Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja (2014): Jallikattu, the Five Freedoms, and Article 21 for animals

Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja is the judgment in which Indian law spoke, in this register, of an animal's interest in living without cruelty as something more than a matter of statutory regulation. Decided on 7 May 2014 by a two-judge Bench — K.S. Radhakrishnan, J. and Pinaki Chandra Ghose, J. — the case arose out of a familiar collision: a centuries-old festival practice on one side, the ordinary commands of an animal-welfare statute on the other. The Court resolved that collision firmly in favour of the statute, and in doing so gave the welfare of animals a vocabulary it had not previously enjoyed in Indian constitutional discourse.

The facts in brief

The dispute concerned two kinds of events. The first was Jallikattu — the bull-taming spectacle associated above all with Tamil Nadu, in which participants attempt to seize and subdue running bulls. The second was bullock-cart racing, practised in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and elsewhere. The Animal Welfare Board of India, a statutory body constituted under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, together with other petitioners, challenged these events as inherently cruel.

Two legislative measures formed the backdrop. The State of Tamil Nadu had enacted the Tamil Nadu Regulation of Jallikattu Act, 2009, which sought to permit and regulate the conduct of Jallikattu. And in 2011 the Central Government had issued a notification under the PCA Act adding bulls to the list of animals that shall not be exhibited or trained as performing animals.

The respondents, including the State of Tamil Nadu, defended the events as expressions of tradition and culture. The Board's case was that the practices, whatever their cultural lineage, subjected the animals to overcrowding, prodding, the twisting and biting of tails, and force calculated to provoke terror — treatment that no appeal to custom could justify under the governing statute.

The questions

The case put four questions before the Court. The first was statutory: do Jallikattu and bullock-cart races, as actually conducted, violate the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960? The second concerned repugnancy: could the Tamil Nadu Regulation of Jallikattu Act, 2009 stand alongside the Central PCA Act, or was it repugnant to it? The third was the deepest: do animals have rights that the Constitution recognises — can the guarantees ordinarily invoked for human beings, together with the Directive Principles and the Fundamental Duties, be brought to bear on the treatment of animals? And the fourth ran beneath all of them: can tradition or culture justify a practice that would otherwise be cruel?

What the Court held

On the statutory question, the Court held that the events were unlawful. Jallikattu, it found, violated the PCA Act — and specifically sections 3, 11(1)(a) and 11(1)(m)(ii) of that Act, which impose duties on those in charge of animals and forbid the infliction of unnecessary pain and suffering. The Court accordingly banned Jallikattu, bullock-cart races and similar events.

On repugnancy, the Tamil Nadu Regulation of Jallikattu Act, 2009 was held to be repugnant to the Central PCA Act and was struck down. A State law permitting what the Central welfare statute forbade could not survive the conflict.

It is the third holding that gives the judgment its lasting character. The Court read the word "life" expansively, treating it as embracing all forms of life, including animal life, and recognising an animal's interest in living with honour and dignity. It anchored that reading in the constitutional fabric — the fundamental duty under Article 51A(g) to have compassion for living creatures, together with the Directive Principles concerning the protection of animals and the environment. From this the Court fashioned its central practical contribution: it read the internationally recognised Five Freedoms into the duties imposed by sections 3 and 11 of the PCA Act — freedom from hunger, thirst and malnutrition; from fear and distress; from physical and thermal discomfort; from pain, injury and disease; and the freedom to express normal patterns of behaviour. It adopted a "species best interest" standard for assessing how animals are treated, and called on Parliament to elevate animal welfare to the level of enforceable statutory rights, with stricter penalties for cruelty.

Analysis

The architecture of Nagaraja repays attention because the Court did two distinct things, and the durability of each turned out to be different.

The first was a hard statutory holding. The PCA Act forbids the infliction of unnecessary pain and suffering, and the Court found, on the material before it, that Jallikattu and bullock-cart racing as conducted could not be squared with that prohibition. This was the operative ratio — a finding that particular practices breached particular sections of a particular statute. It was on this ground that the ban rested and the State enactment fell.

The second was a broader constitutional gesture. By reading "life" to include animal life, invoking the duty of compassion in Article 51A(g), and importing the Five Freedoms as an interpretive lens, the Court built a normative frame around the statutory finding. This is the part most often quoted and celebrated — the suggestion that Indian law could recognise the dignity of the non-human. But it is also the part that sits less comfortably as binding rule than as principle: the Five Freedoms were treated as standards to inform the reading of sections 3 and 11, and the call to Parliament was, by its nature, an exhortation rather than a command.

