India’s push to save its cows starves Bangladesh of beef
GHOJADANGA — Some 30,000 Indian soldiers guarding the border with Bangladesh have a new mandate under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government this year—stop cattle from crossing illegally into the Muslim-majority neighbor.
Roughly every other night, troops armed with bamboo sticks and ropes wade through jute and paddy fields and swim across ponds to chase aging bovines, and smugglers, headed for markets in Bangladesh.
The crackdown is one of the clearest signs yet of how Indian policies, increasingly influenced by Hindu nationalist ideology, are having an economic impact on neighboring coun- tries as well as the sizeable Muslim minority at home.
About 2 million head of cattle are smuggled into Bangladesh annually from India. The $600 million-a-year trade has flourished over the past four decades and is considered legal by Dhaka.
Modi’s government, which came to power with the help of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), wants to put an end to it.
Interior Minister Rajnath Singh traveled this spring to the frontier with Bangladesh, calling on India’s Border Security Force (BSF) to halt cattle smuggling completely so that the “people of Bangladesh give up eating beef,” media reported at the time.
“Killing or smuggling a cow is equivalent to raping a Hindu girl or destroying a Hindu temple,” said Jishnu Basu, an RSS spokesperson in West Bengal, which shares a 2,216-kilometer border with Bangladesh.
So far this year, BSF soldiers have seized 90,000 cattle and caught 400 Indian and Bangladeshi smugglers.
Bangladeshi traders who operate auctions to facilitate the sale of cattle to slaughter houses, beef processing units, tanneries and bone crushing factories estimate the industry contributed 3 percent to the country’s $190 billion economy.
Syed Hasan Habib of Bengal Meat, Bangladesh’s top beef ex- porter, said it had to cut international orders by 75 percent.
The company exports 125 tons of beef a year to Gulf countries.
He said the price of cows had gone up by 40 percent over the past six months because of India’s move, and they had been forced to close two processing units.
Habib plans to import cows from Nepal, Bhutan and Burma (Myanmar) to meet domestic demand, but he said Indian cows had better quality meat and raw hide.
Bangladesh Tanners Association president Shaheen Ahmed said 30 of 190 tanneries had suspended work due to lack of hides, and about 4,000 workers were jobless.