“We can’t be seen with stray cattle at night,” said Mohd. Umar, while tending to his cow in Madan Mustafabad village of Hapur. “Even if they maraud our fields, we wait till morning to gently push them, including the bulls, towards our Thakur brothers in Bajheda Khurd. They have a licence to hit them hard, shove them into a vehicle and send them to the cow shelter home that has come up on the outskirts.” Sarcasm is melting in April heat as his brother Usman joins in. Tense about their cow losing fertility, he added, “Abhi nayi karai hai [artificially inseminated] but if it doesn’t work out, she won’t be of any use. You would be thinking we will eat her up,” he grinned. Some of the kin who had come home from Delhi for the harvest season said how they buried their previous cow when she died. “Don’t tell anybody, they would seal our land and get it excavated,” interrupted Usman.
The Muslim Rajput and Hindu Rajput-dominated villages hit the national headlines in 2018 when Qasim, a cattle trader, was lynched on the boundary of the two villages and self-styled cow vigilantes grievously injured a witness Md. Samayaddin. After six years, this March, a local court convicted 10 men for life and raised serious questions on police investigation in the case.
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