These birds have flown

The other day I went to the Okhla Bird Sanctuary. It’s not far from my home in Delhi, but I had never got around to visiting the place. I read that more than 320 bird species had been recorded there, including nearly 70 migratory ones. The very names of the birds on the sanctuary’s website conjured up visions of beauty and colour — White Throated Kingfisher, Redwattled Lapwig, Greylag Goose, Common Teal… I was looking forward to making my bones as a bird watcher.

But when I went there, the birds seemed to have decamped. I walked down the forest path overhung with high-voltage electric wires that emitted a steady crackle — an unexpected sound in a nature park. I followed the signs that led to a so-called watchtower. Camera in hand, I waited patiently. However, the only birds I spotted were some ducks in a water body that shimmered coldly in the early morning light.

What one did see in abundance, though, were cattle — scruffy herds of buffaloes, bulls and calves that stood motionless here and there or slowly ambled along. I edged away from them, especially the bulls with the scythe-like horns, watching out for the mounds of poop that littered the forest land. As the day progressed, I saw more of them. They looked utterly content and at peace with the world — as cows might look when they have found their true place in the sun. And the birds? Well, they may have been out there somewhere. Or perhaps they had fled while the bovines went about appropriating their habitat.

It now appears that stray cattle are hoofing it into wildlife sanctuaries as well

India has a ballooning stray cattle problem — a state of affairs brought on by the twin effects of the rigorous implementation of laws banning cattle slaughter and the zeal of cow vigilantes who don’t hesitate to kill on the mere suspicion of anyone having slaughtered a member of the revered species. Unable to dispose of unproductive cattle in the old ways, farmers simply abandon them now. As a result, the cattle roam the countryside, foraging on crops. Oddly, the farmer who regards the cow as a holy mother at some mysterious metaphysical level shows no love towards bovines that come lumbering into his fields to devour his crops. They are thrashed and maimed and driven away and the hapless beasts continue to wander, unless they get hit by traffic, or are picked up and housed in over-crowded, disease-ridden cow shelters. And there aren’t enough of those either.

One knew all this, of course. But it now appears that stray cattle are hoofing it into wildlife sanctuaries as well. Coincidentally, two days after I saw a profusion of bulls and buffaloes at Okhla Bird Sanctuary, The Times of India carried a report saying that visitors to the Keoladeo National Park (formerly known as Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary) in Rajasthan had complained about the presence of abandoned cattle. When you come to watch birds, you don’t want cows and bulls crowding into your line of vision. Besides, such large animals could drive the migratory birds away.

You don’t need to be an environment wingnut to figure out the ecological hazard of letting masses of cattle graze in bird sanctuaries and game reserves and deplete the vegetation on which other, protected, herbivores feed. (Of course, they could also get eaten by a carnivore and it would be interesting to watch how cow vigilantes deal with that!) Some surreptitious domestic cattle grazing does take place in India’s national parks, where it is otherwise prohibited. But with the explosion in the number of stray cattle — 5.2 million according to the last Census in 2012, so the current figure would be far higher — more and more of them could go barrelling into wildlife reserves in search of food. Clearly, the ruling party’s rallying cry of gau raksha is brewing an environmental disaster on many fronts.  

The thing about war cries is that they are often raised without any thought of the consequences. If it was cow protectionism yesterday, it is the doctrine of unquestioning patriotism today — a patriotism that demands that we swallow every assertion of the state with solemn faith, or else. The knock-on effects of these war cries will be felt for years, poisoning our environment in more ways than one.

Shuma Raha is a journalist and author based in Delhi @ShumaRaha