's book: The Agrarian System of Mughal India, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-19-565595-8. It is being used here as a cite for, "The British administrators passed laws aimed at preventing cattle theft and their illegal slaughter."

@Vanamonde93: I have now gone through the entire short paragraph. Is there anything there that can be kept? Frankly, there is precious little, unless one is writing an article about the manifest and latent content of the metaphor "Cattle theft" in British India. I have spent a number of hours going through the sources, and I can say in all honesty that there is nothing salvageable in that paragraph. 3., 4. and 5. are unacceptable. 1 has to be altered so much that it becomes a statement about questioning the notion of "cattle theft." And 2. is inaccurate, and has to go. I am not making any accusations. All I am saying is that the sources have been distorted, without imputing any motives. I can't speak to the rest of the article, but if I had to make a judgment based on this paragraph, it would not be an optimistic one. I am travelling in another part of the world, and am now going to bed. Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:35, 9 July 2017 (UTC) Fowler&fowler«Talk» 13:23, 9 July 2017 (UTC) Final update Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:35, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Response

Let us recap this a bit. The allegation of "content is not reliably sourced" / source misrepresentation began it seems before the source checks! Then the strange analysis above. The general pattern is to provide cherrypicked clips, ignore where the source states "cattle stealing was among the most prevalent crimes in northern India during the colonial period" or equivalent / relevant. Then the vague statement about "a complex, nuanced point" without evidence that the source actually concludes the alleged "nuanced point"! Consider the Gilmartin source. It discusses the subject of cattle theft and associated issues at length, which is what we should expect. Cattle theft, like all thefts, is to be expected to have a context, lead to certain judicial/extra-judicial repercussions, suspicions, individual / clan / community action / charges / defenses / due process / violence / counter-allegations / counter-violence. Gilmartin concludes the dynamic issues with cattle theft of that era on pages 52-54, in a section he begins with, "The long-term results of these cases, however, were hardly clear-cut. In the wake of the Karnal cattle theft prosecutions of 1913, local officials noted an immediate drop in reported cattle thefts in the district. But less than a year later some Punjab officials were already criticizing these special prosecutions as unlikely to lead to any long-term diminution in the incidence of the crime." (he goes on to mention the contradictions in govt position in later cattle theft cases, that both the police/state versus local panchayats served as alternate venues for affected cattle owners, etc)". So, all through the paper, Gilmartin repeats and accepts cattle theft was one of the most prevalent and significant crimes. To allege or imply Gilmartin is denying cattle theft, is strange! So here we are with the Gilmartin source: source is RS, no OR, there is no misrepresentation. Please allow me to skip the rest of the WP:TEXTWALL. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 21:10, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Allegations without reading the sources

F&f: Spare the[REDACTED] community of unhelpful OR allegations, when you admit that you haven't access to Gilmartin source, have read only the abstract of the paper! I have embedded a quote from the paper, in the cite in the article's history section. Here is the entire relevant para:

"Cattle were among the most ubiquitous and important forms of moveable property in India, and cattle stealing was among the most prevalent crimes in northern India during the colonial period. Cattle and buffaloes (which were often lumped together in official discussions of this crime) were critical to the practice of agriculture in much of north India, particularly in those areas where animal power was needed to operate wells for irrigation. British officials thus recognized early on the importance of cattle ownership as a critical adjunct of the establishment of a productive agricultural economy, and of clear, revenue-paying rights to land." – David Gilmartin (2003), Cattle, crime and colonialism: Property as negotiation in north India, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, page 35

OR in[REDACTED] does not mean something is not resonating with "the POV/script in someone's head". To quote from the WP:OR page, the phrase "original research" (OR) is used on Misplaced Pages to refer to material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable, published sources exist. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 14:41, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Vanamonde: I will embed a few more quotes to be constructive. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 15:03, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

I am holding off adding "illegal slaughter" content, given the re-title proposal above. Vanamonde is right: we should not imply theft -> illegal slaughter connection, since theft -> legal slaughterhouse and legal sale -> illegal slaughterhouse are all possible; more importantly, it is the source that must discuss this and other aspects of illegal slaughterhouses. There is WP:RS. I need to reflect on where and how to summarize the various RS on illegal slaughterhouses in India. Ms Sarah Welch (talk) 16:58, 9 July 2017 (UTC)