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Cattle theft is a form of crime in India and a source of unauthorized slaughter in illegal slaughterhouses in India to produce beef. The cattle theft and their slaughter has been one of the drivers of cow protection movement, riots and cow-related vigilantism since the colonial British rule of the Indian subcontinent.

Cow slaughter is banned in most parts of India, but cattle slaughter in registered slaughterhouses is allowed in some states. Beef production and exports from India, particularly those sourced from buffalo has been rising. The demand for Indian beef has led to cows, and cattle in general, becoming a target of theft. According to The New York Times, cattle theft for beef production is a lucrative business in India.

India has over 30,000 illegal slaughterhouses that operate in filthy conditions. According to media reports, cattle theft is partly a source of supplies to illegal slaughterhouses.

History

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David Gilmartin states that while cattle theft was a common crime in British India, yet it was "marked by contradictions". On one hand, Vedic mythology gave cattle raiding "cosmogonic significance". On the other hand, many did not view cattle stealing as criminal. By the 19th century, Gilmartin states, many village chiefs were involved in cattle theft networks and shared in the profits. The crime came to be known as "cattle lifting" (like shop lifting), and it was practiced by thieves, by organized mafia and by armies during conquest. Cattle theft were a source of riots and civil disturbances. Hundreds of riots erupted in colonial India over cow slaughter. The village "muqaddam" (chiefs) pursued peace in the village, and British administrators added laws aimed at preventing cattle theft.

According to Ramnarayan Rawat, a professor of South Asian History, cattle theft (or languri) was the "most widely reported crime investigated by the Uttar Pradesh police in the 1880s and 1890s, and was considered the most organized and widespread agricultural crime because cows were regarded as the most valuable animal in Indian society." The convicted cattle thieves were from various Hindu castes such as Thakurs, Ahirs, Gujars, Kurmis, Brahmins, Chamars, as well as Muslims. During this period 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 Rawat, these accusations were "standard bureaucratic response" that continued after the British rule ended.

In 1930, an elderly Hindu woman alleged that Bengali Muslims had stolen her bullock, for sacrifice during the Islamic festival of Bakri-Id, when she saw her bullock in the Digboi market place. Hindus with sticks and Muslims with stones collected, triggering waves of riots in this part of Assam, accompanied by looting and killings.

According to David H. Bayley, a professor of Criminal Justice, the crime of "cattle theft is a matter of deadly seriousness in India," because it is an agrarian society where "many people live on the cheerless threshold of starvation". Cattle, states Bayley, are as important as children and grown adults "weep bitterly over the loss of their stock". In 1963 alone, over 20,000 cases of cattle thefts and arrests were reported in India.

Contemporary situation

According to media reports, India has numerous illegal slaughterhouses. For example, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, the officials in 2013 reported over 3,000 illegal slaughterhouses. According to Nanditha Krishna, there are an estimated 30,000 such illegal slaughter sites in India, typically operating in filthy conditions. The American Animal Rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) also gives the figure of 30,000 illegal slaughterhouses in India, and states that these unregistered, unsupervised operations treat and kill animals cruelly in the name of producing meat and leather. PETA's Indian office has campaigned and congratulated the state governments of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan for shutting such establishments down.

Cattle are traditionally left free to roam streets and graze in India. They are easy prey to thieves, state Rosanna Masiola and Renato Tomei. According to The New York Times, organized mafia gangs pick up the cattle they can find and sell them to illegal slaughterhouses. These crimes are locally called "cattle rustling" or "cattle lifting". In many cases, the cows belong to poor dairy farmers who lack the facility to feed and maintain the cows, and they don't traditionally keep them penned. According to Masiola and Tomei, the increasing meat consumption has led to cows becoming a target for theft.

The theft of cattle for slaughter and beef production is economically attractive to the mafias in India. In 2013, states Gardiner Harris, a truck can fit 10 cows, each fetching about 5,000 rupees (about US$ 94 in 2013), or over US$900 per cattle stealing night operation. In a country where some 800 million people live on less than US$2 per day, such theft-based mafia operations are financially attractive. According to Andrew Buncombe, when smuggled across the border, the price per cattle increases nearly threefold and the crime is even more attractive financially. Many states have reported rising thefts of cattle and associated violence, according to The Indian Express.

