Muslims angry at plan to ban city's thousands of donkeys

Plans to remove all working donkeys from India’s capital in a bid to clean-up the streets ahead of next year’s Commonwealth Games have left hundreds of families fearing for their livelihoods.

Across Old Delhi there are an estimated 2,500 donkeys and mules usually carrying bricks to construction sites or removing concrete rubble from demolished buildings. They are led by their owners or labourers employed for the day to tend to the animals.

In October, officials from the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and local police officers visited the owners of Delhi’s working donkeys and warned them their animals would have to be removed from the city soon. The move is part of a campaign by Delhi to gloss over its filthy streets and present itself as a “world class city” during the games next October by removing beggars, vagrants, rubbish and anything else that spoils this image – including the city’s working animals.

In parts of the old city nearly 1,500 mostly poor and illiterate Muslim families are directly dependant on donkeys and mules for their livelihood, estimated Yusuf Mohammed, a leader of Delhi’s horse, donkey and mule owners union. They are now waiting to see if the city’s authorities will take them away.

“We have been told, our animals will be impounded and we shall be thrown out of the city if we don’t leave Delhi [along with the donkeys] on our own.” said Sheruddin, as he fed and watered his two donkeys at their makeshift stable on the pavement after a day’s work clearing a demolition site in Old Delhi’s Turkman Gate area.

“For generations we have been doing this job in this city, along with these animals,” he said. “We cannot understand how our animals and us have suddenly turned into a nuisance for them now.”

Sheruddin, a 45-year-old who lives in a nearby slum with his wife and three children, said he was not sure what he would do if the plan to remove the animals goes ahead.

“We have nowhere to go. The government is not doing the right thing by being so cruel to us,” he said.

In Turkman Gate owners of about 250 working donkeys and mules are worried about their fate.

“MCD officials surveyed the area recently and we have been asked to remove all donkeys and mules and clean up the stables because, they said, they don’t look good in a beautiful city,” said Saleem Mohammed, who keeps two donkeys in the Turkman Gate stables and is the son of 76-year-old Yusuf Mohammed, the union leader.

“We were born and have grown up in this city. We have got our families settled here. Our children have been studying in local schools. We will be at sea if we are forced out of our native place now.”

Yusuf Mohammed said the animals have a 400-year-old medieval heritage which dates from when nomadic groups arrived from Multan and settled in Delhi to help construct the city in the early 17th century under the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.

“They should not take an abrupt decision to throw out the animals without planning a proper rehabilitation package of our families and the animals,” said Mr Yusuf. “The process of real rehabilitation in this case will take long years because we cannot leave this traditional profession unless our younger children get enough education and find jobs in another world when they grow up.

“But before they decide to ban the animals in the city it must be debated in the first place whether the animals have really no longer fit in today’s or tomorrow’s Delhi.”

No one from the MCD or the police would comment on the ban on working animals, claiming that no official notice has yet been served. Yusuf Mohammed said that sources in the MCD had privately informed him that an official notice asking the donkeys and mules to be removed from the city was being prepared to be served to the animal owners next month. In an attempt to delay the plan, his union executives will meet the city officials and police next week.

For Mohammad Nazar, who owns two donkeys and one mule, the eviction cannot work. The 50-year-old believes that as congestion in the old part of the city grows and roads and lanes becomes narrower, construction companies will come to rely more on the donkeys and mules.

“Eighty per cent of construction sites in Old Delhi are not adjacent to bigger roads,” he said. “Inside most of the narrow winding lanes and by-lanes even mini vans cannot enter to bring in the bricks [to a construction site] or take out the rubble. Donkeys and mules cannot be outsmarted by any other mode here.

“As the population is growing, roads and lanes are getting narrower. In this situation I think the utility of the donkeys and mules is in fact increasing in Old Delhi. You don’t need them in well-planned modern parts of the city where most construction sites are connected with wide roads. But you need our animals in Old Delhi, where congestion is higher.”