RIP Shaktiman ― No Country for horses, hounds & humans?

Originally published April 2016. Refreshed and fact-checked August 2026 with the case’s legal status ten years on.

Lost to man’s wicked wars, humanity, horses, and hounds have all suffered collateral damage since early days, and the abject cruelty refuses to wither.

In the otherwise pristine hill state of Uttarakhand, a police horse was severely injured during a protest, caught on video that spread nationally. On 14 March 2016, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers gheraoed the state Vidhan Sabha in Dehradun during the budget session, protesting the then Congress-led government of Chief Minister Harish Rawat. In the melee between protesters and police, BJP MLA Ganesh Joshi was filmed hitting Shaktiman, a horse deployed with the mounted police, with a stick; in the chaos, the horse fell and shattered a hind leg.

Shaktiman’s leg was amputated within days to stop the spread of gangrene, and he was fitted with a prosthetic limb imported from the US, arranged by Jamie Vaughan, who runs a US-based veterinary care NGO in Bhutan. He’d lost close to 70 kg by the time he was seen briefly standing and walking on the new leg, to cheers from the team caring for him.

He didn’t survive it. Shaktiman died on 20 April 2016, after being sedated for what was meant to be a minor follow-up procedure.

How does attacking an innocent animal prove your point against the government or the system?

Joshi was arrested on 18 March 2016 and granted bail four days later on a ₹25,000 bond. Uttarakhand’s then Chief Minister Harish Rawat visited Shaktiman’s enclosure after his death, and the horse was buried with police honours. A statue was erected near the Assembly to commemorate him; it was removed within two days after a backlash arguing the state should be commemorating human martyrs of the statehood movement first. A second statue still stands today at Shaktiman Park, inside the Police Lines.

RIP Shaktiman

“In every crowd engagement they [horses] are at the mercy of any vicious person who is too cowardly to do anything but injure the defenseless animal. ‘Shaktiman’ was a police officer on duty and the person who put him through so much pain and ultimately killed him should be arrested for killing a police officer.”
― Maneka Gandhi, Union Minister

Even the death of an innocent animal didn’t shake the political factions at war, who went back to their blame games. If only animals could vote.

“Shaktiman died the same day when he was attacked and his leg was broken. Horses with such weight have very little chance to live on three legs. We were mentally prepared for this but political parties are playing blame games.”
― Gauri Maulekhi, Animal rights activist

Where the case stands in 2026

An FIR was registered against Joshi on 23 April 2016, and a chargesheet followed on 16 May 2016. Then the case sat for five years. In 2021, with Joshi’s own BJP now governing Uttarakhand, the state applied to withdraw the case against him. Dehradun’s Chief Judicial Magistrate accepted the application, and Joshi was acquitted on 23 September 2021, per The Hindu’s report at the time, a procedural acquittal on withdrawal, not a verdict on the facts of what happened to Shaktiman.

That wasn’t the end of it. Hoshiyar Singh Bisht, a private petitioner with no direct connection to the original case, challenged the acquittal at the Uttarakhand High Court, arguing that the gravity of the case and the public interest in it warranted judicial scrutiny regardless of who filed the challenge. The High Court reserved its decision in December 2024. A fresh plea from Bisht reopened the matter again in 2025, with a rehearing at the Nainital bench on 9 June 2025. As of this writing, no verdict has been reported since.

Ganesh Joshi remains the sitting MLA for Mussoorie, now in his fourth term, and holds a Cabinet berth (Agriculture, among other portfolios) in Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami’s government. Ten years after Shaktiman died, the man accused of killing him carries more political weight than he did in 2016, and the case is still, technically, open.

Dog with Blog stands with everyone who has kept pushing this case back into court rather than letting a procedural withdrawal be the final word. Cruelty to a working animal is covered under the same laws that are supposed to protect every other animal in India, on paper, if not always in practice; we’ve laid out what those animal laws in India actually say and how to use them. It’s the same gap between the law on paper and the law as it’s enforced that runs through Rani the sloth bear’s story, from the other direction: a case where the law came down hard on someone who meant no harm, while this one shows what happens when it doesn’t come down at all.