The recent communal tensions in Soro, Pattamundai and Rourkela should be probed by the Crime Branch and the background ascertained since there is a common string in the three riots, which were triggered by agents hired by the cattle mafias, said Gau Gyan Foundation (GGF) and Bharatiya Raksha Manch (BRM) in a release here.
Manch convener Murali Manohar Sharma appealed to the Naveen Patnaik Government to probe the role of the cattle mafia in the riots.
GGF spokesperson Jagpreet luthra, who has been in Odisha for the last six months in connection with GGF’s campaign against cattle-smuggling and slaughter, said, “The mafias are frustrated at failure to smuggle huge numbers of cattle during the Eid month.”
As per a study of the crime patterns done by luthra, before Bakr Eid, 150 trucks passed through Baleswar 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 desibreed cattle/head is Rs 1 lakh. So, business worth millions of rupees has been disrupted by the GGF’s six-week-old blockade in Baleswar.
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 Bharatiya Raksha Manch national secretary Anil Dhir, the cattle smugglers are also smuggling drugs, arms, counterfeit currency notes and contrabands as they have links with terrorist organisations. Most of them engage illegal Bangladeshi immigrants for the work, he opined.