The First Roundup

"The cow," wrote Mahatma Gandhi, "is the mother to millions of Indian mankind. She is a poem of pity." By tradition and training, many another devout Hindu through the centuries had assumed the same attitude toward the beasts who roam India's city streets and country lanes by the millions. It is a statutory crime in India to kill a cow. In 1944 a high-caste Hindu, who accidentally let one of his own cows strangle herself, was forced to roam the streets for three days with a halter around his neck, mooing for food and forgiveness.

In recent years, the increasingly modern-minded Hindu has begun to look with less favor on his sacred cattle. The "dedicated bulls," which from time immemorial have been set free to roam the country as walking memorials to dead Hindus, are no longer of carefully selected, high-breed (Brahman) stock as they once were, but more often cheap, scrub calfs with little breeding and less manners. Their cows are mostly skilled and shifty thieves who are set free by their owners each day to filch and pillage in other men's gardens, garbage cans and vegetable stalls before returning home at night to be milked.

Last week, casting sentiment to the winds, the city fathers of New Delhi took action at last against the 4,000-odd free cows and bulls at large in their city. A task force of 100 picked cow catchers, armed with ropes and long poles, gathered each night at dusk near the municipal post office for briefing. In deep secrecy, lest the cow owners foil their plans, the posses deployed to strategic spots in the city, blocking off the ends of streets and side alleys. Their main idea was to trap the vagrants and drive them into a temporary pound, but time and again the cornered cows would charge their pursuers and escape, frightening the wits and the sleep out of many Delhi citizens dozing in cots on the streets. When finally trapped, the cows would lie down and 8 or 10 people would have to roll each beast to the pound.

By week's end, working against odds, Delhi's cow catchers had rounded up 500 cows for shipment to a 2,000-acre government cow home in the Himalayan foothills (unless their owners chose to claim them and pay a fine). This week they plan to go to work on the city's bulls.

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