Feather Politics

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has long cultivated an image of decisiveness, of being someone who is firm in resolve. Yet his government’s handling of Mumbai’s kabutarkhanas - designated pigeon-feeding enclosures - suggests a more familiar Indian political instinct that when sentiment bites, kick the can down the road.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had moved with rare clarity when it shut down 51 kabutarkhanas, including a popular site in Dadar, citing medical evidence that pigeon droppings carry fungal spores capable of causing hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a serious lung disease. Elderly residents, children and those with respiratory issues are particularly vulnerable. The Bombay High Court endorsed the closures by calling the health risk plain and ordering police to act against offenders.

However, this has severely irked Jain residents, many of whom see feeding pigeons as a religious duty. They saw in the decision an affront to their faith.

Such outrage might have been anticipated. Jains, though a small minority, wield disproportionate influence in Mumbai’s business, philanthropic and political circles. Many are loyal supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), especially in wards crucial to the forthcoming BMC elections. Confronted with their ire, Fadnavis’s decisiveness faltered. The ban, he later admitted, had been sudden while stating that controlled feeding could be permitted.

But ‘controlled feeding’ is a misnomer. From a public-health perspective, 20 minutes or 20 hours of scattering grain makes little difference. Pigeons do not consult schedules and droppings accumulate regardless. The health hazard is constant. In such matters, temporising is equivalent to capitulation.

The episode raises the question of whether the health of the many be compromised to soothe the sentiments of a few? That politicians seek to keep core constituencies sweet is hardly novel. But public health is a different sort of stake: invisible in the short term, it can be deadly in the long. Hypersensitivity pneumonitis is not a hypothetical threat; pulmonologists across Mumbai report treating patients with ‘pigeon breeder’s lung’ contracted without ever keeping a pigeon.

Fadnavis is hardly the first leader to find himself caught between science and sentiment. Yet the middle ground he advocates is less a compromise than a fudge. One might as well allow smoking in lifts for “just a few minutes” a day.

Mumbai’s kabutarkhanas are woven into the city’s fabric, as much a fixture as the monsoon leaks and traffic snarls. But not every tradition deserves indefinite preservation. The retreat undermines both the enforcement effort and the credibility of a government that claims to prize governance over grievance management.

The real test of political leadership is not in delivering the popular, but in withstanding the backlash that comes with doing what is necessary. The decision to blink in the face of protests may have won Fadnavis some temporary calm among Jain voters. But in the long run, it signals that when health policy collides with religious sentiment, the state’s instinct will be to yield. For Mumbai’s most vulnerable lungs, that is a costly compromise.