Probe the cattle mafia’s links with the communal rioters, demand Odisha Hindus

Press conference held by Gau Gyan Foundation and Bharatiya Raksha Manch

Bhubaneswar : The recent communal tensions in Soro, Pattamundai and Rourkela should be probed by the Crime Branch and the background ascertained. There is a common string in the three riots, which were triggered by agent provocateurs hired by the Cattle mafia of the State.

“There is no history of communal trouble in Soro and Pattamundai. The conflicts seem to be the handiwork of agent provocateurs belonging to the cattle mafia,” said Murali Manohar Sharma, Convener of the Bharat Raksha Manch. Sharma appealed to the Naveen Patnaik government to probe the role of the cattle mafia in the riots.

Spokesperson of Gau Gyan Foundation, Ms Jagpreet Luthra, who has been in Odisha for the last six months in connection with GGF’s campaign against cattle-smuggling and slaughter, too agrees. “The mafia is frustrated at its failure to smuggle the huge number of cattle during the Eid month was frustrated by the protracted campaign”, said Luthra.

As per a study of the crime patterns done by Luthra, before Bakr’id, 150 trucks passed through Balasore each night in connivance with the district police, and the Seragarh tollgate was the most popular route. This is besides the hard-to-detect sealed containers that pass through the gate each day.

With an average of 40 cattle in each, the number of cattle smuggled would have been about 250,000 over the last six weeks. The current price of an Indian desi breed cattle/head is one lakh rupees. So, business worth millions of rupees has been disrupted by the Foundation’s six-week-old blockade in Balasore.

Odisha is the single largest conduit of the cattle smugglers in India with traffic from four states converging here before going to West Bengal and Bangladesh for slaughter.

According to Anil Dhir, the national Secretary of the Manch, the cattle-smugglers are also smuggling drugs, arm, counterfeit currency and contraband as they have links terrorist organisations. Most of them engage illegal Bangladeshi immigrants for the work. The tacit support given to these elements is reprehensible.

“The cattle mafia, with the open and covert support of the Balasore police,” Luthra said, “tried every dirty trick in its book” to have her removed from the Seragarh tollgate where she did unbroken duty for 40 nights and successfully stopped almost all the night smuggling.

“The mafia men have been running a campaign against me as being an outsider come to disturb the communal situation and criminal involved in extortion but with the law book as my Brahmastra, I refused to budge from my self-assigned duty of blocking the smugglers at the tollgate,” said Luthra.

This is Luthra’s fourth trip to Balasore in the last 30 months, and she got the “worst response” from the Balasore police this time, she said. “The police sided openly with the cattle mafia and were hostile to me and my fellow volunteers, threatening us with arrests, questioning our motives and locus standi.”

Last month, Luthra caught a beef-loaded truck in Balasore on its way to West Bengal. It had come from Kendrapada, where the mafia men had slaughtered 115 cattle. Luthra believes that the mafia had come up with this plan as it was unable to transport the cattle alive on account of her blockade at Seragarh.

On the 9th September, when the communal flare-up had already happened in Soro, the mafia tried to smuggle cattle to fuel the communal fires, she alleged. With public help, Luthra, caught a cattle-smuggling container (No. OD 01 B 1674) at Bampada in Balasore. The container had been loaded in Bhadrak and was heading to West Bengal. “The cattle-stuffed container had come right through Soro despite a curfew and heavy police presence all along that part of NH 5,” she said, adding, “it is not hard to figure out the dangerous intent behind the move.”

The cattle mafia runs the biggest crime syndicate in the State, with hefty payoffs to politicians, police and authorities. Rules are flouted in active connivance with the authorities, and officials who take action are shifted. The smugglers break every rule in the book, the Police seizes a few trucks as a cursory matter, while the bulk of the trade goes on unhindered.

Source : Press Release by Gau Gyan Foundation and Bharatiya Raksha Manch