LIVING ON THE EDGE
invite any trouble from the BSF, there is no problem,’ he declared…
Every fisherman here knew that hundreds, if not thousands, of cows from across the country were brought to these border villages to be smuggled to Bangladesh every day. The cows were herded across by smugglers who swam along with the animals until they reached the other shore safely. Besides cows, gold and other items were also being smuggled out. Villagers like Puran, who had been witnessing this for years, were sympathetic towards the BSF guards and claimed that their hands were tied.
‘Senior officers might be taking bribes and allowing the operation. What can these jawans do?’ asked his nephew Karthik Mundol... ‘The cows come all the way from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashatra and other parts of India. If they can travel all the way to Taki and Sodepur without being detected, what is the point in blaming the poor BSF alone?’
By now, a crowd had gathered around me... According to them, while human trafficking and smuggling of gold and narcotics had been taking place along this border for years, cow smuggling had gained notoriety over the past decade or so.
‘‘Every now and then, some cows and herders get shot or arrested, but not much is made of these incidents.’…
COOCH BEHAR
...I hired a local cab from Dinhata, situated about 28 kilometres from Cooch Behar town, and asked the driver Shafiq... to take me to Dighaltari village... where a road divides India from Bangladesh… Shortly afterwards, we crossed our first BSF check post… The next... was about two kilometres further on... The senior officer, Subinspector Pappu Singh... who hailed from Chandigarh, looked at my voter identity card and said, ‘Chennaiiiii… You have come a very long way indeed.’
I nodded and explained once again that I wanted to visit border villages and talk to the people living there... ‘So what do you want to find out from these villagers?’ Pappu Singh enquired. ‘... Let me tell you that the only important activity in these villages is cow smuggling. And it is not as if just one or two people are involved in it; the entire village is hand in glove... People always find it convenient to blame the BSF guards. What can we do?... It
is an open border and only two of us are assigned to guard a one-kilometre stretch...’
…We resumed our bumpy ride …Since my visit to Taki, I had been really curious about the reason behind so many cows being smuggled to Bangladesh from India... ‘It is the most profitable business in West Bengal,’ he (Shafiq) replied. ‘A cow that costs ₹5,000 here could fetch up to five times that price once it crosses the border. And handlers could earn anywhere between two thousand and ₹5,000 for smuggling out a single cow. That is why this business is so rampant here. As the BSF officer said, every villager in these border areas has a role to play in cow smuggling and makes a lot of money.’
He added that while there were enough cows in Bangladesh to satiate the local need for beef, the cows that were smuggled out from India were primarily intended for the Middle East market.
‘The cows that are smuggled out from here are not slaughtered,’ Shafiq went on. ‘They are killed slowly in boiling water and their hide is peeled off. Then the meat is sliced and packaged as various products, such as beef sausages, ground beef and even steak slices, before being exported. Beef exports represent the biggest industry in Bangladesh. Healthy cows, bred under the right conditions, can fetch up to ₹100,000 each.’ A little research confirmed the driver’s feedback. According to a Reuters report, at least two million heads of cattle were smuggled into Bangladesh from India every year. Annually, this trade was worth at least US $600 million. The smuggled cows were auctioned by Bangladeshi traders to facilitate the sale of cattle to slaughter houses, beef-processing units, tanneries and bone-crushing factories, which contributed approximately 3 per cent to the country’s $190 billion economy. Most of the beef flesh and beef products were marked for export and sent to the Middle East; Singapore, Malaysia and other countries in the Far East.
‘All the beef consumed in the Arab countries and in South East Asia are processed from Indian cows,’ Shafiq volunteered...
Driving on for another three or four kilometres, we halted near a petty shop, where four clean-shaven young men, neatly dressed in t-shirt and jeans, were... chatting. Their bikes were parked at some distance.
Shafiq... pointed at those boys. ‘Do you see? The villagers here are not as poor as those are in other parts of West Bengal. This just confirms what the BSF officer said: Everyone here is involved in the smuggling racket and makes some profit out of it.’…