That distinction matters for understanding what came later. A judgment whose operative core is "these practices, as conducted, are cruel under this statute" is vulnerable to a particular response — a legislative one that changes the statutory landscape so that the practices, as now regulated, are said no longer to be cruel. The richer constitutional language, however memorable, does not by itself prevent that move; it shapes the climate of interpretation rather than foreclosing the legislature.

There is also a methodological point worth marking. Nagaraja belongs to the tradition of expansive purposive interpretation that Indian courts have used to read substantive content into open-textured guarantees — the same disposition that, in the environmental field, read the right to a clean and healthy environment into the protection of life, and that has more recently been deployed to articulate a right against the adverse effects of climate change. Nagaraja extends that method outward, beyond the human claimant, to the animal whose suffering the statute exists to prevent.

The later trajectory

The story did not end in 2014. Tamil Nadu's petition for review was dismissed in 2015, and the legislatures then responded directly. Tamil Nadu enacted the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Tamil Nadu Amendment) Act, 2017, together with rules, to permit and regulate Jallikattu; Karnataka enacted a parallel amendment for Kambala; and Maharashtra did the same for bullock-cart racing, or Bailgada Sharyat. These amendments were promptly challenged as an attempt to legislate around the 2014 ban, and the challenge was referred to a Constitution Bench.

On 18 May 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench — K.M. Joseph, Ajay Rastogi, Aniruddha Bose, Hrishikesh Roy and C.T. Ravikumar, JJ. — decided Animal Welfare Board of India v. Union of India, reported at 2023 SCC OnLine SC 661. The Bench upheld the validity of the Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra Amendment Acts and their rules. It held that the Tamil Nadu amendment, in pith and substance, relates to Entry 17 of the Concurrent List and is not a colourable exercise of legislative power, and it directed strict enforcement of the regulatory regime the amendments had put in place.

Crucially, the 2023 Bench did not overrule Nagaraja. It distinguished it. The Constitution Bench proceeded on the footing that the amended statutory framework — with its rules, restrictions and enforcement machinery — overcame the defects that Nagaraja had identified, so that the practices as now regulated could no longer be said to carry the cruelty the 2014 Court had found. The earlier judgment was treated as a decision about a particular statutory state of affairs, one the legislatures had since changed. The net result is that Nagaraja's outright ban no longer governs: Jallikattu, Kambala and bullock-cart racing are lawful under the validated State amendments. As to the further reaches of the 2014 reasoning — the reading of constitutional protections for animals — the precise disposition by the 2023 Bench is best left to the text of that judgment rather than summarised here.

Why it matters

Nagaraja remains significant on two levels that should not be confused. As a matter of operative law, its ban has been displaced by validated legislation; a practitioner advising on the legality of Jallikattu today must begin with the 2023 Constitution Bench and the State amendments, not the 2014 decision. But as a contribution to the grammar of Indian law, Nagaraja endures: it introduced the Five Freedoms into the interpretation of the PCA Act, articulated a "species best interest" standard, and modelled how the duty of compassion in Article 51A(g) and the Directive Principles can be marshalled to read welfare obligations with seriousness.

The deeper lesson is about the limits of judicial pronouncement. A court can find a practice cruel under a statute; it cannot, by that finding alone, prevent the legislature from rewriting the statute. Nagaraja and its 2023 sequel together trace the dialogue between bench and legislature over the same subject — a reminder that, in fields where culture, livelihood and welfare contend, the last word often belongs not to the judgment but to the law that follows it.

Related on Valkya

• M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India
• Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar
• In re Stray Dogs / ABC Rules 2023

Sources

• Supreme Court Observer, "Challenge to the Practice of Jallikattu" — https://www.scobserver.in/cases/challenge-to-the-practice-of-jallikattu/
• SCC Online Blog, coverage of the Constitution Bench Jallikattu judgment (18 May 2023) — https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2023/05/18/supreme-court-constitution-bench-holds-jallikattu-kambala-and-bull-cart-racing-legal-legal-news/
• LiveLaw, report on the 2023 Constitution Bench decision in Animal Welfare Board of India v. Union of India — https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/supreme-court-review-petition-against-judgment-upholding-jallikattu-kambala-bullock-cart-racing-262939