Demonising the guardians
Amreeta Sen

Savage Humans and Stray Dogs—A Study in Aggression
by Hiranmay Karlekar.
Sage. Pages 275. Rs 295.

A dog starved at his master’s gate; predicts the ruin of the State
— Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

ON January 5, 2007, eight-year-old Sridevi was allegedly "torn to pieces" by stray dogs, and the same thing happened to four-year-old Manjunath on February 28. This took place in Bangalore. And overnight the "tech capital" of modern India turned into a killing field, where stray dogs were marked down, hunted and killed brutally under the aegis of the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike in total defiance of the Animal Birth Control (Dog) Rules 2001 and the Prevention of Cruelty Act, 1960. This decimation and the reasons behind it is what Hiranmay Karlekar tries to track down in his book Savage Humans and Stray Dogs—A Study in Aggression.

What happened, and what really took place during those dog murdering days in urban Bangalore, where a section of the people bayed like maniacs for the slaughter of all street dogs and another section of the populace tried to save them, where friendly canines were herded into vans and left to starve, where puppies perished in terror bereft of their mother’s milk, where dogs were clubbed, injected and killed in a savage outbreak of brutality?

Karlekar tries to give us the answers but ultimately we are hounded by a shadow that we cannot grasp, a shadow the author traces from the battlefields of yore to the holocaust of Nazi Germany and a shadow which is elusive and ultimately evil.

Another question to answer is: What does Nazi Germany have to do with the Bangalore dog-killers? When do dogs, guardian dogs turn on children and kill them?

Those who have worked with stray dogs and been in close contact with them know that these dogs are essentially guardians of the streets they live in. They are on good terms with people from the locality, they scare away other stranger dogs and marauders who come into "their" area and thus, maintain a balance. And they do not kill. This is rare. They do not turn on eight-year olds, unless they have been trained and let loose in a pack. The very thought scares. Who would have been sadistic enough to warp the essential nature of these animals? Or were they dogs? Are there jackals or wolves on the outskirts of Bangalore or in the heart of the city? Was this angle even investigated? The shadow looms and leers.

Murder of innocent children is born of horror. Something else is horrifying. When we blame the slaughter of innocents on other innocents. And the real culprits walk free.

How do we destroy the soldier on a horse? By first destroying the horse. How is mankind destroyed? By first destroying that which guards and protects mankind, the trees, the animals, for it is when humankind stands exposed and alone, that it is most vulnerable to attack.

It is in the traditions of the East, says the book, that the whole universe is but a cosmic whole, standing because of the interconnection between each other. The West speaks in a different language, that of the superiority of man. "When we tug at a simple thing in nature we find that it is connected to the rest of the world".

The NGOs in Bangalore were sterilising and vaccinating dogs. The work was progressing and results were being obtained. One mad frenzied moment changed all that. Why is it that the work of NGOs are always looked upon with suspicion? Why is that all the good they do, brushed under the carpet, most of the time?

One other thing is the title of the book, Savage Humans. On the outskirts of Bolpur it is the tribals, the Santhals who look after their dogs most tenderly. It is the Nelus and Bholus out there, under the orange sunset of dusty skies that dance with their tribal masters and welcome the night. Again, the Nulias of Puri have bright-eyed pets, swishy tailed running inquisitively on the golden sands, sniffing with curiosity as each silver catch is brought home and occasionally patting a fish that jumps out back into the basket.

Savages? It was "civilised" Bangalore which ordered the execution of dogs.

When I used to pick up wounded stray dogs from the road and nurse them back to health, I had never been bitten. As I became more "civilised", I stopped doing so. As we become more "civilised" and less "savage", we think that we no longer need these "lesser life forms". As we " civilised" human beings build building upon building, we destroy the green of the jungles and the forest and come to the city in desperate search of a place to live. Results: elephants in villages of Bengal, lions in the market places of Gujarat `85 and soon there will be more. We deal with these intrusions most brutally though some sparks of sanity can be heard here and there.

It is time to remember that when we destroy and demonise the guardians, we lay ourselves open to attack. Karlekar’s book is one such spark of sanity. Try and identify the shadow.

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