Legend has it that Muhammad bin Tughlaq was an erratic genius. One morning, on a whim, he decided to move his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad, in present-day Maharashtra, forcing his entire population to trudge hundreds of miles through dust and heat. Many perished along the way. His vision may have been ambitious, but history remembers him not for the grandeur, but for his dangerous detachment from reality.
Another legend endures: when told that the peasants had no bread, Marie Antoinette allegedly replied, “Let them eat cake.” True or not, the story endures because it captures that fatal distance — when power becomes deaf to reality.
Centuries later, echoes of that same imperial detachment seem to reverberate through the corridors of Lutyens’ Delhi. A stunning decree has been passed by the highest judicial authority: every school, college, hospital, railway station, and bus stand in India must build boundary walls or fences to keep out street animals. Dogs, living peacefully within these campuses, are to be removed to municipal shelters, never mind that such shelters exist mostly in theory, not in law or on land.
If the measure weren’t so tragic in its wastefulness, it might have passed for satire — a portrait of governance by decree rather than by evidence-based solutions.
The irony
Across much of India, schools still struggle with basic infrastructure. Many don’t have toilets for girls, their roofs leak, blackboards are cracked, and teachers often double up as mid-day meal cooks or administrators. How will these schools now divert their meagre funds to erect eight-foot walls? How exactly does one fence a bus stop? Shall we next expect moats around railway stations or glass domes over stadiums?
The irony runs deep. Budgetary constraints are cited when asked to provide basic dignity — clean water, trained teachers, or classrooms with walls that aren’t caving in. Yet governments are now to spend on fortress walls. At an average cost of Rs 75-150 per square foot, this directive demands billions — money that could have built futures instead of fences.
This order asks institutions to breed unnecessary panic and build fortresses, when they’ve yet to achieve basic safety or dignity. It’s a gold-plated fix for a system still running on rust and resolve.
More worryingly, it contradicts the spirit of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which envisions compassionate, experiential learning. It also runs counter to the University Grants Commission (UGC) circular of 2025, which encourages campuses to create animal welfare societies and feeding points to nurture empathy. The message was to teach coexistence, not exclusion.
Do we really need new battlefields inside our schools? One group of students, guided by kindness, will try to feed the animals; another, armed with a judicial order, will drive them out. The decree risks breeding conflict, not safety.
Also read: I am a dog lover, but we don’t know how to win the war on strays
Theatre, not governance
The judiciary’s role is not to rule but to reason, to uphold the scientific temper the Constitution demands under Article 51A(h), and to ensure that law rests on evidence, not impulse and anecdote.
Judicial authority derives from interpretation, not instruction. When court orders disregard statutory processes, budgets, or feasibility, they turn performative — grand in tone, empty in substance. Law, like architecture, collapses when built on fantasy.
True security will never come from walls of exclusion; it will come from scientific solutions and compassionate governance, firm enforcement of the Animal Birth Control (ABC) Rules, effective waste management, and education grounded in empathy and respect.
In a country where classrooms still leak and girls still drop out of school for lack of toilets, demanding removal of community animals on the pretext of safety is not governance; it is theatre. Like Tughlaq’s march to Daulatabad or Antoinette’s imagined cake, it reveals how far power can drift from the people it serves.
Our judges are trustees of a Republic. And trustees must first recognise the foundations of our civilisational contract before they command the sky.
Gauri Maulekhi is a leading animal welfare expert, celebrated for over three decades of transformative legal advocacy and policy reform. She tweets @gauri_maulekhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)