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MANY of us were introduced to the big innovators, inventors, thinkers, and leaders right up to the 1970s through a book titled Sau Barey Aadmi (100 Great Persons). Up there, along with Madame Curie and Wilhelm Rontgen, renowned for their groundbreaking work on radioactivity and X-rays, respectively, was Louis Pasteur, inventor of the rabies vaccine. It seems our lives as a nation are inextricably intertwined with vaccines, the lack thereof to be more precise.
Still struggling to eradicate the poliovirus whose vaccine has been around for over seven decades, we got whammed by Covid-19. While the world scurried to invent the vaccine, we went about our beloved hobby, sounding warnings of sundry conspiracies to make us collectively ‘shameless’ and ‘impotent’ via the vaccine. The prime minister lectured the world on the importance of debt relief and free delivery of vaccine to poor countries amidst continuous spending on weapons’ testing by Pakistan.
Time and again it has been proved that courts of law are not best placed to set prices of commodities or to decide which state-owned enterprises should be divested, but the failure of governance leads to all sorts of issues ending up in court. Dragging one court after another into the stray dogs menace, especially in Sindh, is a case in point. The slow supply of Covid-19 vaccines can be explained away as the entire world is vying for them. However, it is extremely embarrassing that the only nuclear power among the Muslim world does not even produce the dog-bite vaccine invented more than a century ago.
One regularly reads reports of packs of dogs mauling people.
So, who is responsible for ensuring a) control of the stray dog population, and b) the availability of rabies vaccine? It is usually the local governments that run such services, but the problem is that we usually do not hold local government elections. Why, you may ask? Well, because the national and provincial assembly legislators have not risen above repairing sewerage drains and paving the streets, that too only on paper. If they delegate these tasks to the municipalities, what would they promise their constituents come next elections? The courts step in from time to time and pass orders to hold local government elections. The provincial and federal governments drag their feet and only comply with court orders after they run out of all pretexts and then too, knowing full well that courts can make them hold the polls but cannot force them to fund and empower the LGs.
It is the citizens who fall through the cracks in all this and often the stray dogs situation gets so out of hand that one regularly reads reports of packs of dogs mauling people, usually little children, to death. Those who survive these horrendous attacks cannot be called ‘lucky’ as they face extremely painful deaths for want of vaccine. The media reports these awful incidents of criminal neglect on the part of all tiers of government. The courts take notice usually in response to petitions filed by citizens, call public representatives and district administration officials; reprimands are issued, lack of ambit and jurisdiction are proclaimed, the buck is passed around, judges warn of dire consequences if court orders are defied, and the legislators do not hold back in telling them off.
The cycle of absurdity does not stop here. Some governments try to assuage the situation to the best of their capacity and imagination. This causes civil society to step in. They too approach the courts and demand an end to violent treatment of stray dogs. They want the governments to catch, transport to veterinarian facilities, vaccinate and neuter, and transport back to their places of origin, hundreds of thousands of stray dogs. The courts comply. The governments who do not have funds for providing even an aspirin at the Basic Health Units for millions of human beings living in the rural and peri-urban areas of Pakistan, go through the motion of complying with the court order.
Only recently, the Sindh High Court was informed by the provincial government that tenders had been floated for the procurement of vaccine and the same will be procured as soon as the due bidding process is completed. Sixty vehicles are also being procured for transporting stray dogs. Are we allowed to wonder why the single-source route of procurement is not adopted in the case of the dog-bite vaccine or is that reserved only for the FWO to build roads we always need so urgently? One has an eerie suspicion that somehow the summary for buying 60 vehicles will be approved far ahead of the vaccine procurement; after all, the dogs need to be ferried back and forth. It seems the great Sufi poet Bulleh Shah meant this as a call-to-action for our governments and CSOs: “uth Bulleha chal yaar mana le; naeen te bazee lay gaey kutay.” (O’ Bulleh! wake and charm the beloved, lest the dogs carry the day).
The writer is a poet and analyst.
Published in Dawn, May 29th, 2021
