In a country where human lives rarely matter, the love we profess/confess for animals is strangely curious and telling.
The outrage over street dogs, like most public ones, expose a deeply entrenched idea of violence of class and caste
Our moral compass, much like our politics, is hierarchical. Animal and human lives are not graded by need or suffering but by their utility and closeness to privilege
I firmly believe that India is entirely constructed on the idea of surplus; surplus bodies, surplus hunger, and constant surplus suffering. A nation of life in excess and inadequate care. We spill and tumble over footpaths, railway platforms, vacant lots, and night streets, each one swiftly replaced by news cycles. In a country where human lives rarely matter, the love we profess/confess for animals is strangely curious and telling. It reveals less about compassion and more about the kinds and ways of life we value and why.
I love dogs and I love meat. I have always had love for strays in my neighborhood, colleges and universities, the playfulness of them longingly gazing at our plate of food, the manipulative whimper of asking and the general way human absurdity surrounds the animals that live around us. I also happen to be a Bengali, whose meal is primarily non-vegetarian and I have eaten almost everything that is acceptable and sometimes sanctioned in our country. The vegetarian section of a Bengali wedding or any occasion always had an orphaned existence. This contradiction feels ordinary to me, even natural. I also feel that this reflects of my country where I live in; a place that romanticises compassion and love while witnessing and consuming cruelty in tandem and often in silence.
A couple of months, a raging debate in the Supreme Court resulted in a decision about relocating street dogs, a plan of action that was supposed to be implemented within a matter of days. The debate was framed on an idea of balance, binaries of human safety and animal protection, empathy and order. A seemingly ordinary thing, legality trying to comprehend the contradictions that communities refuse to face and often shy away from. What, where, and whose life counts? Who deserves care? Who can be legitimately refused care? Who can be relocated to oblivion? The case and the debate were about dogs but let’s be honest, this is an extension of what kind of people we care for/about— migrants and migrant workers, refugees, political prisoners, marginalised identities. In precarious circumstances, some lives deserve absolution from precarity and some don’t.
The outrage over street dogs, like most public ones, expose a deeply entrenched idea of violence of class and caste. The disenfranchised make their habitat among stray dogs, because both of them are excluded by our city’s planning and its desire to expand its territories. The middle classes love dogs with selective compassion—the husky in posh Gurgaon, the Labrador in Bangalore and the Pomeranian in Calcutta, vaccinated, neutered, and house trained. We only feed strays when it flatters our occasional conscience and guilt. The Resident Welfare Association WhatsApp machine rages against the menace of street dogs while boasting about AC bills required for huskies in North Indian summer. Municipalities conduct sporadic sterilisation with bureaucratic urgency, with empathy kept buried under ‘tasks’ accomplished. The legal world,when it interjects, exercises a pageantry of contradictions, that declares that all life is sacrosanct while implementing policies that make living unbearable for millions.
Our moral compass, much like our politics, is hierarchical. Animal and human lives are not graded by need or suffering but by their utility and closeness to privilege. A cow is a mother, a dog sentimental, a goat an eventual kebab, and a Muslim who slaughters a cow is criminal. Compassion in India was never ethical but rather political, it has always flowed downwards while flattering those up above.
Even then, the mutt survives. They survive like our poor, not because of a system that protects them but because their adaptability to indifference is deeply honed. Leftovers are there for them, they give birth to pups/children in drains, sleep wherever there is shade. Truest citizens of our country’s informal republic. Scavenging of our cruelty and testimony to our contradictions. When the court debates their rights, it is not really legislating morality; it is grasping at straws to humanise a country that has forgotten what that means.
I am not exempt from this hypocrisy. I love dogs and eat animals. I call one a “baby” and another “delicious.” I weep for a roadkill puppy, and bydinner, order mutton biryani. Sometimes I console myself with culture: that I am Bengali, that meat is heritage, not indulgence. Fish is memory, goat is ritual. But deep down, I know this is evasion. Tradition often masks habit wrapped in nostalgia. And an idea that protein is also political.
My first lesson in animal suffering came from television. In the 1990s, Maneka Gandhi hosted Heads and Tails, a weekly Doordarshan show on cruelty and ethics. Dogs beaten on streets, elephants chained in temples, slaughterhouses running in shadows, all broadcast in grainy half-hours. Gandhi spoke in a clipped moral tone that unsettled me. I watched every Sunday, and by lunch, ate mutton curry. I learned a central lesson of Indian morality: guilt does not interrupt appetite; it coexists with it.
This is our national complicity. We are capable of deep sentiment and deeper cruelty, often in the same breath. We touch gods with hands that strike servants. We build temples for cows and prisons for those who eat them. We watch cruelty on television and then go to KFC. Compassion becomes spectacle, a gesture for the self, not a politics of care.
Modern animal rights discourse is largely aesthetic, not political. “Kindness to animals” rarely critiques factory farming, land dispossession, or urban inequality. It soothes the conscience of those who benefit from the hierarchies they claim to oppose. Cruelty runs across species, class, and caste, yet we prefer easy targets: the poor man who throws a stone rather than the system that denies him food.
It is easier to mourn a dog than a Dalit or a displaced farmer. Even our compassion is stratified. The Supreme Court deliberates on stray dogs while migrant workers die on highways. Dogs are not the problem; they are the symptom of a society that mistakes sentiment for solidarity. Compassion, like justice, has a caste: selective, performative, partial.
Yet within this hypocrisy, something fragile survives. A street dog follows me home every evening. I feed him scraps; he offers trust. It is not redemption, just a small exchange of endurance. Here, I see the truth of love in India—flawed, quiet, surviving in contradiction. It feeds what it also fears. It holds rice in one hand and meat in the other. It is political precisely because it refuses purity.
To love anything here, a dog, a human, a city, is to do so within violence. The question is not whether we are complicit; it is whether we are willing to see it. Between the bark and the butcher’s knife lies the uneasy heartbeat of this country, a place that devours what it loves and still calls it compassion. This contention is not a call for reason, but an everydayness what it means to live in a country where death is consumed, celebrated, and relegated to ashes and dust, depending on one’s faith.
(Views expressed are personal)
Anirban Ghosh is an Assistant Professor at Centre for Writing, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence
