In a remote coastal village of Mota Samadhiyala in Gujarat, Balubhai Sarvaiya, 48, sits huddled in his cowshed. As grey clouds of Cyclone Ochki loom large over the state, Sarvaiya is pacifying Gori, his 15-year-old cow, who is pregnant for the fourth time.

While her first three offspring were male calves, two did not survive. The third was given away to a farmer. “She will deliver her fourth baby in a fortnight. We are desperate for a female calf,” he says.

Sarvaiya is one of the five Dalits who were beaten up by self-proclaimed gau-rakshaks, a year-and-a-half ago on the outskirts of his village Mota Samadhiyala in Gir Somnath district – an incident which marked a flashpoint in the Dalit agitation of the state.

A year-and-a-half down the line, 30-odd families in the village of close to 4,000 have given up skinning dead cows. Sarvaiya says they fear re-emergence of the violence which was perpetrated against him, his two sons, Vashram, 24, and Ramesh, 18, and his brother’s sons, Besar, 21, and Ashok, 18, on July 11 in 2015.

At the time when Sarvaiya was thrashed so badly by the goons, Gori was very sick. “I had spent close to Rs 5,000 on her treatment. How could they have alleged that I killed a cow to skin her? We only skin dead cows,” he says. “However, that is a thing of the past now. We have given up on our ancestral occupation after the flogging,” he adds.

Selling hides, hooves and bones of dead cows used to fetch his family of six a monthly income of Rs 4,000 to Rs 5,000. After they stopped the skinning work, the already poor family has become poorer. “It was the dead cattle of the higher-caste Patels that we collected. After we decided to stop picking up the dead cattle, the Patels took to disposing them off themselves,” he says.

For him it is a double whammy. Being brutally beaten up has affected his blood circulation adversely. Working on farms of the higher-caste Patels in the village as daily labour fetches his family supplementary income, but he cannot carry out the hard labour everyday.