In the quiet hours between 1.40 am and 2 am on May 21, Laila, a senior community dog who had made her home on the premises of the upscale Jio World Drive mall in Bandra-Kurla Complex, was taken away. Months later, she remains missing. An FIR was registered on June 30 at the BKC Police Station by Bandra-based animal activist Shiraz Ahmad, who alleges that she was illegally relocated at the behest of the mall’s management. Despite the police case and the existence of CCTV footage and witness statements, Laila has yet to be found. Now, with the Supreme Court’s August 11 directive allowing the relocation of street dogs in Delhi-NCR, and with other states beginning to follow suit, activists like Ahmad fear there will not only be more such disappearances, but also fewer chances of return.

On August 11, the Supreme Court of India took suo moto cognisance of a troubling media report on fatal dog bites and rabies in Delhi. A two-judge bench of Justices Pardiwala and Mahadevan ordered municipal agencies across Delhi-NCR, including Gurugram, Noida, and Ghaziabad, to round up all stray dogs within eight weeks and confine them in shelters without releasing them back onto the streets. The court said that “infants and young children… should not at any cost fall prey to rabies.”

Animal rights groups, veterinarians, community animal feeders, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and political leaders, including Maneka Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, opposed this, warning that the order could undermine the long-standing humane Animal Birth Control (ABC) policy formulated by the Animal Welfare Board of India. By August 13-14, after widespread protests, Chief Justice of India Bhushan Gavai referred the case to a newly constituted three-judge Bench (Justices Nath, Mehta, Anjaria), which on August 14 reserved judgment while noting that the “whole problem is because of the inaction of local authorities”. The court stressed that municipal bodies had failed to enforce the ABC Rules and that this negligence — rather than flaws in the policy — had allowed the situation to escalate.