BJP government's beef ban policy before Eid hits dairy farmers of Bengal
In an (un)expected yet ironic turn of events, the BJP government’s decision to ban cow slaughter in the state, something many people rightly saw as being directed towards inconveniencing Muslims and policing their practices has now backfired onto Bengal’s own dairy farmers, most of whom are Hindus.
I remember a lot of right-wing Hindus, mostly from the upper-caste and upper-class bhadralok milieu, constantly cheering for this whenever discussions about the BJP forming government in Bengal came up. They celebrated this decision as some sort of civilizational victory. I genuinely wonder what they have to say now that it has ricocheted back onto Hindus themselves by disrupting an economic supply chain that was already functioning in a relatively balanced way, especially across rural Bengal.
The problem with devotionalizing or attaching religious sentiment to a commercial entity like cattle is that economics does not stop functioning just because you are emotionally attached to something. At the end of the day, people buy cows, bulls, oxen, buffaloes etc with money and they have to extract economic value from them in order to survive. That is simply how livestock economies work.
When a cow stops producing milk after a certain age, it becomes commercially unfit for poor dairy farmers to maintain indefinitely. Traditionally, the animal would be sold off for consumption, giving the farmer enough money to buy younger cattle and continue sustaining the dairy cycle. This is literally how rural livestock economies have functioned for generations. Disrupting this cycle simply pushes the burden onto the poor farmers.
And this will inevitably affect us consumers too. Milk and milk-based products in Bengal are going to become more expensive over time. Maybe not necessarily the packaged products sold by giant corporations like Amul or Mother Dairy immediately, but definitely things sold through local economies like dairy based sweets, paneer, curd, ghee etc from local sweet shops and small dairy vendors.
And now the same people will probably start cheering for “market solutions” and privatization. I mean, the upper middle-class urban gentrified crowd will adapt just fine by buying packaged dairy products from giant corporations while the indigenous local dairy economy of Bengal slowly gets hollowed out from the inside. Maybe Amul or some other corporation belonging to one the crony capitalist friends of the party in power will step in to fill the gap and capture the market.
But it is worth thinking about what happens to the poor dairy farmers who relied on this cycle for their daily bread.
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