Dear Chairman,
Starting last March when I brought out AWBI’s complicity and passivity in the reckless orders of mass dog culling by an IAS officer of J&K, nominated as AWBI member and had the expose covered by CNN-IBN ; the Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) alongwith some antagonized members of AWBI thereafter embarked upon a campaign of disinformation and slander against me also in retaliation against my present “obstructionist” role to letting the ABC turn into a lucrative pound industry for corrupt Municipal officials in league with vested interests at the AWBI itself. The same AWBI member in J&K is now being used to assemble a sham SPCA of convenient AWBI stooges for it to save face under mounting anti-pound pressure. Please remember I had only a tertiary sympathizer role at SPCA with the actual control vesting in two of Ms Jasjit Purewal’s and your own blue eyed boys as President and Vice president respectively and am and will not be dissuaded by AWBI efforts at stymieing my voice as a fierce, independent animal rights volunteer – SPCA or no SPCA. Some AWBI members and its legal adviser at the behest of those exposed subsequently floated concocted stories of my being responsible for the poisonings in Srinagar even as the SMC officially acknowledged otherwise at http://www.smcsite.org/swm.html (Excerpts in yellow below) that I indeed blew the whistle resulting in their halting of the drive.
Dog Menace in the Srinagar City:
Due to present law and order situation and continuation of Security Bunkers in various parts of the Srinagar City there has been an unprecedented growth in stray dog population in Srinagar City. As a result hundreds of dog bite complaints are being received monthly in and around Srinagar City. During the preceding financial year a number of stray dog eradication programme have been launched in all parts of the Srinagar city and 10,000stray dogs have been killed. However, SMC intended to launch a massive stray dog eradication programme in the Srinagar City but due to stay of Hon’ble Supreme Court of India and intervention of certain NGO’s and animal lovers this programme has been deferred. The matter has been taken up with the Animal Welfare Board, Government of India and in collaboration with NGO’s (SPCA) and Animal Welfare Board a memorandum is being signed to birth control growing number of dogs through sterilization/ vaccination of all stray dogs in Srinagar within a period of two years limit.
For the past one year running the AWBI role in Srinagar far from bring ideal or conducive to the objectives of mandated participatory ABC and animal welfare has actually been instrumental in institutionalizing and bureaucratizing the concept of multi-crore mega pounds that have invariably led to malfeasance and proven rampant animal cruelty elsewhere in India. Animal birth control and welfare there got relegated to the background for the immediate gain of the green bucks. What Kashmir needed was not mega-pounds but community ABC programmes with animal sympathizers and public support run in compact, interspersed ABC centers costing peanuts, rather than “large and pleasant” multi-million pounds breeding personal aggrandizement and gratis experimentation by ineligible hands.
Under your leadership the AWBI has earned the dubious distinction of turning the mandate of this holy institution upside down on its head. Not just in Kashmir but in the rest of India as well. This will not pass muster. AWBI is a statutory institution and the sphinx like silence of a Dhidhrashtra can be a strategic personal survival compulsion not the acceptable stand of an accountable public institution run on tax payer’s money. In any case Dhidhrashtra is only a footnote of history – remembered for being overtly blind and covertly deaf, even as Draupadi got disrobed. With a view to bring out the whole truth and the sordid bungling of the AWBI as indeed to vindicate the truth in my contentions I am from tomorrow onwards bringing out an entire series of some papers as the first installment of evidence that outright indicts and contradicts the known, misleading AWBI stance in the J&K issue. Some are a real shocker – That of AWBI Members corresponding with the SMC and quoting rates as interested suppliers for equipment in the Srinagar ABC !! Others roaming the cool climes of Gulmarg and Pehalgam, engaging in self-indulgent dog tourism trips in the name of ABC. I have said earlier and reiterate that I would be the happiest to be proved wrong – at least for the sake of my dumb four legged friends.
AWBI’s obsession that I fail is not enough – AWBI must succeed in its duty – for the animals in their last chance yet. AWBI will no longer function as a fiefdom – its actions are already being called to question. A suffering populace in Kashmir already besieged by the enormity of the problem is losing patience and will not brook any further dogmatic pursuit of vested interest or self-deluding solutions by AWBI and SMC at the expense of its well being.
Sincerely
( JAVED IQBAL )
JAVED IQBAL SHAH
(Political Analyst & Writer)
385 Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar Kashmir (J&K)
E Mail : javed0909@yahoo.co.in GSM : 9810002976 / 09419007318