Yogi Adityanath's meat ban campaign defies logic and economics

Uttar Pradesh’s (UP’s) new chief minister, who officially styles himself Yogi Adityanath, may urgently need a crash course in basic economics before the forces he has unleashed with his campaign to close abattoirs inflict more damage to the state’s economy. Reports increasingly suggest that a campaign, ostensibly against illegal abattoirs, has degenerated into an all-out, overt assault on a particular community, the Muslims, who own and run the bulk of the state’s 30-odd legal slaughterhouses and thousands of unlicensed ones. Far from limiting their activities to unlicensed abattoirs, the authorities have expanded the ambit of their activities to legal ones, on which the full force of the invidious “inspector raj” has been unleashed to withdraw licences on the flimsiest of pretexts. Within four days of the state government formation, four licensed abattoirs were closed. The fact that government officials visited these premises armed with locks and seals, as a representative of the All Indian Meat and Livestock Exporters Association stated in an interview, underlines the suspicion that legality is an incidental element of this campaign, especially when none of these establishments slaughters cows.

 

The toxic impact of this calculated deepening of social polarisation may be part of a political agenda, but Mr Adityanath needs to consider seriously the wider implications embedded in this troubling operation. UP does not just account for a sizeable chunk of India’s buffalo-meat exports (43 per cent), earning forex of over Rs 20,000 crore a year, the industry and its offshoots — meat packaging, livestock-rearing and leather production — provide employment to over 500,000 people. This campaign, thus, weakens the foundation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s job-creating “development” agenda in a state with the country’s second-highest unemployment rate. The irony perhaps is that Muslims account for less than a quarter of the employment; Hindus, make up the rest. The fact that most of them are Dalits or OBCs means that the weakest sections of society are hit hardest by Mr Adityanath’s agenda. Equally, the flourishing meat industry has resulted in a vibrant dairy industry – India is the world’s largest milk producer – even as the economics of rearing cows has been rendered unviable by the ban on their slaughter. 

 

It could be argued that the action against illegal abattoirs, at least, is valid, especially considering the conditions under which they operate. But given the significance of their activities in the state’s economy, their existence no doubt met a robust demand, especially when the state’s own facilities do not meet standards. In Lucknow, for example, the famed Tunday kebab shops were forced to source supplies from illegal abattoirs after the state-owned one was closed by the UP Pollution Control Board in 2013 and never reopened. A viable alternative could have been to give these establishments a time-frame, say six months, to conform to standards. The biggest irony of Mr Adityanath’s abattoir campaign is that it comes at a time when Brazil, hitherto the world’s largest exporter of meat, faces a ban in some overseas markets owing to safety standards. This would have put UP in pole position to increase production and cash in on growing global demand.