Law on beef backs ban in Maharashtra
The Maharashtra Government's controversial ban on cattle slaughter may stand the test of law as laid down by the 7-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in 2005 while upholding a similar total ban on cattle slaughter slapped by the Gujarat Government.
The Bench had overturned a 5-judge Bench''s verdict that was delivered in 1958 on the constitutionality of the laws on the cattle slaughter ban in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The 1958 judgment had even declared beef as a "poor man''s food," but the new judgment by the Bench headed by then Chief Justice of India R C Lahoti that is now the law dismissed it as reflecting India''s panic due to the food scarcity in that era.
The 1958 judgment had made a fine distinction between the bovine useful or useless, allowing slaughter of "useless" cattle, except cows of all ages and calves, not capable of milch on the ground that keeping such useless cattle would be a ‘wasteful drain’ on the nation's cattle feed while their slaughter would feed the poor.
Then Chief Justice S R Das, who wrote the 1958 judgment, had termed beef as the common man''s diet, noting that "poorer people, who can hardly afford fruit, milk or ghee, are likely to suffer from malnutrition if they are deprived of even one slice of beef or buffalo flesh which may sometime be within their reach."
The 2005 judgment, however, trashed most of the contentions while reversing the 1958 ruling, noting that nutrition is not "necessarily associated with non-vegetarian diet and that too originating from slaughtering cow and its progeny" and moreover "beef contributes only 1.3 per cent of the total meat consumption pattern of the Indian society."
It noted that "the concept of food security has undergone considerable change in 47 years since the earlier judgment and hence it was futile to think that meat originating from cow progeny can be the only staple food or protein diet for the poor population of the country."
The judgment also rejected the distinction between useful and useless cattle, holding that it would be "an act of reprehensible ingratitude to condemn cattle in old age as useless and send them to a slaughter house as the weak and meek need more protection and compassion."