Ashiq Hussain
SRINAGAR, July 3: Jammu and Kashmir’s grand mufti, Bashiruddin Ahmad wants Member Parliament and animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi to get Kashmir rid of dogs by transporting them to ‘some other’ place.
Moreover his son and deputy priest of the state Mufti Nasir ul Islam has offered to bear the expenses for ‘airlifting’ the canines away from the valley where their number has reached a staggering one- hundred-thousand in capital Srinagar alone.
Gandhi was made the offer during her visit to the valley to take stock of Animal Birth Control program initiated by the Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) early this year in collaboration with Animal Welfare Board of India.
The official priest urged Gandhi to respect the ‘rights of humans as well’.
“She should seriously look into the problem which the people have been facing because of the dog menace,” Mufti Ahmad said.
“Apart from human rights violations owing to the situation in valley, our women and children every now and then fall prey to stray dogs,” he said.
Hospitals in Srinagar receive more than 50 cases of dog bites on an average every day, with health officials putting the number of dog-bite cases to around 18,500 for the year ending March 2011.
“The number of dogs is such that without their transportation to some other place, it would not be possible to get rid of them,” said Mufti Nasir, who has served as legal adviser to the law and Islamic affairs ministry in the United Arab for 12 years.
“I am ready to bear the freight charges for their transportation or airlifting.”
In 2001, government had proposed to sterilize the dogs under Animal Birth Control (ABC) program instead of culling them after backlash from animal rights activists.
However the program was started a decade later in May, 2012, resulting in a geometric increase of dog population to a staggering 100,000 (as per SMC figures) with dog-man ratio in Srinagar reaching 1:13. As against this the national average dog-man ratio is 1:36.
Gandhi visited Shuhama in city outskirts where ABC program is being conducted in a highly congenial and state-of-art dog sterilization centre.
(The author is Srinagar-based correspondent, The Hindustan Times)
