On Thursday, 7th July 2022, the Uttarakhand High Court allowed the slaughter of animals for Eid al-Adha on July 10 at a slaughterhouse in the Manglaur municipality of the Haridwar district staying a state government notification designating the whole district of Haridwar as a ‘slaughter-free zone’.
A division bench of Chief Justice Vipin Sanghi and Justice RC Khulbe ordered that during Eid al-Adha, animals can be slaughtered only at the Manglaur municipality’s legally compliant slaughterhouse built through a public-private partnership and urged the municipality to publish the court ruling. They also ordered the petitioner who challenged the government’s decision to guarantee that no slaughtering occurs elsewhere in the district.
Uttarakhand High Court permits animal slaughter for Bakri Eid in Manglaur
— Bar & Bench (@barandbench) July 7, 2022
report by @DebayonRoy https://t.co/TSeOyVm2yq
On 3 March 2021, the Uttarakhand state government designated Haridwar district’s urban local bodies including two municipal corporations, two municipalities, and five Nagar Panchayats ‘slaughterhouse-free regions’, and terminated permits to operate slaughterhouses. The notification from the urban development department came ahead of the Kumbh Mela. Earlier, Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs from the area wrote to then-chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat, urging that slaughterhouses be prohibited in a ‘religious city like Haridwar’.
Faisal Hussain, a Haridwar resident, petitioned the high court, claiming that animal slaughter was an essential religious practice in Islam and that for the Eid al-Adha festival, animal slaughtering should be permitted at the Manglaur slaughterhouse, which was built last year but could not function due to the district’s blanket ban on animal slaughter.
He contended that Muslims constitute 87.45% of the Manglaur municipality’s population. The location is around 45 kilometres from Haridwar, and if animal slaughtering is permitted in a slaughterhouse in Manglaur, Hindu religious sentiments would not be harmed.
