Constitutionalism and the sacred cow: the secular mythology of the Indian Supreme Court

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the judicial discourse around cow protection laws in India, tracing the trajectory of the Indian Supreme Court’s reasoning in cases where the constitutional validity of anti-cow-slaughter laws was challenged in post-independence India. The mainstream scholarship on Article 48 of the Indian Constitution has emphasised the existence of a religious motive behind this constitutional provision and its apparent justification through utility-based economic reasoning. However, most critical writings utilise a simplistic, binary formulation: religious versus secular. Through a close analysis of the judicial decisions in which anti-cow-slaughter laws were constitutionally challenged, the article proposes a move beyond the religious/secular divide and attends to the implications of the uneasy coexistence of the secular and the mythical. It further demonstrates that the invocation of the common law doctrine of presumption of constitutionality has acquired the status of what I term ‘secular mythology’ in the context of anti-slaughter laws.