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Journalism of Courage
In a 1956 ruling of the Supreme Court, Justice Vivian Bose said the Constitution was not just for governments, lawyers and politicians but also “for the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker”. It was a prescient statement — the following year, nearly 3,000 butchers came knocking on the doors of the Supreme Court. Their case, Mohammad Hanif Quareshi v State of Bihar, marked a watershed moment for the young Republic as it sought to negotiate the centuries-old, communally fraught issue of cattle slaughter within the framework of India’s new Constitution.
In his book, A People’s Constitution, Rohit De, Associate Professor of History at Yale University, wrote that more than 3,000 individually named petitioners from at least 90 villages and towns from Bombay, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar “signed or put their thumbprints on the petition”. Though they were mostly Muslim, Quareshi and the others identified themselves as “citizens of India, Muslims by religion” who belonged to a caste of butchers, hide traders, gut merchants, and leather workers.
Quareshi, from Patna’s Sultanganj, lent his name as the lead petitioner in the batch of cases that challenged state laws, including the Bihar Preservation and Improvement of Animals Act, 1955. The Bihar law and the other state laws prohibited the slaughter of cows, calves, bulls, bullocks and “sheep-buffaloes”. All these laws drew upon the imagery of the cow as a symbol of resistance against British rule, and were enacted in the aftermath of the country’s bloody Partition.
The petitioners challenged it on three main grounds: that they violated their right to equality (Article 14) as the laws separated bovine butchers from other butchers; their right to practise religion (Article 25); and the right to practise any profession or to carry on any occupation, trade or business (Article 19(1)g). Prof De noted that the argument for freedom of religion “was the last of the four challenges in the petition and took up a single paragraph.”
On April 23, 1958, a five-judge Supreme Court Bench headed by then Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sudhi Ranjan Das partially upheld the state bans, carving out key exceptions. The court mainly reframed the issue from its communal overtones to bovine economics.
“In our view the ban on slaughter of she-buffaloes, breeding bulls and working bullocks (cattle and buffalo) which are useful is reasonable but of those which are not useful is not valid. The question as to when a she-buffalo, breeding bull or working bullock (cattle and buffalo) ceases to be useful and becomes useless and unserviceable is a matter for legislative determination,” the court said. Essentially, the court said that cow slaughter was prohibited for economic value and not entirely religious sentiments.
How the economic reasoning was adopted
On November 24, 1948, after much debate, the Constituent Assembly bargained for a consequential settlement on the issue of cattle slaughter. The demand of a handful of members from the northern provinces was to make protection against cow slaughter a fundamental right, much like the protection against untouchability. Dr B R Ambedkar, the chairman of the Drafting Committee, prevailed and it was agreed that “fundamental rights deal only with human beings and not animals”.
The Assembly then adopted an amendment to the Directive Principles of State Policy, a set of guiding values for the State that cannot be enforced in court. Article 38-A states, “The State shall endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry in modern and scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving the breeds of cattle and prohibit the slaughter of cow and other useful cattle especially milch and draught cattle and their young stocks.”
The amendment was moved by Pandit Thakur Dass Bhargava, an MP from Haryana’s Hisar, who later went on to be an amicus curiae (Latin for “a friend of the Court”) in Hanif Quareshi’s case. It was the first time that the court had appointed an amicus curiae. It was also Bhargava’s idea to place the economic argument at the centre of the cow protection debate that the Supreme Court borrowed.
“The average per capita consumption of milk and milk products was worked out by the First Five Year Plan at 5.5 ounces, i.e., about 2.5 chhataks or 1/6 of a seer per day, though 10 ounces are recommended by nutrition experts,” the court noted, deciding that “it is clear, therefore, that in India, where a large section of tile population consists of vegetarians, there is a huge shortage in the supply of milk”.
The SC, in a lengthy ruling, cited numbers and statistics to make the economic argument but also mentioned the religious impulses behind the slaughter ban.
“It is also a fact that after the recent partition of the country, this agitation against the slaughter of cows has been further intensified. While we agree that the constitutional question before us cannot be decided on grounds of mere sentiment, however passionate it may be, we, nevertheless, think that it has to be taken into consideration, though only as one of many elements, in arriving at a judicial verdict as to the reasonableness of the restrictions,” the court said.
On the right to religion, cow slaughter was held not to be a core tenet of the religion while the court cited “interests of the general public” as a reasonable restriction on the right to trade and profession under Article 19(1)(g).
Hanif Quareshi himself, according to his grandson Shafi Quareshi, lived well past 100 years. He was a community leader who sat over small civil disputes and believed in advocacy and died in 2008. In his lifetime, Quareshi would have seen more litigation on the issue.
Legacy of the 1958 ruling
While the 1958 ruling was a setback for the butchers who went to Court, it also required states to amend their laws to allow procedural clarity on what animals could be deemed “fit for slaughter”. States amended the laws but also tried to circumvent the verdict. After a series of revisions, the Supreme Court in the 2005 ruling in State of Gujarat v Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat virtually upheld a near-total ban on cow slaughter.
More than six decades after the Quareshi verdict, the idea of balancing competing interests against religious practices continues to be relevant. The issue of banning fire-crackers during Diwali to curb air pollution and the ban on traditional bull-taming sports such as Jallikattu and Kambala are instances where the court will have to weigh religious and community practices against larger public interests.
Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan said the Hanif Quareshi ruling must be applied with greater force today. “Communities have to take a step back from advocating from their most extreme points of view, even if it is a core tenet of one’s religion, in case such a practice affects the larger public interest. This is based on the core constitutional principle of fraternity. Both the faithful and the irreligious are blessed equally by our Constitution — neither can say that our practices permit the destruction of animals, the polluting of rivers or the mutilation of children,” he said.
The case also serves as a reminder that debate, dissent, and the free exchange of ideas are hallmarks of a civil society. “We are, however, happy to note that the rival contentions of the parties to these proceedings have been urged before us without importing into them the heat of communal passion and in a rational and objective way, as a matter involving constitutional issues should be,” CJI Das had said in the ruling.
