India’s disappearing camels: How a law to save them is wiping them out

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

Her calf occasionally suckles on her mother’s breasts. While the newborn is the latest addition to Singh’s herd, sadness is palpable on his face. His otherwise sparkling eyes have turned gloomy, gawping at the grazing camels.

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

“Rearing camels was no less than a competitive affair when we were children,” he tells Al Jazeera. “I used to think my camels should be more beautiful than those reared by my peers.”

He would groom them, apply mustard oil to their bodies, trim their brown and blackish hair, and decorate them with colourful beads from head to tail. The camels would then adorn the landscape with the festooned frieze of symmetry they form while walking in herds as the “ships of the desert”.

“All that is memory now,” he says. “I only keep camels now because I am attached to them. Otherwise, there is no financial benefit from them.”

Across the world, the camel population rose 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 declared 2024 as the International Year of Camelids to highlight the key role the animal plays in the lives of millions of households in more than 90 countries.

But their numbers are on a drastic decline in India – from nearly a million camels in 1961 to just approximately 200,000 today. And the fall has been particularly sharp in recent years.

The livestock census conducted by India’s federal government in 2007 revealed that Rajasthan, one of a few Indian states where camels are reared, had about 420,000 camels. In 2012, they reduced to about 325,000, while in 2019, their population dipped further to a little more than 210,000 – a 35 percent downfall in seven years.

That decline in Rajasthan’s camel population is being felt across the vast state – India’s largest by area.

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

And in the Barmer district’s Dandi village, Bhanwarlal Chaudhary has lost nearly 150 of his camels since the beginning of the 2000s. He is left with just 30 now. As the 45-year-old walks with his herd, a camel leans towards him and kisses him.

“Camels are connected to the language of our survival, our cultural heritage and our everyday life,” Chaudhary said. “Without them, our language, our being has no meaning at all.”

2015 law the biggest blow

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

Camels have also struggled because of the shrinking grazing lands. Since they cannot be stall-fed like cows or pigs, camels must be left for grazing in open areas – like Jeetu’s camel eating the leaves of the Khejri tree.

“That open set-up is hardly available now,” Sadri says.

But the biggest blow came in 2015, when the Rajasthan government under the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) passed the Rajasthan Camel (Prohibition of Slaughter and Regulation of Temporary Migration or Export) Act.

The law prohibits the transport, illegal possession and slaughtering of camels. “Even decorating them could amount to causing them hurt, as the definition of causing them harm is loosely worded,” Chaudhary tells Al Jazeera.

Punishment under the law ranges from a prison term between six months and five years, and penalties between 3,000 rupees ($35) and 20,000 rupees ($235). Unlike all other laws – where the accused is innocent until proven guilty – this law flips conventional jurisprudence.

“The burden to prove innocence rests with the person prosecuted under this act,” it reads.

With the enforcement of the act, the camel market was outlawed – and so were camel breeders if they intended to sell their animals. Buyers suddenly became “smugglers” under the law.

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

“Well, it missed its first two targets,” Chaudhary says.

‘Suddenly, there were no buyers’

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

“Why is it that the camel population is still shrinking,” he asks, if a law meant to revive their numbers is in force?

Chaudhary has the answer. “We rear animals to sustain our lives,” he says, adding that without a market or a fair price, keeping such huge animals is not an easy task.

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

Sadri says the breeders used to get good money for their camels in those fairs.

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

“Suddenly, there were no buyers.”

So, did buyers lose interest? “No, they did not,” says ecologist Dookia. “The only thing is that they are scared for their lives now.”

This is particularly so because almost all the buyers in Pushkar, the largest camel fair in India, were Muslims, says Sadri. And targeting them is especially easy in a climate of anti-Muslim hostility under the BJP.

“If a Muslim is eating camel meat, we don’t have any problem. If there are good slaughterhouses, the price of camels will only increase, thereby inspiring breeders to keep more and more camels,” he says.

“But the BJP doesn’t want to do this. It is putting us out of our traditional markets.”

‘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 over animal slaughter have risen exponentially. Dalits sit at the lowest rung of India’s complex caste system.

“Looking at the scenario in the country, the buyers are scared and would take no risk in camel transport,” says Chaudhary. “Given such a situation, why will there be a buyer? Who will buy the animals?”

When asked whether the law was responsible for the declining number of camels in the country, Maneka Gandhi, a former minister in Modi’s cabinet who had pushed for the law said, “The law has had no effect”, adding that “Muslims are continuing smuggling of the animal”.

Gandhi claimed that the law “has not been implemented at all”. If the law is properly implemented, she said, camel numbers would make a comeback.

But Narendra Mohan Singh, a 61-year-old retired bureaucrat who was involved with the drafting of the law, disagrees.

“Look, the law is problematic, and we got to know about that only after it was passed and started affecting the breeders. We were given very little time to prepare it and farmers and camel breeders who were actually going to be affected were not consulted when it was being brought in,” says Singh, the former additional director of animal husbandry in Rajasthan’s government.

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

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

“The excessive concern that Hindu [majoritarian] politics expresses towards animals has two strange aspects to it,” he says. “First, it is bereft of an understanding of the nuances and complexities of matters such as livestock herding. Second, in the strange zeal to express concern for animals, it ends up demonising and dehumanising groups like Dalits and Muslims.”

Meanwhile, the sun has set in Jaisalmer. Jeetu, sitting on the ground next to a bonfire, thinks of the newborn camel in his herd and asks: “Will the baby camel bring good fortune to Rajasthan?”

Sadri and Singh are not optimistic.

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

“The organisations pushing for animal welfare don’t know anything about big animals. They can only raise dogs and cats,” he says, his voice seething with anger.

“This law took away our markets and will eventually take our camels. I will not be shocked or surprised if there are no camels left in India in the next five or 10 years. It will be gone forever like dinosaurs did.”

Singh has an almost as dire prognosis for the future. “If not extinct, it will eventually become a zoo animal,” he says.

Source