Cow Soldiers Ride Buff Bazaar

New anti-slaughter rules choke cattle markets, make farmers desperate

- Pragya Singh And Jitender Gupta

As he made his way from Garh Mukteshwar in Uttar Pradesh to Salahpur near Meerut, Jitender, a thirty something farmer, felt his courage slowly crumble. He had brought Rs 70,000 to buy a buffalo at Salahpur’s weekly farm-animal fair. But by the time he got there, he lost his nerve. “I might be attacked by gaurakshaks,” says Jit ender, anxious about riding home with a buffalo, should he buy one. “The rakshaks won’t care if my buffalo is for milking. They will accuse me of wanting to slaughter her,” he says.

The fair at Salahpur has got, every Tuesday for twenty years, up to a thousand buffaloes. It caters to buyers from western UP, Rajasthan and Haryana. But this week, business fizzled out before it could even begin. By noontime, about 200 buffaloes and a dozen cows arrived. “The market has dwindled since problems over slaughterhouses began some months ago. People became scared of transporting animals. Cow protection groups have terrified traders and the new rules make things worse,” says Jabbar Ali, the market’s contractor.

With rules for animal trade in perpetual flux, even sellers such as Riazul, a local resident, are ruffled. Riazul fattened his buffalo with feed worth Rs 250-300 daily and brought her to this fair. “She gives 14 litres of milk,” he says. “We have little to eat at home. I have two children and a wife. I want to sell my buffalo but where are the buyers? Are they dead?”

They’re not quite dead, just stunned by circumstances. First, in April, UP branded most abattoirs illegal and closed them. Of the remaining, 42 are exportapproved abattoirs and only four cater to local meat demand. Thus, retail trade in buffaloes all but stopped in UP. Now the central government has issued new rules for the entire country that prohibit trade in farm animals at markets—like at Salahpur—if the purpose is slaughter.