New Delhi: Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai on Wednesday referred the stray dogs matter to a larger, three-judge bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and N.V. Anjaria, to be heard tomorrow. This comes amid a nationwide uproar over the Supreme Court’s (SC’s) order for all stray dogs in Delhi-NCR to be picked up and put in shelters, to tackle the issue of dog bites.
While large sections of society welcomed the SC’s order, animal lovers have been continuously protesting the move, calling it inhumane, impractical and unscientific. Politicians like the Congress’s Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, BJP’s Maneka and Varun Gandhi and Shiv Sena (UBT) Swati Chaturvedi, authors like Suhel Seth, and prominent personalities including Simi Grewal, John Abraham, Vir Das and Zeenat Aman, have strongly criticised the SC’s decision.
On Wednesday, advocate Nanita Sharma mentioned a pending Special Leave Petition (SLP) before CJI Gavai that also dealt with stray dogs. Sharma pointed out that a recent judgement by a bench of Justices J.K. Maheshwari and Sanjay Karol had ruled that canines cannot be mistreated or killed indiscriminately, while adding that Justice Pardiwala’s bench had taken a contrary stand in its 11 August order.
The pending SLP arose from a challenge to a Delhi High Court ruling on the sterilisation programme, where the petitioner had argued that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and others, despite receiving funds, had failed to curb the dog population in the city. Sharma also said that if previous directions were followed for proper utilisation of funds and sterilisation, there would have been no need for the order passed by the two-judge of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan on Monday.
Underlining that the 11 August order’s implementation could come with its own set of complications such as an increasing risk of disease transmission to humans, and worsen diseases in shelter homes, Sharma also said that such conflicting rulings by the Maheshwari-Karol and the Pardiwala-Mahadevan benches, necessitated the need to list the matter, so that a larger bench could resolve this conflict.
A full copy of the SC’s 11 August order was uploaded on the top court’s website on Wednesday.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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