How Court Orders Are ‘Muzzling’ Article 51a(G)

• When did ‘compassion’ become a ‘health hazard’?
• Since when did feeding a hungry animal become a punishable offense?
• At what point did “public safety” quietly upgrade itself to “public indifference”?
• And how did a Constitution that orders citizens to “have compassion for living creatures” suddenly find itself staring at notice boards that say: “Feeding stray dogs here is illegal”?

Welcome to the new India, where Article 51A(g) asks you to be compassionate, and a series of recent Supreme Court directions tell you exactly where, when, and how you’re allowed to feel it. Feed a starving dog at the gate of a hospital at midnight? Illegal. Feed him at a designated feeding zone, five streets away, at 4 pm? Highly constitutional.

Apparently, compassion now comes with ward numbers, GPS coordinates, and office hours.

The Night Compassion Broke the Law

Picture this.

It’s 11:45 pm outside a government hospital. A security guard is half asleep on his chair, a family is pacing in the corridor waiting for news of their loved one, and at the gate, a scrawny brown dog is quietly lying near the entrance.

A woman walks up, opens a small packet of chapati and boiled rice, and places it in front of him. His tail thumps weakly; he hasn’t eaten properly in days.

Before he can finish his first bite, she hears a shout.

“Madam, feeding is not allowed here. Supreme Court order. Go to the designated feeding zone.”

Because of recent directions, municipal bodies have been ordered to remove stray dogs from premises like educational institutions, hospitals, railway stations and similar public places, and relocate them to shelters after sterilisation and vaccination. Feeding them on streets and public places has been prohibited, with instructions that they may only be fed in designated feeding spaces created in each ward. Violations can invite legal action. 

So, in this new moral universe, the woman is not a compassionate citizen; she’s a potential offender. The starving dog is no longer a vulnerable life at the doorstep of human suffering; he is a “nuisance” who must be removed to some municipal exile, neatly away from hospitals, bus stands, malls, and human conscience.

The logic is simple: if you cannot see it, you don’t have to feel it. If you don’t feel it, you don’t have to act.

Article 51A(g): Compassion in the Constitution, but Not at the Corner

Now let’s revisit the small matter of the Constitution.

Article 51A(g) states that it is the duty of every citizen “to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for living creatures.” 

Not “compassion only in fenced, notarised, board-certified feeding zones between 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm.”

Not “compassion, subject to municipal convenience and neighbourhood WhatsApp outrage.”

Just… compassion for living creatures.

In the landmark Jallikattu judgment (Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja), the Supreme Court itself elevated Article 51A(g) into something far greater: it called it the “magna carta of animal rights,” and held that the duties in Article 51A(g) fuel the interpretation of statutory and even fundamental rights of animals. 

So, let’s get this straight:

• On one hand, the Court says compassion for animals is a constitutional baseline, a lens through which we interpret law.
   
• On the other hand, more recent directions effectively say that feeding hungry animals in public spaces is illegal, and dogs must be hidden away from certain public institutions and streets, or tucked into shelters many cities don’t even have the capacity to run humanely. 

Solution? Simple. If compassion is becoming too inconvenient, don’t adjust the policy; just put compassion in a cage. Or better, pretend it’s “implemented” through signboards and shelter notifications.

The Bureaucratisation of Compassion

The new regime sounds very “balanced” on paper. Dedicated feeding zones. Shelters. Helplines to report “violations.” Performance reports of sterilisation and vaccination drives. 

But underneath the administrative polish lies a cold assumption:

Stray dogs are a problem to be managed, not lives to be protected. Compassion is a risk factor, not a civic virtue.

We are told this is all for “public safety.” India has indeed seen many dog-bite incidents and rabies cases; news reports estimate thousands of bites per day in cities like Delhi, and stray dog attacks have triggered public anger in several states. 

Fair enough. Public safety is non-negotiable. But public safety is not the same as public sanitisation of conscience.

Real compassion does not deny risk. It manages it without amputating empathy. The legal framework itself — including the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, and Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023 — is supposed to balance humane treatment of animals with human safety, not quietly downgrade animals to mobile biohazards. 

