BJP effect: Beef is vanishing from India’s Bengal, forcing diet changes

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 Mohammad Mehmood Alam, manager of a roadside eatery opposite the facility that mostly caters to daily wage labourers, taxi and autorickshaw drivers. He’s still getting used to the desolation, he says.

“I don’t think this government will let this reopen any time soon,” Alam says.

On May 13, the West Bengal government issued a notice on bovine slaughter in the state, only four days after the 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 party (TMC). The TMC is nationally in opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP.

The document mentions strict compliance with the West Bengal Animal Slaughter Control Act, 1950, stating that cows, bulls, bullocks, calves and specified buffaloes cannot be slaughtered without a certificate declaring the animal fit for slaughter.

Such a certificate can be issued only if the animal is above 14 years of age, unfit for work or breeding, or has become permanently incapacitated because of age, injury, deformity, or an incurable disease. The notice also states that certified animals may be slaughtered only in a municipal or locally designated slaughterhouse and prohibits slaughter in open public places.

The notification was issued just as Eid approached in May, and the impact was immediate, with restaurants and markets across the city and state reporting an acute shortage of beef. But the effects have outlasted Eid. More than three months later, beef remains in short supply in a state where the meat was widely relished.

That’s because the certificate that traders and suppliers need to show, establishing that a specific animal meets the conditions for slaughter, isn’t the only bottleneck holding up beef trade in Kolkata.