By – Divyaansh Kharbanda
Abstract
In 2014, the Supreme Court of India in Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja took a massive step towards recognising entitlement for animals. By aligning itself with the global shift towards viewing animals as not a source purely for human use, it anchored within its reasoning an eco-centric approach that led to the ban of Jallikattu and bullock-cart racing. Yet, in 2023, the Supreme Court, in its five-judge constitutional bench in Animal Welfare Board of India v. Union of India, upheld the state amendments reviving all three sports and therefore reinstated an anthropocentric approach which declined to extend fundamental rights to animals. This article attempts to trace that reversal and argues that the court’s willingness to accept “tradition and culture” as a self-evident, homogenous category was never accompanied by any inquiry as to what the tradition and culture were. By doing so, it reignited the well-documented casteist and patriarchal moorings that are placed alongside the judgment’s silence on the subject.
Introduction
In its 2014 judgment, the Supreme Court took a significant step towards animal jurisprudence in India. The bench read Section 3 and 11 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 together with Article 51A (g) and (h) of the Constitution and held that animal rights “have to be elevated to the status of fundamental rights”, calling these provisions the “magna carta of animal rights”. Further, the bench compared welfare statutes of various jurisdictions before invoking the Five Freedoms recognised by the World Organisation for Animal Health as principles that “find a place in Sections 3 and 11” of the Prevention of Cruelty Act. This recognition found its root in the shift that took place in environmental law that was moving towards recognising nature’s own rights. Most significantly, the Bench refused to treat culture as a trump card, holding that the act “over-shadows the so-called tradition and culture”. This cemented India’s environmental jurisprudence as one taking shape towards an eco-centric approach, one which treats the animal as being of intrinsic worth and tests even long-standing custom against that standard. It is with this backdrop that the 2023 reversal must be read as not a technical correction but a retreat from the very premise on which the 2014 judgment stood.
The Anthropocentric Turn: Culture Restored, Rights Denied
With this judgment and ban, massive protests took place in the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra, following which an amendment took place in the Prevention of Cruelty Act that essentially reintroduced jallikattu, kambala and bullock-cart racing subject to regulatory conditions. This essentially nullified the impact of the 2014 judgment. When these amendments were challenged, the Constitution Bench in 2023 declined to reopen the premise that had troubled the 2014 Bench. It focused on applying the doctrine of pith and substance and held that the amendment read with its rules fell within Entry 17 of the Concurrent List. In regard to the pain caused to the animals, it noted that the amendments had “substantially diluted” the pain-inflicting practices that were documented.
Now, two moves of this judgment marked a clear departure from an eco-centric approach. First, in regard to animal rights, the Bench held that it isn’t “prudent” to bring bulls within the mechanism of Article 21 by remarking that it had “doubts as to whether detaining a stray bull from the street against its wish could give rise to the constitutional writ of habeas corpus”. While the 2014 Bench urged Parliament to elevate animal rights to constitutional status, the 2023 Bench leaves the question open and to be considered by the appropriate legislative body. This essentially means that the Court “has held that animals are not conferred with the protection of fundamental rights under the Constitution.” Second, the 2023 Bench reframes the entire welfare enquiry that the 2014 Bench had recognised. Rather than asking whether the unnecessary pain was being inflicted as was required by the Act, it assessed only the degree of pain that was there. Its reasoning stemmed from the fact that even horse-racing permitted under the Performing Animals (Registration) Rules causes “some element of pain and suffering” to a sentient being. On culture specifically, the Bench went further than merely permitting these amendments. It engaged with the 2014 judgment to disagree with the finding that jallikattu was not part of Tamil cultural heritage, as sufficient material was not placed to prove the same. This very shift is what commentary has described as a reversion to a Kantian, anthropocentric model, in which animals are protected only “to the degree required to meet human or cultural needs”.
This retreat is starkest against the trajectory of comparative animal law since 2014. Far from stalling, the trend the 2014 Bench invoked accelerated globally. For example, France recognised animals as sentient beings in its Civil Code. Spain and Denmark extended similar recognition. In 2022, the United Kingdom went further, enacting the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, establishing a statutory committee to scrutinise government policy against animal welfare. Luxembourg’s 2023 constitutional revision recognises animals as “non-human living beings endowed with sentience”. The 2023 Bench engaged with none of this. Its silence is conspicuous precisely because the 2014 Bench had treated comparative developments as interpretively significant to begin with.
What this turn means for the Environment- Culture, Caste, and the Court’s Silence
Both Benches treated “Tamil culture” as a single coherent thing. They disagreed on its content, never on whether it has a single content to begin with. The 2014 Bench, by invoking Yeru Thazhuvu (the practice of embracing, not overpowering, the bull and the bull’s status as lord shiva’s vehicle), rejected the claim of cultural authenticity. The 2023 Bench reversed this. However, neither bench asked whose Tamil culture was under discussion, or whether “Tamil culture” named one thing at all. This very silence is deafening as jallikattu’s claim to cultural authenticity has never been caste neutral.
Commentary on the 2017 protests notes that “the pride that jallikattu evokes is clearly associated with people from a particular dominant caste, often at the forefront of violence against Dalit men and women.” Further, scholarship on the 2017 protests situates part of their intensity in “increased anxieties among intermediate caste groups due to new mobility of Dalit groups.” This is not merely abstract, as the same week that produced mass mobilisation for jallikattu saw a Dalit funeral procession being denied despite a Madras High Court order, with no disciplinary consequence for the officials responsible. Traditional displays of masculinity central to jallikattu’s appeal are, moreover, actively discouraged, sometimes violently among Dalit men elsewhere in Tamil society. This shows the fact that the cultural pride jallikattu is said to embody has never been equally available along caste lines. Neither Bench engaged with any of this. The 2014 Bench measured jallikattu against an idealised, singular reading and the 2023 Bench deferred the same to the legislature without asking what work that deference does when the legislature reflects the same dominant-caste political constituencies whose cultural claim was in dispute. Therefore, the retreat from eco-centrism was, in this sense, twofold as the court relinquished the animal as a rights-bearing subject. Further, it relinquished the opportunity to ask whose culture it was being asked to protect. Culture therefore functioned as a category that was treated as though it existed before and apart from the caste hierarchies that shaped those who got to define it, who benefited from its defense, and whose experience of “tradition” is rendered invisible when a court declines to ask the question at all.
Conclusion
The trajectory from A. Nagaraja (2014) to AWBI v. Union of India (2023) marks a movement from an eco-centric constitutional vision, one that measured jallikattu against the animal’s intrinsic worth, refusing to let custom override statute, towards an anthropocentric one, in which animal suffering is tolerated, and its cultural justification is deferred to the legislature. This reversal was made possible by a shared failure in both judgments, which was to treat “tradition and culture” as a self-evident, homogenous category requiring no further inquiry. That same unexamined deference is what allowed the well-documented casteist moorings of jallikattu to remain outside the scope of either judgment. The 2023 Court did not merely decline to extend fundamental rights to animals. It declined to ask whose tradition it was reviving and saving and the subsequent costs that would occur. An eco-centric jurisprudence that will not interrogate the human hierarchies embedded in “culture” cannot, in the end, fully escape anthropocentrism as it merely relocates the unexamined category from the animal to the human.
About the Author
Divyaansh Kharbanda is a 5th year student pursuing BA LLB at O.P. Jindal Global University. His area of interest lies in corporate and commercial laws.
Image Source : https://pucl.org/manage-writings/jallikattu-violates-the-dignity-and-civil-liberties-of-non-human-animals/