Holy cow: smuggling Indian cows to Bangladesh
There are few things that keep Utpal Mondan awake at night, but his choice of profession is one of them.
The 19-year-old Hindu lives in Char Rajapur, a small village in rural India, two kilometres from the Bangladesh border.
Most of the homes have dirt floors, no electricity and no running water.
Four years ago, Utpal Mondan dropped out of school when his father fell ill and joined the queues of men that line up at the border each morning in the hope of getting work toiling in the fields.
He was earning a few dollars a day, which was not nearly enough to support his parents and three sisters.
At 16 he started looking for a career change.
"I saw some of my friends in this border area making money from this other kind of business," Mr Mondan said.
"That's why I started to do this illegal work."
That illegal work is cow smuggling.
Hindus worship cows, seeing them as an essential part of human life - providing milk to drink, dung for fertiliser and muscle to work in the fields.
Killing a cow in India can attract a jail sentence and it is illegal to export them for slaughter.
Despite religion and legislation, millions of cows continue to be smuggled across the border each year to neighbouring Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
In Bangladesh, the country's domestic supply of beef is unable to meet demand.
Mr Mondan takes between 30 and 40 cows across the border each month, usually in pairs to blend in with farmers who take cows two at a time to work in the fields.
Smuggling two cows earns him between 20 and 40 times what he was making working as a farmhand for a day.
"If it is a small cow it is less, if medium size a little more, if it is big I get more money," he said.
As a Hindu he hates the work, but the prospect of seeing his family slide further into poverty keeps him going.
"I know in the Hindu religion the cow is my God," he said.
"If I had money I would never hand the cows over to other people."
Smuggling cows is a risky business.
Usually Mr Mondan has enough money to bribe the police guarding the checkpoints along the fortified border.
If he doesn't, he and his fellow smugglers have to sneak across.
"We create a disturbance, a distraction, at the police post between local villagers, usually between a Muslim and a Hindu," he said.
When that doesn't work, the consequences can be serious.
"The Border Security Force is very aggressive," Mr Mondan said.
"Sometimes they use firearms and sometimes boys are killed.
"Many incidents like this have happened in my village area."
According to human rights groups more than 1,000 people have been killed by the Indian Border Security Force along this frontier during the last decade.
Many more have been tortured.
"They are only torturing and killing the people who are not paying the bribes," Kirity Roy, the secretary of the Kolkata-based civil rights group Masum, said.
Two years ago the Indian Government ordered the Border Security Force to use only rubber bullets along the Indo-Bangla border, but in many places they still use live ammunition.
"It is not true that BSF are now only using pellets," Mr Roy said.
"Even a few days back there was a firing and one man was killed".
Dr Sreeradha Datta, the director of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies under the Ministry of Culture, says legalising the trade could be one way to reduce the number of deaths on the border.
"The more you formalise the trade the less of a problem it becomes," Dr Datta said.
She says it's impossible that smuggling could have gone on for so long without the compliance of state and federal officials.
"There is a strong vested interest that works with both the traders as well as the political constituencies," she said.
But any moves to legalise the trade would be met with fierce opposition from Hindu nationalist groups.
"If the government were to legalise the cow smuggling trade then it would happen in a huge way, so we will never accept it," Sontosh Kumar Sarkar, the vice president of the West Bengal branch of Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), said.
While the government would find it hard to justify legalising the trade, Hindu cow smuggler Utpal Mondan can explain clearly why he does it.
"What we do, we do it for the money," Mr Mondan said.
Yet that rationale doesn't alleviate his daily battle with his conscience.
"When we hand over the cow we know very well it will be killed," he said.
"We know that the cow is God, but we have to hand it over... if I don't then how will I run my family?"
Holy cow: smuggling Indian cows to Bangladesh - Australia Network News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
