How the gau rakshaks help the gaushalas profit from their violence and activism

According to a supervisor, the cattle shelter is home to about 200 cattle, cows as well as bulls.

Most of them he told us were ‘rescued’ by an army of about 200 gau-rakshaks or self-styled cow-vigilantes attached to the shelter, sometimes using violent methods.

In reality, many of the seizures are booked by the police under milder animal cruelty laws – not slaughter – and courts regularly hand the cattle back to the owners pending a final settlement.

But a well-connected cattle shelter like Mr Modak’s doesn’t seem to have much respect for the law.

In 2011, cattle worth Rs. 80,000 was seized from Ahmed Sheikh, a Pune-based cattle trader and brought to Mr Modak’s shelter.

The court ordered them to be released for a Rs. 48,000 bond.

But when the police arrived to collect the cattle, they said they found the owner missing. Finally, they had to register an FIR against the shelter.

The cattle have still not been handed over.

The reason, say cattle owners, is that the police are scared to enter these shelters, especially those run by outfits with political clout and with a horde of bouncers at their disposal.

Four years after he went to court, Mr Sheikh claims he was attacked by goons linked to the shelter, acting under orders of Shiv Shankar Swamy, an enforcer for cattle shelters in the Pune region.

Mr Sheikh’s lawyers showed us pictures of his badly bruised body taken immediately after the attack. An FIR was registered against Mr Swamy.

This is not the only case against Mr Modak’s shelter, or against multiple cattle shelters in the Pune region.

MM Sayeed, a lawyer for Pune’s cattle traders, told us he has conducted more than 250 cases and estimates that around 25,000 cattle have been seized in this particular Pune area.

But if you visit the shelters, you will not find more than 200 cattle. So how does this happen and where does this cattle go?

The only conclusion, said Mr Sayeed, is that “gaushala owners themselves engage in the buying and selling of our animals”.

When we tried to contact Mr Modak, at the cattle shelter they told us he was at his home a short distance away.

At his residence, however, they claim he had left for a meeting without his cellphone.

In  another report by NDTV, a cameraperson, Sanjay Mandal, armed with a hidden camera, posed as an assistant to a truck carrying 10 buffaloes from Pune towards Satara district, about an hour south of the city in Maharashtra.

An hour from Pune near the village of Saswad, a mob of aggressive ‘gau-rakshaks‘ or cow-vigilantes stopped the truck.

They pushed and shoved Sanjay and the driver, yanked him out and snatched his phone.

Screaming abuses all the while, they forced themselves into the truck’s cabin and steered it into a police station.

Until then, they had not even looked in the back of the truck.

At the Saswad police station, a bigger crowd gathered. The tension in the atmosphere was palpable.

Police officials made little attempt to control the mob.

Instead they were taking cues from a young man leading the gau-rakshaks. He identified himself to NDTV as Subhash Tayade, a member of the local Hindutva group, Samastha Hindu Aghadi.

Tayade’s boys told us they were tipped-off about the truck by a Pandit Parsuram Modak, the owner of a nearby gau-shala or cowshed. “We were looking out for this truck all night after Pandit-ji‘s tip off,” they said.

A Facebook community page describes Mr Modak as a gau-rakshak, who has worked for “the BJP and RSS for 40 years”.

When we asked Sub Inspector AS Tapade how a mob can forcibly stop a truck and push and shove those inside, he said the gau-rakshaks only pass on information to the police.

What we had witnessed was very different – it was rule of law by mob. When pressed, Tapade said they would act against the gau-rakshaks if needed.