The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice on a PIL by Akhil Bharat Krishi Go-Sewa Sangh for direction to the Centre to take steps to prevent the smuggling of cattle to Bangladesh.
The court also issued notice to the governments of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Odisha, Assam, Tripura, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal on the plea asking them to take steps to check illegal transportation of cattle to West Bengal and then to Bangladesh.
While issuing the notice, the apex court bench of Justice Jagdish Singh Khekar and Justice S.A. Bobde said that if the BSF is going to look after cows, "how they will check the infiltration of terrorists? We have a vast border with Bangladesh."
As senior counsel Soli Sorabjee appearing for the Akhil Bharat Krishi Go-Sewa Sangh urged the court to issue notice, the court asked under what law cattle could be banned from being exported to Bangladesh.
The Akhil Bharat Krishi Go-Sewa Sangh said that its PIL was based on two reasons: one the depletion of indigenous life stock and the other the unabated and unbridled illegal and wrongful smuggling of cattle to Bangladesh through borders of India.
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The petitioner Krishi Go-Sewa Sangh also sought the court's directions to the customs and the BSF not to auction the cattle seized at the border areas and instead hand them over to various Gaushalas/Panjarapols constituted under Section 35 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960.
Having issued notice, the court tagged the plea with an earlier petition wherein petitioner Gauri Maulekhi sought direction to the Centre to prevent the illegal transportation of lakhs of animals across the Indo-Nepal border to be sacrificed at the Gadhimai Festival.
The apex court on October 17, 2014, in an interim order asked the Centre to check the illegal movement of animals across the border to Nepal, in violation of the Export-Import Policy of India and the Foreign Trade Act.