Instead, what we are now witnessing is the bureaucratisation of compassion:

• Feed, but only where the board tells you.
• Care, but only at the approved coordinates.
• Love, but from a safe, state-sanctioned distance.

The message is clear: you may keep your heart, but please route it through the correct file.

Morality vs Legality: When ‘Dharma’ Is Asked to Obey the Notice Board

Let’s step back from the dog for a second and look at the bigger question:

What happens when morality and legality clash? Which one must bow?

Legality is man-made. It evolves with time, politics, pressure, and public mood. The same Court that once banned Jallikattu on grounds of cruelty later upheld legislative changes allowing it to continue under “regulation,” arguing a balance between culture and animal welfare. 

Morality, in the dharmic sense, is something deeper. Dharma is not “what is currently permitted”; it is “what is inherently right.” Law operates in ‘territories.’ Dharma operates in ‘conscience.’

Our epics are brutal in their honesty about this conflict:

• Bhishma stood by legality — his vow and the throne — even when it meant watching Draupadi humiliated in the Kuru court. Legally, he was bound. Morally, he failed. His deathbed in the Mahabharata is one long commentary on what happens when a man upholds legality and abandons dharma.
   
• Karna stood on the “legal” side of loyalty to Duryodhana, even when he knew the moral truth was with Krishna and the Pandavas. His tragedy is precisely that he knew dharma and still fought for adharma.
  
  
• Krishna, on the other hand, is repeatedly willing to bend, twist, and bypass technical “rules” of war — using Shikhandi against Bhishma, urging Arjuna to shoot Karna when he is distracted — because the higher dharma is the protection of justice, not worship of procedure.

You see the pattern. Dharma is not obsessed with ‘formal correctness.’ It is obsessed with ‘moral correctness.’

Now bring that back to the street.

• Legality: “You may not feed a stray dog here; it is a public place. Go to the designated feeding zone.” 
  
  
• Morality: “There is a hungry, sentient creature in front of you. You can help. Will you?”

If you choose legality and walk away with your food packet because the board told you so, you are technically compliant.

If you choose morality and feed the dog, you might technically be in violation of a municipal interpretation of a court order.

The hard question is this: when you sleep that night, which breach weighs more heavily — ‘legal technicality’ or ‘moral abdication’?

The Infinite Nature of Compassion

The funniest part of this entire tragedy is the attempt to localise compassion.

Article 51A(g) does not define how, when, or where to feel compassion. It cannot — because anything that needs to be geographically mapped, fenced, and timestamped is not compassion; it is logistics. 

True compassion is immediate.

• When a person collapses on the road at night, you do not tell them, “My empathy hours are 9 am to 6 pm. Please wait till morning.”
   
• When a flood hits a village, you don’t respond, “Relief will be provided only within the notified comfort zones.”
   
• When an injured dog lies bleeding near a school gate, you don’t say, “Sorry, this is a public institution. Kindly drag yourself to Ward-37 Feeding Point No. 4.”

If compassion is real, it responds where suffering appears. It does not ask whether the suffering being is standing in front of a hospital, a temple, a bus stand, or a mall.

By refusing to define compassion, the Constitution did something profound: it left it deliberately open, limitless, unbounded — because the moment you try to narrow compassion, you are already betraying it.

The Slippery Slope: When We Start Choosing Which Lives May Be Seen

Make no mistake, this is not just about dogs.

Whenever we start pushing the vulnerable out of sight “for public convenience,” we are rehearsing a dangerous script:

• First, we decide dogs don’t belong near hospitals.
   
• Tomorrow, perhaps homeless people near hospitals are “unsightly” and must be relocated to shelters far away.
   
• Then street vendors become “obstructions” and are wiped away from prime zones.
   
• Eventually, anything that reminds us of inequality, suffering, or shared responsibility is shunted confidentially off-stage.

The street then becomes a showroom, not a shared space. Sanitised, curated, morally hollow.

