NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court's August 11, 2025, directive to remove stray dogs from the streets of the National Capital Region has triggered protests by animal welfare activists, social media influencers and the opportunistic causerati of sportspersons, celebrities, and actors. It’s a coalition that claims to represent civil society.
Critics of the apex court ruling are questioning the practicality of moving lakhs of strays into municipal capacities of no more than 5,000. Demonstrators have been held in several cities, denouncing the order as "unscientific" and "inhumane." Animal welfare NGOs and public personalities are arguing that mass confinement would be cruel to dogs accustomed to living in human communities.
Social media campaigns have surged, demanding sterilisation, vaccination, and humane animal management instead of mass removal. Best practices are being cited from foreign locales like Amsterdam, where sterilisation and vaccination programs have reportedly reduced dog populations.
Within this advocacy, there is even a strand questioning the vocabulary being used in the discourse: These, apparently, are not street dogs. They are community dogs, meaning implicitly that they have a right to live where they wish to, in the streets.
These civil society protests reflect a remarkable fervour and an impressive capacity for mobilisation of hashtags, influencers, placards, and candles across cities. But they also strike a sharp contrast with the silence on other urgent issues of the day.
Take the fraud being perpetrated by the Election Commission of India on the voters of Bihar: More than 6 million voters have been scrubbed from the rolls without showing cause.
Hundreds of election officials have been ordered to forge the signatures of voters only to meet an impossible deadline — and to weed out inconvenient voters, perhaps. Or take the Vote Chori campaign launched by the leader of the Opposition, with evidence of massive voting irregularities in several states and general elections since 2019.
Take even the campaign being conducted against people in the jhuggi bastis of NCR on the pretext of detecting illegal immigrants. No candlelight vigils have been held for the forced eviction of Bangla-speaking bais.
These are issues that go to the core of our democracy; yet civil society has largely refrained from participating in any protests over those issues. Contrast this reticence with this demographic’s raucous participation in the India Against Corruption movement during UPA II, circa 2010-12. Millions rallied then under Anna Hazare’s banner, believing him to be a crusader against corruption and lending themselves to the designs of his acolytes — Arvind Kejriwal included — who were only executing a Trojan horse campaign for the RSS.
It brought about a power shift on the basis of trumped-up charges of corruption, most of which have drawn blanks in the courts since or have been annulled by the investigating agencies themselves.
The activism of this formless entity claiming to be India's civil society tends to be selective, sporadic, and self-centred. It rouses itself only when its living arrangements are at risk.
The National Human Rights Commission’s annual report for 2024 registered a 31% drop in citizen complaints about political violence, a decline attributable not to peace, but fear and apathy. At the core of this dissonance — empathy for street dogs, equivocation for everything else — is a fear of the state and therefore an amniotic need for safety.