From C.K Nayak
NEW DELHI: As the political game over gau rakshaks resorting to lynching gains momentum, it is the animals that continue to be the biggest sufferers.
Chilli powder or petrol is put into their urinary or reproductive organs which make the animals run in sheer pain. This helps the herders to move the animals faster towards the border, BSF sources said.
After border fencing was done, herds of such animals in hundreds are rammed on to the barbed fences which collapse under the animals’ weight.
In the process some cows or bulls get maimed or even die.
But prices of livestock are so high in Bangladesh that the loss is compensated, the sources said.
A cow that costs Rs 5,000 in India fetches up to Rs 50,000 in Bangladesh. The illegal cross-border trade is estimated to be worth Rs 5,000 crore a year. Cattle supply from India’s North East and eastern states not only feeds neighbouring Bangladesh but also its tannery industry.
Border guards intercept them periodically but cattle smugglers keep devising new methods. India shares 4,096 km border with Bangladesh and there are multiple points along this boundary where cattle smugglers operate, often after dark.
At times, the smugglers push nails into the rumps of the cows besides putting chilli or petrol in their genitals to make them run in pain. These would be applied on cows making up the last row in a group of about 50, the sources said.
Breaking through the fence usually kills or maims the first few cows, but the possibility of their death is factored in when the receivers in Bangladesh pay for the “consignment” in advance through hawala transactions. Sources said these transactions are controlled by non-Muslim traders, most of them based in Mankachar on the Assam-Meghalaya-Bangladesh tri-junction. The fence was reinforced with a double fencing in the early 2000s. This made the cattle smugglers switch to other strategies.
One more technique involves snorkelers, usually children, who use the hollow of papaya stems to breathe underwater and guide cattle across in rivers and channels flowing into Bangladesh through the border some of which are riverine.
At times a cow tied on the Indian side of the border with a rope for grazing and then drove to the other side and taken away by just cutting the rope.
Sometimes smugglers lose their way at night and enter the same village from where they had lifted the cows only to be caught and thrashed.