According to The Sunday Guardian, "cattle smuggling is rampant in Bengal, with an estimated 60,000 heads of cattle being smuggled out of India into Bangladesh, every day" in 2015, but the rate of this smuggling has dropped because of rising surveillance at the international border.

Theft and smuggling into Bangladesh

According to the Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star, some of cattle theft operations move the cattle stolen in India across the border into Bangladesh, ahead of festivals such as Eid-ul-Azha when the demand for meat increases. The criminals dye the white or red cows into black, to make identifying the stolen cow difficult. The Border Guard Bangladesh in 2016 reported of confiscating stolen cattle, where some of cattle's original skin color had been "tampered with". Hundreds of thousands of cows, states the British newspaper The Independent, are illegally smuggled from India into Bangladesh every year to be slaughtered. Gangs from both sides of the border are involved in this illegal smuggling involving an estimated 1.5 million (15 lakhs) cattle a year, and cattle theft is a source of the supply, states Andrew Buncombe.

Bangladesh and India share over 4,000 kilometers of border, with many rivers, hills, highways and rural roads. The border is quite porous to goods and people movement. The border security is limited and cattle smuggling is a common crime, states Smruti Pattanaik. According to Zahoor Rather, trade in stolen cattle is one of the important crime-related border issues between India and Bangladesh.

Incidents

• In Karnataka, villagers chased a truck carrying stolen cattle, caught two cattle thieves and handed them over to police. The truck toppled over, killing one of the cows inside the truck.
• Riots broke out in Gujarat when local people discovered a partially decomposed calf head near a road side butcher shop.
• In West Bengal, according to a June 2017 Indian Express report, villagers of Durgapur showed "copies of nearly two dozen police complaints of cow thefts", then claimed that the police asked them to take care of such “petty matters” themselves. Further poor farmers complained of economic calamity from the thefts and a willingness to beat anybody they catch with stolen cattle. In northern region of the state, a gang of about 10 men came in a van in an alleged attempt in a village to steal cows, and a few of them were shot dead after they had entered a cowshed and had already taken cows from two homes.
• In Assam, two Muslim teenagers were killed, after they were caught untying two cows in a pasture and then suspected of trying to steal those cows. According to The Financial Express, cow smugglers use cruel methods such as dumping them in fast flowing rivers to transport cows into Bangladesh.
• In Uttar Pradesh, three suspects were caught stealing a buffalo by villagers and beaten up according to a April 2017 report. In June 2017, a farmer was killed by a gang of cattle thieves near Agra at night when the farmer protested.
• Thieves were caught on a CCTV stealing a cow in Gujarat from the street by shoving it into a hatchback in October 2016. The car and the gang was later located, but cow was gone.
• In Delhi, a 5-member gang was arrested on charges of cattle theft after tip off and surveillance in July 2017. The police accused the gang of "sedating the cattle, piling more than 10 of them in one vehicle, filling the edge of the vehicle with stones and making two people stand at the back to mislead the police", and they shot at the police when challenged. A cattle theft gang was caught with illegal weapons and was reported to have been involved in over 100 cattle cases.

Cow protection

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (July 2017)

According to Mark Doyle, the first cow protection societies on the Indian subcontinent were started by Kukas of Sikhism (Namdharis). In 1871, states Peter van der Veer, Sikhs killed Muslim butchers of cows in Amritsar and Ludhiana, and viewed cow protection as a "sign of the moral quality of the state". According to Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf, Sikhs were agitating for the well-being of cows in the 1860s, and their ideas spread to Hindu reform movements. According to T.N. Madan, Muslim groups have been accused of stealing cattle, and viewed as a part of their larger violence against non-Muslims.

