Meatless Days In UP

Visitors to Meerut city in ­Uttar Pradesh these days will be surprised by a strange sight. It is perhaps a sign of the times that the city’s meat retailers—the handful still in business—are being made to do something they ­never had to before. They are being told to cover their shopfronts, concealing from public view their supplies, raw or cooked. The retailers—largely Qureshi Muslims—have scrambled to submit to the rule, hastily throwing curtains or woollen blankets across their storefronts. This, they say, is the only way to stay in business during the Yogi Adityanath government’s crackdown on ostensibly illegal abattoirs.

This injunction, however, has not made the meat shops invisible, as the government had perhaps hoped. Instead, concealed under bright pink blankets or blue chiks, they have become even more conspicuous. Covered facades single out “non-vegetarian” shops from other establishments. Such segregation is known to  have had fraught meanings elsewhere in the world. “At least our shops are open. Almost all others have closed,” says Firoz, whose family owns two chicken and mutton shops at Begum Pul in Meerut. He counts himself among a lucky few.

This is happening not only in Meerut, but also in Hapur, Khurja, Bulandshahr, Allahabad and Lucknow. Everywhere, those who sell chicken, mutton, fish or buffalo meat are being told to “go legit” or close shop. Going legit implies not just having all the requisite licences, but also assuring the authorities that they will cover up their shopfronts. Police and district officials are also insisting on glass windows, air coolers, air conditioners and other modern parapher­nalia in meat shops.

“The administration broke my shopfront, saying I have encroached,” says B.B. Ram, a 70-year-old whose pork shop is also at Begum Pul. “We have been here for three generations, 150 years, but I am being told to cover up for the first time.”

Ever since UP barred ‘illegal’ slaughterhouses, Muslims—and many Hindus—are being reminded of what the BJP had promised in its manifesto: illegal and mechanised slaughterhouses will be closed. So, while the central government grants meat export licences only to mechanised abattoirs, in UP it no longer matters whether they are legal or not. No wonder it’s not just the ret­ailers who are nervous, but also meat ­exporters, most of them Qureshis again. Dalits, who dominate the animal hide business, are also majorly affected as their trade is umbilically linked with the meat business.

“In the assembly election, the BJP cleverly managed to isolate the Dalits and Muslims politically,” says Satish Prakash, Dalit ideologue and professor at Meerut College. “And after coming to power, their first step has been to use against these two groups the strength they have gained from this strategy. In the name of legalising slaughterhouses, the BJP is weakening the Muslims economically. The party is also worried as the Dalit hide traders are the same people who, 50 years ago, brought the Ambedkar movement to Agra from Maharashtra. Those old caste wars have become today’s economic wars.”

The most profitable aspect of the meat business is exporting it, largely to the Middle East. The annual turnover of meat exports is Rs 2.50 lakh crore, while leather exports account for another Rs 40,000 crore. Around 65 per cent of India’s meat and leather originates in UP. The Qureshis control around 40 per cent of this business, which is the only means of livelihood for 1-1.5 crore people of the community. Jains and Hindus too figure in the meat export chain, in various roles such as livestock farmers, mandi owners, livestock financiers, exporters and packaging-­unit owners. However, it is the Qureshis who have made their presence felt. The business has created a burgeoning Qureshi middle class and sent many to the higher echelons in the political and economic spheres.

“We didn’t expect this kind of action against slaughterhouses from the UP government because PM Narendra Modi always talked about ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’,” says Sirajuddin Qureshi, president of the India Islamic Cultural Centre and MD, Hind Group of Companies. Instead, they have caused us huge losses. Similarly, CM Adityanath delivered a good oath-taking speech, saying he will pursue the PM’s agenda and there would be no divisiveness. There will be widespread unemployment and hunger if slaughterhouses are shut. Even licensed ones are being closed. There should at least be a scheme for rehabilitation.”

Two decades ago, the Qureshis were mostly workers in meat processing or small halal stores, but they have come a long way today. Now, their leadership is under severe pressure from the community to resolve the crisis. Sirajuddin has written to the PM on their behalf and also met the CM, who assured that lic­ensed traders will not be “troubled”. The traders also want new municipal slaughterhouses that meet the regulations.

UP’s meat retailers once had access to municipal slaughterhouses for a fee, but now all except four are shut or outdated. The sudden closure of informal ­slaughterhouses since Holi has spurred great anxiety. “It’s hard to understand what our crime is. Are we being ­punished just for being Qureshis and in this trade?” says Haji Noor Mohammad Qureshi from Bulandshahr, who is the state vice-president of the All India Jamiat-Ul-Quraish.

Haji Noor is besieged by jittery meat traders. “My phone won’t stop ringing,” he says. “The government wants our shops to be 100 yards from religious places, even mosques. They want coolers, ACs, glass facades. Can anybody afford meat from such hi-fi shops? Who will pay electricity bills of Rs 5,000-7,000? Who will spend Rs 1-2 lakh to rebuild the shops—I or my landlord?”

Bulandshahr has no municipal abattoir, leaving the town’s butchers to fend for themselves. In rural areas, a four-walled enclosure in Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods caters to their needs. In urban areas, it is the Samajwadi Party (SP) government that had shut municipal slaughterhouses, while assuring that they would be reopened after “modernisation”. This almost never happened despite a Rs 10-15 crore central subsidy for reconstruction. Meerut’s 200 meat-­sellers had been using abattoirs within ­export units, or had contrived informal slaughterhouses in the bylanes.

