The cow is held sacred in India. Hindus worship cows, seeing them as an essential part of human life - providing milk, dung for fertilizer and muscle to work. Killing a cow in India will attract jail sentence and it is illegal to export them for slaughter.
Across the border in Muslim majority Bangladesh, situation is completely opposite: beef is considered a delicacy and in high demand.
In fact Bangladesh needs three million cows to keep up with internal consumption, but the country can only supply one million. So where the rest coming from? It's being smuggled from India, in a trade worth around 1 billion US dollars per year.
Smuggling the cows is dangerous business. The Indian Border Security Force has had a pretty liberal shoot to kill policy. More than 1,000 people have been killed by them along the border during the last decade. Many more have been tortured.
But as long as the economic incentive is there, somebody is bound to do the illegal trade. By now, I have learned how to tell an Indian cow from a Bangladeshi one (mostly by size and horns). And I have been stuck in traffic for so many hours because of traffic jams caused by trucks full of Indian cattle.
Slaughtering of cows has long been an emotional issue in the subcontinent. The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, which marked the end of Mughal Rule and the beginning of the British Raj, was sparked by rumors that the rifle cartridges used by sepoys, or soldiers of the East India Company, were greased with beef and pork, which offended both Hindu and Muslim.
But stopping this trade would have a serious impact on the Bangladeshi economy. I would bet rising beef prices could even spark riots here. After all, how can you live here without gorur mangsho (cow meat)?
