WHEN THE STATE DECIDES THE FATE OF A MINORITY SPORT An analysis of the high court ban on bull fights in Goa
Antonio do Rosario Fernandes +91 88 88 624464 Acting on a writ petition (No. 347 of 1996), the Panaji Bench of the Bombay High Court comprising of Justice R K Batta and Justice R M S Khandeparkar, in a judgement dated 20 December 1996, banned the sport of bull fights popularly known as dhirio in Goa, as a contravention of section 11(1) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, which is also in force in the state of Goa. Let's look at the merits of the case, and then ponder on the likely detrimental effects to society due to the imposition of the ban on bull fights, and suggest a course of action based on reason. The writ petition seeking the ban on bull fights was filed by Norma Alvares and People for Animals. The petitioners' advocate was M.S. Sonak. The respondents in the case were the State of Goa; the Director, Department of Animal Husbandry; and the Inspector General of Police. The respondents were represented by the Advocate General, V B Nadkarni, with G U Bhobe assisting him. The intervenors in the case were Simon Caiado and the All Goa Bull and Buffalo Owners' Association. The intervenors were represented by Anacleto Viegas. The arguments of the petitioners' counsel, Mr Sonak, all of which were found to be weighty by the honourable judges, were as follows: (i) That cruelty is inflicted to the animals in the course of the sport of bull fights and occasionally a bull can get gored and he can be calmed down only by putting to sleep. Also occasionally a spectator can be gored to death. In fact the immediate cause for the writ petition was the fact that notwithstanding the killing of a spectator, Xavier Rodrigues, during a bull fight organized at Ambaji-Fatorda, near Margao on 17 September 1996, a further bull fight was scheduled to take place on 2 October 1996. That eight months earlier an unnamed spectator was also gored to death during a bull fight at Guirim. (ii) That the conduct of bull fights is in contravention of section 11(1) of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, for short called the Act, and therefore is illegal and that the respondents are aiding and abetting the illegalities. (iii) That bull fights are associated with social evils of illegal betting, relating to the fortunes and fate of individual bulls, and that bull fights have become popular because of the betting that goes with them. (iv) That bull fights are a recent introduction in Goa and though initially, no money or gambling was associated with them, in recent times, due to the patronage of politicians, the frequency of bull fights has increased enormously and they have become a completely commercial business in which spectators are charged Rs 35 as entrance fee and the crowd at a bull fight can range anywhere from 500 to 5000, depending on the bulls which are engaged for fighting, the commercialization being at the cost of cruelty to the animals and occasionally to human beings. (v) That the State cannot be a silent spectator to the cruelty to animals and choose to be indifferent to the barbaric treatment given to animals for sheer pleasure of human beings and cannot shirk the responsibility to take action under the Act and under the Criminal Procedure Code, and that toleration by the authorities of the violation of the Act will encourage lawlessness and social evils. In hindsight it may be observed that the respondents and the intervenors both relied solely on a single line of defence, which proved their undoing. Their defence was that cruelty to animals cannot be presumed merely because a bull fight is arranged. Cruelty may occur only in the course of a bull fight depending on the circumstances in each case of bull fights and there is no presumption that there will be cruelty to animals in the course of each and every bull fight. Being so, it is not possible to prohibit bull fights under the provisions of the Act. As rightly pointed out by the petitioners' counsel, neither the respondents nor the intervenors attempted to counter the arguments put forth by the petitioners, viz cruelty to animals and human beings, betting etc. In the course of his arguments, the Advocate General, V B Nadkarni mentioned to the effect that any cruelty inflicted to the animals in the course of their being butchered for food for human beings, is exempted from the Act. A moot question is, how does this cruelty to animals, which is exempted from the Act, compare with the cruelty to animals in the case of bull fights? In either case, indubitably it is not the objective of human beings to inflict cruelty to the animals. While in the case of butchering for food the cruelty is not deliberate but only incidental, in the case of bull fights it is also not deliberate but incidental as well as accidental. An animal undergoes the agony of death each time and every time an animal is butchered for food, which is normally done by cutting its throat. In case of bull fights, animals generally suffer negligible injuries, sometimes none at all; for example when one of the bulls runs away without even locking horns; there is generally no loss or flow of blood but at the point of contact of the horns at the neck a faint pink coloration is seen -- even the petitioners have not drawn attention to the flow or loss of animals' blood because