India's push to save its cows starves Bangladesh of beef

 DHAKA: 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 neighbour.

Roughly every other night, troops armed with bamboo sticks and ropes wade through jute and paddy fields and swim across ponds to chase ageing bovines, and smugglers, headed for markets in Bangladesh. The crackdown is one of the clearest signs yet of how Indian policies are having an economic impact on neighbouring countries.

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 wants to put an end to it.

Union home minister Rajnath Singh travelled this spring to the frontier with Bangladesh, calling on the 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 spokesman in West Bengal, which shares a 2,216km (1,375 miles) border with Bangladesh.

Beef prices up, exports down

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.

The hit to GDP from India's policies is not yet known. But HT Imam, a political adviser to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said there was "absolutely no doubt" that the beef trade and leather industry were suffering.

Syed Hasan Habib of Bengal Meat, Bangladesh's top beef exporter, said it had to cut international orders by 75 percent. The company exports 125 tonnes 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 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.

A senior official in India's home ministry said Bangladesh should find new sources of beef because India would stick to its stance.

Cow protection force

India is home to 300 million cattle and is the world's largest beef exporter and fifth-biggest consumer.

But since Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is closely linked to the RSS, came to power last year, the rhetoric on cow protection and the beef ban has increased.

Critics say tougher anti-beef laws discriminate against Muslims, Christians and lower-caste Hindus who rely on the cheap meat for protein. Butchers and cattle traders, many of them Muslim, say the push threatens thousands of jobs.

The rhetoric has also emboldened vigilante cow protectors.

"I was chained to a tree and beaten by members of the cow protection force. They forced me to recite a Hindu prayer," said Mohammed Tarafdar, who was caught smuggling two calves near the Bangladesh border in April.

"My religion permits me to eat and sell beef, so why should Hindus have a problem?" said Tarafdar, sitting in a crammed prison cell in Basirhat district. Some BSF soldiers said they could not understand why they were chasing cows. Some animals are caught and auctioned by the BSF, only to be bought and smuggled again.

Two soldiers were killed by a gang of Bangladeshi smugglers, while three dozen have been injured by the animals.

"It is a wild chase, but not of a kind a soldier appreciates," said Vivek Tyagi, a BSF commander at the Ghojadanga check post.

Why Do Hindus Not Eat Beef [Google Questions Answered]

Why Do Hindus Not Eat Beef?

I’ve addressed this a little bit here and there, but always as part of a larger post. Today I’m just going to talk about beef and cows…

Growing up in America, beef is every where. For some Americans, it’s part of every dinner. It is the thing our diets are most based on. Without meat, and often specifically beef, it’s not a meal.
I think to many Americans not eating cow seems arbitrary. Certainly some Hindus are fully vegetarian but many others eat some meats but not beef. How strange, the American thinks, how could it be okay to 
eat chicken but not cow?

For Hindus who grow up in America, not eating beef or stopping eating beef can be an enormous challenge. Beef eating is all around us and if we don’t eat it, we are viewed as extremely strange and forced to explain it every time. It can get pretty exhausting.

My understanding is (and please correct me if I’m wrong) that Hindus growing up in India have a very different perception of the cow. It is simply not a meat animal. How could that be? Well, my American peers, think about the stories of some cultures eating dogs. Is it true? I have no idea. But I know that shocking rumors go around from time to time about how in some countries you might accidentally eat dog meat.

Why are they shocking? Because to us, a dog is not a food animal. It occupies a different position in our brains than those animals we would eat. A dog is not for eating.
To Hindus, the cow is the same way. It is not an animal for eating.

There are other reasons why a Hindu might also be a vegetarian. One reason is that one of the important principles of Hinduism (and several of the other Indian religions) is ahimsa, the principle of non-harm. Hindus try to minimize the harm that they do to anyone or anything. (Did you know that in strict Jainism food cannot be plucked from trees or pulled from the ground to minimize harm to plants? Traditionally Jains do not eat root vegetables and fruits must have already fallen from the tree).
Another reason is the belief that when you take the meat into your body, that meat is infused with the emotions of the animals and that you are also taking in the pain and fear connected with how that animal died.

As you have probably heard, cows are revered in India. Some say it is because Krishna was a cow herder and so it is an animal special to him. Others will say it is because the cow is a great symbol for selfless giving. She provides us with milk, cheese, yogurt, etc.

In practice, I think cows wandering the street may be just one more pest. For some, anyway. When I was in India, I mostly saw people swatting cows away in annoyance!

During Diwali there is a day (Dhanteras) when, in some regions, cows are decorated and pujas are performed to them.