Nagpur's Beef

IF THE FIRST-INFORMATION REPORT is to be believed, the Lonavala Rural police station received an anonymous call at 3.30 am on 10 March 2022. The caller said that a truck carrying beef would be crossing their stretch of the Pune–Mumbai Expressway as it snaked its way through the Western Ghats. It was a valuable tip. After a 2015 amendment to animal protection laws pushed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the mere possession of beef in Maharashtra began to carry a longer sentence than the possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine or morphine. The police acted quickly, with the assistant sub-inspector Qutubuddin Gulab Khan keeping watch near Sinhgad College, where the highway takes a wide turn before it enters the hill station. That evening they spotted the truck, NL 01 AB 5853—the same number plate mentioned in the tip. Khan signalled for the truck to stop, but it flew by. A chase followed, and Magnu Ashrafi Paswan, the 35-year-old driver, and Shubham Sharma, the truck’s 25-year-old cleaner, were arrested.

The truck’s papers showed that its journey had started from Hyderabad, where it had picked up 1,400 cartons of freshly processed meat, each weighing 20 kilograms. The police priced the catch at around Rs 60 lakh. Paswan and Sharma had neither any certification for the meat nor transportation papers. They only knew that they had been asked to transport it by one Rehan Ahmed Qureshi—who also goes by Rehan Chaudhary—who, they thought, lived either in Mumbai or in Hyderabad.

The Maharashtra Police did not have to wonder about ownership for long. The next day, an application was filed in a magistrate’s court at Vadgaon Maval, a suburban town in Pune district, requesting custody of the 28 tonnes of meat during the pendency of the case. The application came from a company called Rembal Agro and Foods, registered in Mumbai, which claimed that the meat was of buffaloes, not cows, and was thus perfectly legal in the state. Bills of ownership were also presented, with Rembal arguing that the meat was purchased in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh, before being sent to Hyderabad for processing. It was headed to Mumbai, so that it could be exported to Vietnam.

However, the judge found the furnished documents doubtful. Rembal was transporting the meat from Hyderabad to Mumbai but did not have the permission of Hyderabad’s animal husbandry department. Instead, the health certificate was issued by a veterinary officer in Aligarh. Further, the E-way bill—an electronic document required for transporting bulk goods—was generated by Rehan’s firm, Chaudhary Enterprises. Rehan himself was based in Nagpur, adding to the confusing geographical spread of the whole deal. The judge also observed that no documents had been filed to show that the meat belonged to buffaloes and not cows. He ordered that it be kept in cold storage while the police searched for a bone-mill owner or licensed industrial user to sell it to.