New Delhi: Declining to stay directives requiring eatery owners along the route of the kanwar yatra to display their names on their shops, the Supreme Court said that these establishments must in any case display their license and registration certificate per statutory provisions.

It also orally said that there ought to be a way to let customers know if an eatery that otherwise serves non-vegetarian food switches to serving vegetarian food only during the time of the yatra.

The top court was hearing a petition by Delhi University professor Apoorvanand, human rights defender Aakar Patel and others seeking a stay on directives, including by the Uttar Pradesh government, requiring eatery owners to display their names or QR codes containing their names on their establishments if they lie along the kanwar yatra route.

These directives violate the Supreme Court's interim stay on similar orders issued during last year's yatra, the petitioners argued.

However, a bench of the court comprising Justices M.M. Sundresh and N. Kotiswar Singh simply ordered that eatery owners must display their license and registration as statutorily required.

“We are told that today is the last day of the yatra. In any case, it is likely to come to an end in the near future. Therefore at this stage we would only pass an order that all the respective hotel owners shall comply with the mandate of displaying the licence and the registration certificate as per the statutory requirements,” LiveLaw quoted the bench as saying.

It added: “We make it clear that we are not going into the other issues argued. The application is closed.”

The petitioners had pointed out on July 10 that the apex court had put an interim stay on similar directives last year, wherein it had ordered that food vendors “must not be forced to display the names/identity of the owners and also the employees deployed in their respective establishments”.

Such directives issued this year contravene the court's order, they had said, adding that displaying the names of an eatery's owner and employees outside the establishment is different from displaying its license inside the premises.

This “unlawful demand to display [one's] religious identity” leaves room for the “violent enforcement of such a manifestly arbitrary demand both by vigilante groups and by authorities on the ground”, the petitioners alleged.

The court did however say that there must be a way to inform customers whether an establishment has only temporarily halted serving non-vegetarian food in view of the yatra.

“If a hotel is running as pure veg all through, then you are right. The question of indicating names will not arise. But only for the purpose of the yatra, if someone changes from non-veg to veg, then the customers should know,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying and adding that the “consumer is the king”.

Hindu pilgrims undertake the kanwar yatra around July every year, travelling by foot to Uttarakhand to collect water from the Ganga river. They then offer the water in Shiva temples on their way back.

When similar directives such as this year's were given in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand last July, petitioners had said in the Supreme Court that they were issued against the backdrop of “a climate in which individuals are actively urged to refrain from buying food from Muslim proprietors” as well as calls for boycotts.

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