India’s disappearing camels: How the law to save them is destroying them | Environmental news

Rajasthan, India – Jeetu Singh’s camel stands still, nibbling on the leaves of a Khejri tree in Jaisalmer district in India’s desert state of Rajasthan.

Her calf occasionally feeds on her mother’s breast. Although the newborn is the latest addition to Singh’s flock, the sadness is palpable on his face. His normally sparkling eyes turned gloomy, staring at the grazing camels.

When Jeetu, 65, was a teenager, his family had more than 200 camels. Today, that number has dropped to 25.

“Camel breeding was nothing less than a competitive thing when we were kids,” he tells Al Jazeera. “I used to think that my camels should be more beautiful than those bred by my peers.”

He would groom them, anoint their bodies with mustard oil, trim their brown and black hair and decorate them with colorful beads from head to tail. The camels would then decorate the landscape with the ornate frieze of symmetry they form as they walk in herds like “ships of the desert”.

“It’s all a memory now,” he says. “Now I only keep camels because I am attached to them. Otherwise, there is no financial benefit from them.”

Worldwide, the camel population has grown from nearly 13 million in the 1960s to more than 35 million now, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, which has declared 2024 the International Year of the Camel to highlight the crucial role the animal plays in lives of millions of households in more than 90 countries.

But their numbers in India are in drastic decline – from almost a million camels in 1961 to only about 200,000 today. And the decline has been particularly sharp in recent years.

A livestock census conducted by India’s federal government in 2007 revealed that Rajasthan, one of India’s few camel-raising states, has about 420,000 camels. In 2012, they dwindled to around 325,000, while in 2019 their population had fallen to just over 210,000 – a 35 percent drop in seven years.

This decline in the camel population in Rajasthan is felt throughout the vast state – India’s largest by area.

About 330 km (205 miles) from Jeetu’s home is the village of Anji Ki Dhani. In the 1990s, the hamlet was home to more than 7,000 camels. “Now there are only 200 of them present; the rest are extinct,” says Hanuwant Singh Sadri, a camel conservationist for more than three decades.

And in Dandi village in Barmer district, Bhanwarlal Chaudhary has lost nearly 150 of his camels since the early 2000s. Now he has only 30 left. As the 45-year-old walks with his herd, a camel leans towards him and kisses him.

“Camels are associated with the language of our survival, our cultural heritage and our daily life,” Chaudhary said. “Without them our language, our existence has no meaning.”

2015 law the biggest blow

Camel keepers and experts cite various reasons for the dwindling number of camels in India. Tractors replaced their need on farms, while cars and trucks took over the roads to transport goods.

Camels are also struggling due to the reduction of pastures. Since they cannot be fed in a barn like cows or pigs, camels have to be left to graze in open areas – like Jeetu’s camel eating the leaves of the Khejri tree.

“That open setting is barely available now,” says Sadri.

But the biggest blow came in 2015, when the Rajasthan government under the Hindu majority Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) passed the Rajasthan Camel Act (banning slaughter and regulating temporary migration or export).

The law prohibits the transport, illegal possession and slaughter of camels. “Even decorating them could lead to injury, as the definition of injury is loosely formulated,” Chaudhary told Al Jazeera.

Punishment under the law ranges from six months to five years in prison and a fine of between 3,000 rupees ($35) and 20,000 rupees ($235). Unlike all other laws – where the accused is innocent until proven guilty – this law reverses conventional judicial practice.

“The burden of proving innocence rests with the person prosecuted for this crime,” it says.

With the entry into force of the law, the camel market was banned – as were the camel breeders who intended to sell their animals. According to the law, buyers suddenly became “smugglers”.

The act was conceived on the assumption that the slaughter of camels was the cause of the decline in their population in Rajasthan. He banned the transport of camels to other states, says Chaudhary, thinking that this would serve three purposes: it would increase the camel population, it would increase the livelihood of the breeders and it would stop the slaughter of camels.

