India’s Supreme Court has granted an interim stay on an order by the Madras High Court that had banned cow slaughter in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on Eid al-Adha and any other day. Delivering the ruling on Monday (July 13), the Supreme Court made clear that the High Court’s order required legal “correction” or review. The order came in response to a special appeal filed against the High Court ruling by the TVK government, led by Thalapathy Vijay, currently in power in Tamil Nadu. The ruling has brought major relief in protecting the religious freedom of the state’s minority Muslim community.
Earlier, on May 27, a division bench of the Madras High Court had ordered a full ban on cow slaughter across Tamil Nadu by implementing an old government order from August 1976. Challenging that order in the top court, the Vijay government argued that when the country’s existing laws and statutory provisions clearly permitted the slaughter of a particular category of cattle at designated places under specific rules, any judicial directive or ban running counter to that statutory law could not be sustainable.
The division bench of Justices GR Swaminathan and V Lakshminarayanan of the Madras High Court had cited the 1976 order in the interest of increasing milk production and developing the rural economy. Justice Swaminathan, who wrote the ruling, had also stressed that under Article 48 of the Indian Constitution it was the state government’s duty to take effective steps to prohibit the slaughter of cows, calves and other milch and draught cattle, and drawing on the history of the Constituent Assembly debates, he noted that the cow was a highly revered animal.
Traditionally, the Muslim community sacrifices animals during Eid al-Adha at various religious gatherings and on private premises in line with local rules, while several Hindu temples in Tamil Nadu also practise animal sacrifice during their annual festivals. Welcoming the Supreme Court’s decision, leaders of the Muslim and various religious communities argued that restricting such sacrifices to licensed and government slaughterhouses alone was entirely impractical and impossible, as those slaughterhouses did not have the capacity or infrastructure to handle the huge demand for animals during festival days. The Tamil Nadu government told the court that the Tamil Nadu Animal Preservation Act and other existing rules already strictly regulated where and under what conditions animals could be slaughtered, but that these laws did not impose any blanket or total ban on animal slaughter in the state.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report