Cow-related violence

Cow slaughter has triggered riots and vigilantism since at least the 18th-century. The "Holi Riot" of 1714 in Gujarat was in part triggered by slaughter of a cow by Muslims in front of a Hindu's house. In the town of Mau, there were riots in 1806, states John McLane, that had led to Sadar Nizamat Adawlat to prohibit cow sacrifices in 1808. Cow slaughter-related violence erupted again in late 19th-century.

According to Judith Walsh, widespread cow protection-related riots occurred repeatedly in British India in the 1880s and 1890s, killing and injuring hundreds of people. The cow-related riots were the largest riots in British India after the 1857 revolt.

Cattle protection-related violence re-emerged at numerous occasions, often over the Muslim festival of Bakri-Id, in the first half of the 20th century. In contemporary times, according to media reports, cattle theft for beef production in India has increased, as well as cow-protection groups and cow protection-related violence.

See also

• Cattle slaughter in India
• Cow protection movement
• Cow protection-related violence

References

1. ^ 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, Quote: "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...'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."
2. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye (1968). Social tensions in India. Popular Prakashan. pp. 305–318.
3. S. M. Batra (1981). Cows and cow-slaughter in India: religious, political, and social aspects. Institute of Social Studies. p. 23.
4. P.J. Li, A. Rahman, P.D.B. Brooke and L.M. Collins (2008). Michael C. Appleby (ed.). Long Distance Transport and Welfare of Farm Animals. CABI. ISBN 978-1-84593-403-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link); Quote: "Most Indian states have banned cattle slaughter for religious and moral reasons"
5. ^ From Where the Buffalo Roam: India’s Beef Exports, Maurice Landes, Alex Melton, and Seanicaa Edwards (June 2016), United States Department of Agriculture, pages 1-9
6. OECD; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2014). OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2014. FAO United Nations, OECD Publishing. pp. 183–185. ISBN 978-92-64-21174-2.
7. ^ For New Breed of Rustlers, Nothing Is Sacred, Gardiner Harris (MAY 26, 2013), The New York Times
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9. ^ PETA asks for illegal slaughterhouses’ closure, The Hindu (April 1 2017)
   PETA calls on all states to stop illegal slaughter as per Supreme Court Order, PETA India (March 31 2017)
10. For New Breed of Rustlers, Nothing Is Sacred, Gardiner Harris (May 26, 2013), The New York Times, Quote: "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, which are considered sacred in Hinduism. Criminals round up some of the roughly 40,000 cattle that wander the streets of this megacity and sell them to illegal slaughterhouses located in villages not far away."
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24. In Assam, mob fury and cattle thieves have a long history, Samudra Gupta Kashyap (May 2, 2017), The Indian Express
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32. 3 killed in North Bengal for cattle theft bid, The Times of India (June 24 2017)
33. Two Muslim Teenagers Killed in India Over Accusation of Cow Theft, Hari Kumar, The New York Times (May 1, 2017)
34. How ‘Gau bhakshaks’ float cows from India to Bangladesh, The Financial Express (June 21 2017)
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36. Farmer killed by cattle smuggler in Agra, The Times of India (July 1 2017)
37. Cattle rustling, Indian style, The Daily Mail (13 October 2016)
38. 5 members of Mewat-based gang held for cattle theft, The Hindu (July 4 2017)
39. Delhi police arrest 5 for cattle theft, illegal slaughter; seize illegal weapons, The Deccan Chronicle (July 3 2017)
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55. For New Breed of Rustlers, Nothing Is Sacred, Gardiner Harris (MAY 26, 2013), The New York Times
56. Buncombe, Andrew (2012-06-01). "Nothing's sacred: the illegal trade in India's holy cows". The Independent. Retrieved 2017-06-27.
57. Raj, Suhasini (5 April 2017). "Hindu Cow Vigilantes in Rajasthan, India, Beat Muslim to Death". The New York Times.
58. "Violent vigilante cow protection groups prompt condemnation from Indian PM Narendra Modi".

• Crime in India
• Cattle in India
• Hinduism and cattle