When justice strays from reason and compassion

NEW DELHI: There are moments when the law, in its anxious search for order, forgets the living pulse of the country it seeks to govern; moments when judicial pronouncements reveal India’s peculiar talent for turning a manageable issue into a full-blown crisis.

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The direction to remove and permanently relocate every community dog from all public institutions has done just that. It took what was essentially a question of civic management and turned it into an administrative nightmare. It is, to be blunt, a monumental folly, a verdict of disconnect that threatens to substitute sound science with a reckless, impractical fantasy.

The problem was never the dogs. It was, and continues to be, the utter collapse of civic systems meant to manage them. Municipal sterilisation programmes exist only on paper. Waste lies scattered across our streets and campuses. Hospitals dump food and biomedical waste in the open. And when dogs gather where food and filth do, the response is not to fix the cause, but to punish the symptom.