Court suspends ban on cow slaughter
INDIA: India’s Supreme Court has suspended a controversial ban on the trade of cows for slaughter, which critics said unfairly targeted the country’s meat and leather industry and its predominantly Muslim and lower-caste workers.
The ban, introduced by the Hindu nationalist government, prohibits the trade of cattle for slaughter in animal markets, a move that would have cut off a major supply chain for the country’s US$16 billion-a-year meat and leather industry.
Cow slaughter and consumption have increasingly become a flashpoint in India, where cows are considered sacred by many members of the Hindu majority, and where cow traders and beef consumers have faced beatings and lynchings.
India’s highest court yesterday upheld a lower court decision to suspend the ban - which some states had already declared they would not enforce - for three months.
‘‘The livelihoods of people should not be affected by this,’’ Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar said in New Delhi.
The government said in May that the prime focus of the new livestock market rules was to protect cows from cruelty and to stop them from being smuggled to places such as Bangladesh and Nepal for large-scale animal sacrifice.
Representatives of India’s meat industry had argued that the ban - which prohibits the sale of ‘‘cattle’’ for slaughter, ‘‘cattle’’ being a broadly defined term including buffaloes and even camels would have a devastating effect on their business.
The ban was the latest limitation placed on butchers in a country where beef slaughter and consumption is already banned in several states.
One state assembly this year amended laws to punish those slaughtering cows with life in prison, and other state officials have suggested that butchers should be hanged. Right-wing Hindu ‘‘cow protection’’ squads have in recent months beaten and killed cow traders and those suspected of eating beef. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s lengthy silence on the issue led to criticism that he was enabling the cow vigilantes. Last month he finally spoke out against the violence, saying killing in the name of the cow was ‘‘not acceptable’’.
The country’s leather goods industry, which supplies international retailers such as Benetton, would face supply shortages in the long run under the ban, said Puran Dawar, chairman of the northern section of India’s Council for Leather Exports.