The Supreme Court has stayed a Madras High Court order that had imposed a blanket ban on the slaughter of cows and calves across Tamil Nadu, whether on Bakrid or any other day, granting relief to the state's TVK-led government headed by Chief Minister Vijay.
A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta passed the interim order while issuing notice on a Special Leave Petition filed by the Tamil Nadu government challenging the High Court's ruling, Live Law reported.
The bench flagged that the concluding portion of the High Court's order, the part imposing the state-wide prohibition, appeared, on the face of it, to need reconsideration.
Senior Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi represented the state before the apex court.
The state's case rests on the argument that the High Court's directive runs counter to the Tamil Nadu Animal Preservation Act, 1958, which permits slaughter of cows above 10 years of age that are certified unfit for work or breeding.
Other statutes governing slaughterhouse conditions, the state contended, regulate the manner of slaughter but stop short of an outright ban, making the High Court's blanket order tantamount to rewriting the law through judicial fiat.
The High Court's order, passed by Justices GR Swaminathan and V Lakshminarayan on 27 May, the eve of Bakrid, had arisen from a plea by K Surya Prasanth of Hindu Makkal Katchi.
While the original petition had only sought a direction confining slaughter to designated locations in Coimbatore, the bench went further and imposed a total, state-wide prohibition, relying on a government order linking the ban to milk production and the rural economy, along with past Supreme Court rulings on Bakrid practices.
In its plea before the apex court, the state has argued that the High Court's order is internally inconsistent — permitting slaughter at designated facilities in one breath while barring it entirely in the next — and that it wrongly assumed authorities had conceded to public slaughter, when police records reportedly showed preventive steps were already in place to confine any ritual sacrifice to enclosed, non-public sites.
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