there seldom is any. The fact that the petitioners have failed to give any statistics of bulls gored to death during bull fights proves that such accidental deaths occur only rarely. Bull fights are not organized every day but only on festive occasions, so that the occasions when bull fights and the attendant cruelty to animals take place are limited. On the contrary in the state of Goa thousands of animals including bulls, buffaloes, goats, pigs, hens, rabbits etc are butchered and die a slow and agonizing death each and every day of the year. Like every nation of the world, India which includes the state of Goa also has a fishing industry owing to which lakhs of fishes are caught in the nets to die a horrible death due to asphyxiation. More than 90 percent of Goans are non vegetarian, but this is not the right occasion to defend the right of human beings to butcher animals for food. What I have done is just to point out the glaring fact that the cruelty to animals intrinsic in the conduct of bull fights is negligible compared to the cruelty to animals intrinsic in the act of butchering animals for food, which is permissible under the Act. There is no magic wand that converts a living animal into dead meat. The conversion into meat takes place only through the act of administering the supreme cruelty of agonizing death to the animal. On the basis of two articles, one published in the September 1996 issue of "Goa Today", and the other in the daily "O Heraldo", which had been introduced by the petitioners as Exhibits A and B respectively, Justice R M S Khandeparkar, who proffered a 25 page judgement in this case, in the main body of the judgement gives the following description of bull fights: "The fight begins when two bulls or buffaloes specially trained for the fight are brought against each other with their owner or trainer standing behind them goading them on. At regular intervals, either mud is rubbed on the back of the animals or water is poured on its back. This is done to either agitate or cool down the animal as the case may arise. In the process of such fight, the animals are goaded and incited not only by the owners or trainers who stand behind such bulls but almost the whole crowd participate in inciting the animals to fight. Before the actual fight begins, the bulls with their eyes turned red glare at each other and sometimes try to scare their opponent by scything their horns in the ground. Then suddenly they dash at each other, locking horns, pushing each other. They move back and forth intermittently charging and retreating. It all depends on the strength of the bull and its stamina. Pushing each other sometimes they even try their force on the spectators while the crowd scrambles to safety. The bull that gets pushed out of the arena first or turns and runs away, loses the fight. One fight could go on as long as one hour or get over within two or three minutes. On some occasions the bull runs away from the field without even locking horns" The above appears to be a fair though poetic description of bull fights. It may be pointed out that there exists no cruelty to animals in the act of rubbing mud and pouring water on the animals, which appears to have impressed the honourable judge, from the fact that it is mentioned twice in his judgement. As far as goading, instigating and inciting the animals to fight there is no evidence of any. No whips or any other instrument of torture are used to coerce the animals to fight. What the owners and trainers do is only to lead their bull towards its adversary, much like a cartman who uses typical sounds and words, a pull on the reins and an occasional tap with the whip on the sides of his oxen to guide them to their destination. According to the above description of a bull fight given by the honourable judge, it essentially consists of the animals locking horns and moving back and forth until one of them is pushed out of the arena or runs away from it, and this is the action that the crowd comes to watch. The petitioners' own Exhibit A speaking about injuries suffered by the bulls says, "Injuries are usually minor -- small cuts caused by the opponents horn. Occasionally, though a bull can get gored and have to be put to sleep. Usually, these fatalities occur only once or twice a season of nine months. Goan bull fighting is not a bloody sport, unlike its Spanish and Portuguese counterparts". The goring to death of either a bull or spectator is accidental and is a very rare event, otherwise the sport of bull fights in Goa would have died a natural death as it would be totally uneconomical for owners to maintain bulls solely for the purpose of bull fights, and there would have been a total dearth of spectators because of the unacceptable risk to their lives. The doctrine invoked by the honourable judges of banning bull fights just because accidental death of bulls as well as human beings can occasionally take place and because betting has come to be associated with bull fights, rests on very fragile grounds and has no precedent. In Gomantak Times dated 5 January 1997 a diagram was published giving details of major air crashes in 1996, including location of air crash, number of people killed and ownership of aircraft involved; according to which there were eleven major air crashes in 1996 in which a total of 1472 people were killed. The air crashes