We will have:

• Perfectly painted zebra crossings,
• Beautifully lit metro stations,
• Pothole-free expressways lined with manicured plants,

and a ruthless societal skill: the ability to walk past hunger, pain, and fear — in humans or animals — without the slightest inner disturbance.

At that point, yes, we will have “public safety,” but we will have lost public soul.

But What About Bites, Children & Rabies?

This is the standard, and fair, counterquestion.

Dog-bite incidents are real. Rabies is fatal. Families have lost children. Anger is understandable. States have struggled to manage stray dog populations, vaccination, and sterilisation at scale. 

But notice the sleight of hand: instead of admitting decades of administrative failure — poor sterilization drives, lack of vaccination, chaotic waste management that feeds dog overpopulation, pathetic shelter infrastructure — we quietly reframe the problem as:

“The real danger is people who feed dogs.”

It’s like blaming people who distribute food to migrants during a lockdown for “creating crowds,” instead of asking why the State let them starve in the first place.

We had tools:

• Animal Birth Control rules.
• Funding mechanisms for sterilisation.
• Provisions to vaccinate, register, and monitor community dogs.
• Judicial precedents that recognised dogs as “community animals” with a right to live in their territories. 

We underused, misused, or ignored them for years. Now, instead of fixing the system, we criminalise the only thing that has consistently worked in practice: individual human compassion.

‘Dharma-Compliant Law’: What Would That Look Like?

If we took dharma seriously — not as a slogan but as a design principle — our approach would change.

A dharma-aligned framework would:

1. Acknowledge the moral status of animals clearly
   
   Courts have already expanded Article 21 to conceptually protect animal life and described Article 51A(g) as central to animal rights. A dharmic legal order would not then treat animals as disposable “risks” to be swept away from wherever they inconvenience us.
    
2. Treat feeders as partners, not offenders
   
   Feeders are the ones who know the dogs by face, name, and temperament. They are the first to notice disease, injury, or aggression. Turning them into potential violators is not just morally ugly; it is strategically foolish.
    
3. Invest in real solutions, not aesthetic ones
   
   - Systematic sterilisation and vaccination.
   - Properly funded, audited shelters where only genuinely aggressive or rabid dogs are      permanently kept, not mass dumping grounds. 
   -  Public education on how to behave around dogs, especially for children.
    
4. Design rules that respect both safety and compassion
   
   Yes, you can reasonably ask that feeding not obstruct entrances, emergency gates, or high-density, high-speed traffic zones. But that is coordination, not criminalisation. It is about where is safest to feed, not whether you should feed at all.
    
5. Use law to raise society’s moral floor, not lower it
    
   Laws should encourage citizens to live up to their constitutional duties, not punish them for attempting to do so. If Article 51A(g) asks me to be compassionate, the law should help me do it responsibly — not demand that I emotionally log out in front of a hungry animal.

Final Thoughts: When Law Forgets Its Own ‘Soul’

At its best, law is the outer armor of inner morality. It is supposed to be dharma translated into proceure, not dharma suffocated by procedure.

Right now, we are in a strange phase where:

• The Constitution tells citizens: “Have compassion for living creatures.”
• Past Supreme Court judgments call that duty the bedrock of animal rights.
• Newer directions risk turning that same compassion into an administratively managed, spatially confined, and occasionally punishable act.

No, the answer is not literally abolishing Article 51A(g). The answer is the opposite: to finally start taking it seriously. If there is any “conflict” here, it is not between Article 51A(g) and recent orders; it is between our moral spine and our appetite for convenience.

So, the real questions we should be asking are:

When a hungry dog looks at you outside a hospital gate, will you see a “public nuisance” or a “living being” under your constitutional duty of compassion?

When ‘legality’ and ‘morality’ pull you in opposite directions, which one will your conscience obey?

And if we continue to fence in compassion, zone it, timestamp it, and threaten it with legal action…

How long will it be before we realize the stray we truly abandoned wasn’t the dog at the gate, but the ‘dharma’ in our own hearts?