BARELY a day after Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah and his mother Molly Abdullah threw open the famed Tulip Garden where the entry comes at presumably costly Rs 50 per head for breathtaking view of the delicate Dutch flowers, sight of something scary but abundantly available in this summer Capital, comes free of cost in the form of stray dogs, around one lakh of whom are on prowl in the summer Capital.
 Where the stray dogs caged during the VVIP visit on Thursday or the canines infiltrated into the picturesque territory a day after, is for the administration to ponder over.
 But what remains the ground reality is that dogs are making their presence felt almost everywhere: be it the main roads, hospitals, parks, wildlife sanctuary, or the Tulip beds. 
 The Mughal emperors who got this garden developed in the foothills of Zaberwan Hills and named it Siraj Bagh, wouldn’t have it in their wildest imaginations that dogs would someday prowl to disturb the Tulips, which otherwise toss their heads with breeze. But then even the Mughal Gardens haven’t been immune to the stray dogs, often seen prowling there.
 Dogs aren’t only about prowl. They do bite, often deadly. Official figures reveal that over a dozen odd people, particularly women and children fell prey to dog bites everyday in Srinagar.
 Bite cases are many, record beating, and in a variety, all the times. Sometime back, a ten-year-old got over a hundred dog bites in Lal Bazar area while a year before that a boy of same age died of drowning in Jhelum when chased by canines near Zaina Kadal in Shaher-e-Khaas.
 There’s, however, a little contradiction over the dog population. While the general perception is that over one lakh dogs are on prowl, the Minister of State for Home and Housing, Nasir Sogami recently announced that the accurate figure is: 91,110.
 While the people have been seeking elimination of the dogs from the City, the National Conference led government strongly pleads the  presumably costly and time consuming sterilization of canines as sole remedy to the menace.
 Till now, however, neither any dogs were eliminated(not even rabid for that matter), nor have any of them been sterilized even as Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) Commissioner, Dr GN Qasba, who recently assumed  the charge, says the Animal Birth Control program would soon take off and be successful.
 Coming back to Tulip Garden, what if the CM had a sight of the canines there yesterday? Would he act like Governor NN Vohra, who last month during a visit to the Dachigam National Park was so irked to see stray dogs that he got them removed from there within 24 hours? 
 A paramilitary camp at Dachigam was accused of nurturing the stray packs for “security reasons” while the CRPF itself got the dogs removed. Same could be true for Siraj Bagh, which falls in the highly fortified area housing scores of paramilitary pickets.
 Well, what is gone, is gone. Dogs weren’t presumably sighted at the Tulip Garden yesterday or else they could have been removed from the park, sterilized or even hugged by some animal lover.
 But then a million dollar question by Chief Justice FM Ibraheem Ibraheem Kalif Ullah remains unanswered, which he posed during a hearing of PIL on dog menace in Srinagar last year inquiring: Will a dog stop biting after sterilization?

Lastupdate on : Fri, 30 Mar 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Sat, 31 Mar 2012 00:00:00 IST