“After the municipal abattoir closed, Meerut’s meat exporters—the only ones left with valid slaughterhouse licences—were asked to help small retailers until it was rebuilt,” says Haji Sajjid Akhlak, who runs Al-Aqsa, a processing unit on the Meerut-Hapur highway. “Last week, the exporters were asked to stop helping ­retailers, while informal slaughter was banned. The retai­ler will ­die hungry, for he needs his daily inc­ome to survive.”

Richa Singh, a student leader who contested the assembly polls unsuccessfully on an SP ticket, points out that Allahabad’s butchers were still using the slaughterhouse “closed” by the SP government, albeit informally. “But now they cannot use even the ‘closed’ unit,” she says. “The police have become very strict and the retailers are struggling for food. There is a lot of anxiety and fear now.” It’s the same story in Hapur, Lucknow and Varanasi as well.

“The SP government had promised to reopen municipal slaughterhouses after modernisation, but reneged on it. In fact, even Azam Khan couldn’t bear to see us Qureshis prosper,” says Yusuf Qureshi, who owns a meat packaging unit near Hapur. “And now this government is taking advantage of its majority, forgetting that mutton is prized by Hindu diners more than Muslims.” Yusuf is a former Congress minister, while Khan is a Pathan and SP leader, making them ‘caste’ and political rivals.

Even chicken and mutton retailers in Gola Kuan, a Muslim-dominated area of Meerut, blame Khan and his party for not having renewed their licences in previous years. They feel this has given the BJP an easy opportunity to halt their traditional work. “People have started using godowns as abattoirs, especially to cater to wedding feasts,” says Hamza, a poultry dealer whose licence was not renewed in 2016. “But the police have started raiding weddings too.”

“If all these businesses and export units are illegal, should the UP government not pursue the officials who connived to keep them open?” asks Yusuf. “Instead, the bureaucracy is busy displaying its Hindutva credentials.”

A slaughterhouse at Gosipur near Hapur was closed during the last Kumbh Mela in 2013. “Since religious sentiments were involved, people waited patiently—but the abattoir never reopened,” says Noor Mohammad. This vast network of informal or outdated slaughterhouses is what the Yogi Adityanath government is now calling illegal.

“UP had abattoirs only due to political patronage,” says Balraj Doongar, Meerut convener of the Bajrang Dal. “When ‘they’ ran the government, the people and the administration were turned into helpless spectators.” By ‘they’, he implies Muslims and, according to him, closing abattoirs is a wider public expectation too, a precursor to “Ram Rajya”.

Doongar hit the headlines recently for unearthing an “illegal” slaughterhouse run by Rahul Thakur, a Meerut resident who claimed to be a BJP worker. Thakur, a ‘Nai Rajput’ by caste, was roughed up by Bajrang Dal workers, who say he had been felling bovines at a unit in Ambedkar colony. “You see, we don’t care whether the slaughtering is done by Hindus or by Muslims,” says Doongar.

Yet, oddly, there have been raids of late even on units with no abattoirs. It was during one such drive that Akhlak’s meat packaging unit, Al-Aqsa, was closed. “They inspected the setup and saw there was no slaughterhouse. We also showed the requisite documents,” says Akhlak. “But then they said our building plan was unapproved. Many units here don’t have this clearance as they had come up when there was no approving authority. We are shut until we get this approval.”

Hafiz Imran, whose family is close to the Bahujan Samaj Party and runs one of UP’s biggest meat exporters, Al-Faheem, says, “Big units like ours will survive or diversify, but small retailers will perish without the abattoirs. The new government is making survival tough even for legal units. They are finding small flaws  and ordering closures straightaway.”

Allahabad-based advocate Kamal Kri­shna Roy points out that many Hindus associate the meat trade with Muslims. “It’s a false impression,” he says. “Hindus are, in fact, big meat consumers today. But the scale of the BJP’s electoral victory suggests that most Hindus, at least tacitly, approve the ban on abattoirs. They are silent also because these are Navratri days, when a lot of Hindus stay off meat anyway.”

Many activist groups oppose imp­ositions on food habits, but the BJP win has stunned most of them. “For now, those who oppose the closures don’t know what to do,” says Roop Rekha Verma, former vice-chancellor of Lucknow University. “The propaganda around ‘pink revolution’ rests on incorrect claims of depleting bovine-buffalo population.” It seems to have worked and now Muslims are on the back foot, fearing tremendous resistance. They are only too aware that abattoirs are often seen as inherently unhygienic, that rumours abound about the blood from abattoirs spreading disease and ruining the soil.

Imran rues that not many know “how clean, efficient and non-polluting the better slaughterhouses are—almost as clean as five-star hotels”. Moreover, every part of felled buffaloes and goats serves a purpose. The blood, for example, goes to lipstick and fertiliser manufacturers. “That everything has utility is what makes our business so profitable. Otherwise, to protect bovines, wouldn’t the government simply stop meat exports?” he asks. As Satish Prakash sums it up, “This fight is not over dharma, purity or buffalo-­protection. It’s a financial war.”

By Pragya Singh in Meerut and Hapur