listed included two accidents in India in which a total of 373 people died. Such major and minor crashes take place annually. Train accidents, road accidents are common. It is an oft repeated statement that more people are killed in road accidents than have ever been killed in war. Inspite of the prevalence of air, train, ferry and road accidents nobody has thought of banning these modes of travel because on the whole, even in a backward country like India, they are considered as safe modes of transport. However keeping the safety factor in mind licensing of drivers, vehicles etc is given the highest priority. Similar safeguards can be introduced in case of bull fights also to make them more safe. The suggestion of the intervenors' counsel Anacleto Viegas, of making it compulsory to have barricades around the ground where bull fights take place, which was summarily rejected by Justice R M S Khandeparkar saying that it will not solve the problem, deserves due consideration. There can also be other regulations for minimizing the incidence of goring of animals to death like for example classification of bulls into weight classes viz heavy weight, bantam weight, etc as in the case of boxing, wrestling etc; and putting suitable restrictions on the sharpening of bulls' horns. Betting is associated worldwide including India in case of football matches, cricket matches, boxing matches, parliamentary and presidential elections, etc. The newspapers are replete with stories of punitive action being taken against referees in Europe for fixing matches due to Asian betting syndicates. In Pakistan, Basit Ali and Rashid Latif sacrificed their cricketing career in protest against the incidence of throwing away matches due to betting; and a two year ban has been imposed on Amir Sohail for making charges against some of his senior colleagues of throwing away matches due to the influence of betting syndicates. There is hardly any national league or first division football league match in Goa where there is no incidence of betting. In fact some people attend football matches in Goa specially because of the betting. However nobody, I repeat nobody, has had the temerity to ban football, cricket and boxing matches; or presidential and parliamentary elections, just because these events are associated with betting, as it would tantamount to throwing away the baby along with the bath water. Justice R M S Khandeparkar in the course of his judgement writes, "It cannot be disputed that all animals are born with an equal claim for life without any cruelty to them." Is this equal claim to life to be extended to disease spreading flies and mosquitoes also? Should we place a ban on pasteurization of milk so that germs and bactaria may live at the expense of the health and life of human beings? Should we police the animal kingdom to make animals of prey vegetarian? Justice Khandeparkar in justifying his decision to impose a ban on bull fights invoked the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran, the Buddha and Mahavira and Mahatma Gandhi, and quoted the following verse from the Koran, "There is not an animal on earth, nor a flying creature on two wings, but they are people unto you". A conspicuous reality seems to have escaped the attention of Justice Khandeparkar, that the followers of Islam, whose holy book the Koran is, are one hundred percent non-vegetarian in their eating habits and that their biggest festival, the Bakhri Idd, in which goats are ritually killed, commemorates the biblical story of Abraham setting out, in faith and obedience to God, to offer the sacrifice of his only son Isaac. The correct interpretation of the above verse from the Koran is that we should never be vicious in dealing with animals. Thus while the cruelty intrinsic in using oxen to draw a cart is permissible, the cruelty involved in overburdening the animals, or viciously using whips with spiked knobs is clearly not permissible according to the spirit of the Koran. The Koran or any other holy book is definitely not against the interests of society but is its support. We should not attempt to impose perfection on an imperfect world. According to a news item in the Times of India dated 8 December 1996, 40 percent of the Indian population lives below the poverty line, which was reckoned as a per capita income of Rs 264 in urban areas and Rs 228 in rural areas. As per the petitioners's own Exhibit A, Rs 50 to 150 is spent per day per capita on the maintenance of animals engaged in bull fights. Is it a crime for owners to lift their bulls above the poverty or rather the starvation line? The All Goa Bull and Buffalo Owners Association had submitted to the High Court a list which gave the name of the bull or buffalo and its owner's name, according to which there were more than 400 bulls and buffaloes actively participating in bull fights. According to the same list more than 80 percent of the bull owners are Cristaos, i.e. Roman Catholics. More than 80 percent of the bull fights are held in the Cristao-dominated Old Conquests, viz Salcete, Tiswadi and Bardez, in which more than 80 percent of the spectators are Cristaos. There is hardly any village feast in the Old Conquests where bull fights are not held annually. It may be surmised from the petitioners' own Exhibit A that the sport of bull fights or dhirio is a predominantly Cristao sport. Sports and