Not Just Cow Slaughter Act, Allahabad HC Had Some Observations About Ill-Treatment Of Bovines

On Monday, the Allahabad High Court had made some scathing observations on how the Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act is being misused in Uttar Pradesh.

While the court expressed concern over what it called the repeated misuse of the law and its implication on innocent persons, it also mentioned how cows - considered holy by Hindus - are not taken care of once they stop producing milk.

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Slamming the police department, the judge said that whenever cows are recovered from smugglers, no proper recovery memo is prepared and there is no laid down procedure on where they end up later.

"Gaushalas do not accept non-milch cows or old cows and they are left to wander on the roads. Similarly, owners of the cows after milking, leave the cows to roam on roads, to drink drainage/sewer water and eat garbage, polythene, etc," he observed.

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The judge said stray cows were becoming a menace on the roads, coming in the way of traffic and leading to accidents and deaths. The judge also spoke about the fear of police and certain sections of people because of which cows cannot be transported outside the state.

The judge said a way out should be found, to keep the cows either in designated shelters or be returned to their owners.

The single-judge bench of Justice Siddharth made these observations while hearing the bail application of one Rahimuddin, accused of cow slaughter and sale of beef under sections 3, 5 and 8 of the said Act.

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The judge made the stinging remarks after finding that the accused had spent over a month in jail without any allegations mentioned against him.

Earlier this year, the Uttar Pradesh government, in a statement tabled before the Assembly, said that 9,261 cattle had died in various shelters in the state in 2019 "due to natural causes."

In the state's budget for 2019-2020, the government had allocated no less than Rs 600 crore for building and maintaining cow shelters - apart from imposing a 2 per cent cess on purchase of beer and Indian Made Foreign Liquor - to create a corpus for cow protection.

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There are over 5,000 temporary cow shelters housing nearly 3,00,000 cattle, in addition to 92 'Kanha gaushalas' run by state municipal bodies, housing nearly 21,000 cattle, in Uttar Pradesh.

Ever since the Yogi government implemented the cattle slaughter ban, Uttar Pradesh has been battling the menace of stray cows - aged, unproductive milch cattle that were abandoned by the farmers who could not afford to keep them anymore.

These cattle ended up on the streets, causing several road accidents and often invading farms in search of food.