“Well, he missed his first two targets,” says Chaudhary.

‘Suddenly there were no customers’

Sumit Dookia, an environmentalist from Rajasthan who teaches at a university in New Delhi, has a question for the government about the law.

“Why is the camel population still decreasing”, he asks, if there is a law in force that should revive their numbers?

Chaudhary has the answer. “We raise animals to sustain our lives,” he says, adding that without a market or a fair price, keeping such large animals is no easy task.

“The law conflicted with our traditional system where we used to take our male camels to Pushkar, Nagore or Tilwara – the three biggest camel fairs,” adds Sadri.

Sadri says that the breeders used to get good money for their camels at these fairs.

“Before the law was passed, our camels were selling from 40,000 ($466) to 80,000 rupees ($932),” he says. “But as soon as the government implemented the law in 2015, camels started selling for a meager 500 ($6) to 1,000 rupees ($12).”

“Suddenly there were no customers.”

So, have customers lost interest? “No, they are not,” says environmentalist Dookia. “The only thing is that they are now afraid for their lives.”

This is especially so because almost all the buyers at Pushkar, India’s largest camel fair, were Muslim, says Sadri. And they are especially easy to target in the climate of anti-Muslim hostility under the BJP.

“If a Muslim eats camel meat, we have no problem. If there are good slaughterhouses, the price of camels will only increase, thus inspiring breeders to keep more and more camels,” he says.

“But the BJP does not want to do that. It’s pushing us out of our traditional markets.”

‘The law took away our camels’

Since 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP came to power in India, cases of lynching of Muslims and Dalits by Hindu vigilantes for animal slaughter have increased exponentially. Dalits sit on the lowest rung of Hinduism’s complex caste system.

“Looking at the scenario in the country, buyers are scared and would not take any risk in transporting camels,” says Chaudhary. “In such a situation, why will there be a buyer? Who will buy the animals?”

When asked if the law was responsible for the decline in the number of camels in the country, Maneka Gandhi, a former minister in Modi’s cabinet who championed the law, said: “The law has had no effect,” adding that “Muslims continue to smuggle the animal.”

Gandhi claimed that the law was “not implemented at all”. If the law is properly implemented, she said, camel numbers will rebound.

But Narendra Mohan Singh, a 61-year-old retired bureaucrat who helped draft the bill, disagrees.

“Look, the law is problematic, and we only found out about it after it was passed and began to affect growers. We had very little time to prepare it and the farmers and camel breeders who were actually supposed to be affected were not consulted when it was brought in,” says Singh, former additional director of animal husbandry in the Rajasthan government.

“We were told to formulate a law for camels similar to what existed for cows and other livestock. But a law that was meant to protect camels ended up doing the opposite,” adds Singh.

Amir Ali, an assistant professor at the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, agrees with Singh.

“Exaggerated concern that Hindu [majoritarian] animal politics has two strange aspects,” he says. “First, it lacks an understanding of the nuances and complexities of things like keeping livestock. Second, in the strange fervor of expressing concern for animals, it ends up demonizing and dehumanizing groups like Dalits and Muslims .”

Meanwhile, the sun has set in Jaisalmer. Jeetu, sitting on the ground by the fire, thinks about the newborn camel in his herd and asks, “Will the baby camel bring happiness to Rajasthan?”

Sadri and Singh are not optimistic.

Sadri says the BJP’s “short-sighted bill” continues to contribute to the decline of the camel population in Rajasthan.

“Animal welfare organizations know nothing about large animals. They can only breed dogs and cats,” he says, his voice seething with anger.

“This law has taken away our markets and will eventually take away our camels. I will not be shocked or surprised if there are no camels left in India in the next five or ten years. They will disappear forever like the dinosaurs disappeared.”

Singh has an almost equally dire prognosis for the future. “If it doesn’t die out, it will eventually become an animal in the zoo,” he says.