games constitute an outlet for dissipating harmlessly excess energies present in society much like a safety valve in a pressure cooker. If the safety valve provided by sports is capped, the result is social conflagaration in the form of agitations, riots, etc. In a boxed item given in the petitioners' own Exhibit A, the author Dr Carmo Azavedo writes "Panem et circenses in Latin, meaning bread and circuses, were the two things regarded as essential by the Roman emperors to keep their people happy and contented, so that they would not revolt against their rule". In a five part article "The Cristaos of Goa and the Indian Republic" published in Gomantak Times (I-IV: 25 January; 1, 8, 22 February, and V: 29 April 1993) its author Cristao Q'Pensa (this is a pseudonym used by Antonio do Rosario Fernandes) has drawn attention to the alarming fact that in the last 12 years the Cristaos of Goa, imbued with a false feeling of security and invulnerability, have launched three unprovoked, unprincipled aggressive communal agitations, viz the Konkani Agitation, the English Agitation and the Konkan Railway Realignment Agitation, for the base Machiavellian purpose of rehabilitating politically disadvantaged Cristao politicians. All the above agitations were launched at a time when the Cristaos were enjoying the best stake the political system could give. It is therefore clear that at the present time the Cristaos are very prone to agitations. The banning of bull fights as well as the discontinuance since the several years of using Panjim Gymkhana ground, Tilak Maidan at Vasco and Duler ground at Mapusa for holding first division, super league and other matches in the sport of football, which is the other predominantly Cristao sport, will only give a boost to the minority communalism of the Cristaos, put to an end the communal harmony that has been present in Goa since the time of the New Conquests in 1763, bring earlier the dawn of communal riots in Goa, and bring the Cristao community only unmitigated and unending agony, suffering and grief just as in the case of the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Muslims of Kashmir and the Mohajirs of Pakistan; who imprudently chose the path of adventurism and brinkmanship. Thus, in trying to protect mere bulls from petty cruelties, the ban on bull fights has only given an open invitation to the immeasurably larger cruelties to human beings linked with communal unrest. The detrimental effects to society arising from the ban on bull fights have already started with an event unprecedented in the annals of Goan sports that took place on 23 February 1997 at Fatorda stadium during a National League football match between local team Salgaocar and Bombay's Air India, when the spectators invaded the ground and brutally beat up the Air India players. The foundation stone on which the petitioners' case rests is the incontrovertible fact that bull fights are implicitly prohibited under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 and that the Act is in force in Goa. According to the petitioners' Exhibit A, the Act is in force in Goa since 1964, i.e. it was enacted during the tenure of the first Bhausaheb Bandodkar ministry. According to the same petitioners' Exhibit A, Bhausaheb Bandodkar was the chief guest for the first ticketed bull fight in Goa "around 25 years ago" (i.e. 1971), which was organized at Mungul, between Margao and Colva by Dourado Brothers. The fact that during his second or third term of office, Bhausaheb Bandodkar is himself the chief guest at a bull fight categorically proves that the Goan law makers did not consider bull fights as a cruel sport. This nugget of information provided in the petitioners' own Exhibit A, completely undermines their case -- how did it escape the sharp eye of Justice R M S Khandeparkar? In conclusion, bull fights are a popular and traditional sport in Goa, a tradition introduced by Dr Alvaro Remigio Pinto in the 1960s. Goan society is inured to the petty cruelties intrinsic to the sport of bull fights just as it is inured to the immeasurably larger cruelties intrinsic in the act of butchering animals for food. Since the law stands in the way of this popular sport, it is clear that the law must be changed. Laws are for society, not the other way around. The modalities for changing the law were given by Jyoti Dhond in an article published in Gomantak Times hardly a week after the imposition of the ban on bull fights by the High Court, according to which "prevention of cruelty to animals" is a subject in the concurrent list, so that both parliament and the state government can enact laws on this subject. Since the central goverment has already enacted the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, the state government can now enact (or amend) its own law if it wants to legalize bull fighting. Once this law is enacted it will have to be sent to the President of India for his assent and once it is received, this law will prevail in the state. Maneka Gandhi and her People for Animals, who are responsible for the imposition of the unpopular ban on bull fights, ought to grow up and get themselves inured to life's cruelties in the manner of the Jains, who filter the air they breathe and the water they drink to avoid cruelty even to minute organisms, but have never demanded that others should also behave likewise. ###