Simmering Anger Against ‘Rising’ Cattle Thefts: The Farmer Protests No One Cares About

Two weeks ago, farmers in Petwar village of Haryana’s Hisar district staged an agitation outside police station against what they claimed was police’s lackadaisical attitude towards a growing cattle theft menace. Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar reported the claims of farmers that on 20 October, a resident, Bablu, caught a cattle thief red-handed and handed him over to the police, but the police failed to arrest the thief’s accomplices.

Two months earlier, agitated farmers in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddh Nagar district – in which also falls the Greater Noida region – gheraoed the Jarcha Police Station. Hindi daily Patrika quoted farmers as saying that while the area was witnessing a steep rise in buffalo thefts, the police were refusing to even register first information reports (FIRs). The farmers were forced to stay up all night to protect their cattle. One of the protesters, Udayveer, told the newspaper that thieves stole six of his buffaloes and the police had done absolutely nothing about it.

Open regional newspapers and reports of such protests are a routine sight, especially in dairy-rich states such as Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. In most cases, protesters accuse the police of not registering FIRs, investigating the thefts or carrying out night patrols – in short, the police’s total failure to curb the menace. The farmers threaten to either stage a massive protest or take matters into their own hands.

Loss of cattle is a major setback for the farmers. A buffalo or a cow usually costs more than Rs 50,000 and is bought as an investment. When thieves strike, they wipe out the entire cattle sheds in a go. This correspondent reported a spate of such thefts from Rajasthan’s Alwar district earlier this year. Shafi Khan, a farmer from Mandla Kala village in Alwar’s Ramgarh tehsil, had five of his buffaloes taken away on a night – a loss he pegged at more than Rs 2.5 lakh.

His mother Laduli said the family is forced to buy milk for their grandchildren that they can barely afford. "Hum majdoor log hain [we are labour class]. It's hard on us. We don't have money to buy more cattle," she says.

Increasingly, it is not just the fear of getting economically crushed but also the fear of getting killed at the hands of the deadly cattle-smuggling mafia that is making farmers hit the streets. Frequently. Angrily.

Also read Swarajya’s ground report on two such murders in Haryana: Killed For Owning Cattle: Meet The Victims Of Illegal Beef Industry.

In UP’s Jarcha, a farmer was shot dead in his cattle shed in April. Eye-witnesses said three thieves, who had entered the village in dead of the night on a motorcycle, tried to escape with cattle when 59-year-old Ratan Singh nabbed one of them. The thief’s accomplice fired shots at Singh. One of the bullets accidentally hit the thief. Both Singh and the thief died.

The incident had preceded a spate of cattle thefts in the village. Later, probe revealed that the murder was carried out by contract killers at the behest of one of Singh’s relatives. The relatives had decided to use cattle thefts as cover for the murder. They hoped that the police would fail to reach the killers as they were failing to catch the cattle thieves. Murder of one of the thieves, however, ruined the plan.

Rajkumar Singh, president of a Bharatiya Janata Party-affiliated farmers' group in Jarcha, told this correspondent that cattle thefts continue unabated. The village frequently erupts in protests.

A farmer in Jarcha, Om Prakash Singh, told this correspondent that he would "deliver justice on the spot" so that his "future generations can sleep in peace". He said, “if a thief targets my place, he won’t escape alive from my grip”.

Asked why, he said, “do I have any other option? Has the police or government left me with any option?”

Such is the helplessness of farmers that they can neither depend on the police nor tackle the menace themselves. They blame the national English media for aggravating their problems.

They say that while scores of murders and thousands of thefts by cattle-lifting gangs are ignored, a handful of cases where villagers catch hold of the thief and beat him up, are given communal colours and disproportionate coverage, and made to appear like a national crisis. These cases are covered using the key words – mob lynching. Mob lynching of ‘Muslims’, to be specific. The fact that the cattle mafia is overwhelmingly dominated by members from the Muslim community, is not taken into account.

Columnist Ruchir 'Ferrero' Sharma noted in a recent piece in Swarajya,

A farmer from Alwar, who said he has lost nine buffaloes and cows in a decade to thieves, told this correspondent last year, “We lost our cattle and learnt a new word – mob lynching. What we understand of it is that if a thief comes to your house, you stand with folded hands and let him rob you. If you resist, they will say mob lynching happened.”

Given its propensity to underplay any crime involving Muslims as perpetrators, the national media remains deaf and mute to the growing anger among dairy farmers.

Government data on such crimes simply does not provide a true picture of the extent of the menace. This is due to massive under-reporting of such thefts.

As per the latest data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a total of 7,459 cases of animal thefts, including cattle, were registered in 2017 across the country. The corresponding figure for 2016 was 8,859. Such cases are usually registered under ‘theft’ (IPC sections 379-382), which is defined as an act of stealing somebody’s property without consent.

The under-reporting is due to two major reasons: one, because villagers know that the police are helpless and have told them as much and two, police intervention ruins whatever little hope they have of getting their property back.

With police indifference, state apathy and a hostile national media, cattle owners today are a helpless and angry lot. Hence the frequent protests. The anger, as is evident in the words of Jarcha resident Om Prakash, is rising and could lead to even more cases of mob justice. Any mob justice is condemnable and should have no place in a civilised society. But as Om Prakash asks, has the police or government left the farmers with any option?