‘More dangerous than drugs’: BJP’s war on beef in India’s West Bengal
Since Prime Minister Modi's BJP came to power in West Bengal, beef is vanishing from menus as supplies become harder.
Kolkata, India – It’s 12pm on a weekday, and the lane in the city’s Tangra neighbourhood facing the sole bovine slaughterhouse in Kolkata is empty. Run by the city’s municipal corporation, the colonial-era building in the capital of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal looks like a fortress, with its giant iron gates locked from the inside.
A peek through a gap between the gates reveals schoolboys running around and playing in the vast empty campus. “Those boys scale the walls and enter the slaughterhouse ever since it got shut down in May,” says Mehmood Alam, manager of a roadside eatery opposite the facility that mostly caters to daily wage labourers, as well as taxi and autorickshaw drivers. He is still getting used to the desolation, Alam says.
On May 13, the West Bengal government issued a notice on bovine slaughter in the state, only four days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was declared the winner in the state legislature elections that saw the end of the 15-year rule of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) party.
“If I’d bought a cow for 100 bucks, I sold it for 30 bucks, which is far below the rate at which it would usually go for,” Laiq says. “That’s still better than dealing with the headache” of the harassment that the BJP government has subjected cattle traders to since coming into office, he adds.