May 20, 2023: While much of urban India is deeply passionate and at times even obsessive about tiger conservation, an outbreak of fear has gripped large parts of ‘Bharat’, basically rural India, in recent times. Multiple districts in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, and Karnataka are increasingly becoming hot spots of this outbreak, which has assumed unprecedented levels in the last few months.
No, we are not talking about a fresh outbreak of Covid-19 or some new disease in these epicentres. Had that been the case, the outbreak would have invaded primetime news headlines and dominated noisy debates on TV and social media.
This particular outbreak is about a sharp escalation in instances of leopards and tigers attacking and killing defenceless villagers in these four Indian states. And that is precisely why the country’s influential media networks, based in shiny glass offices in the big cities, are covering this outbreak of deaths as mere fillers, and not as the national crisis that it has ballooned into.
A look at some recent, disturbing episodes in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, and Karnataka gives a clear picture of how alarming the deadly crisis is.
Trail of destruction
On February 13, 2023, a 75-year-old man and his grandson were killed in tiger attacks in separate tragedies in the forested Kodagu district of Karnataka. Raju, an elderly peasant, was killed in Palleri village in the morning, while his 18-year-old grandson, Chethan, was slaughtered by a big cat just a few hours later.
Just five days later, on February 18, reports emerged of multiple leopards killing at least seven villagers and severely injuring more than eight people in three regions of UP’s Bijnor district – Nageena, Afjalgarh, and Rehad.
From February onwards, at least 75 government schools in various villages across Bijnor district that don’t have boundary walls, were placed on a perpetual high alert. The parents of around 3,500 young students who go to those schools were told to be extremely cautious about sending their kids to study.
Expectedly, teachers also expressed fears about going to the schools that were marked as highly potential targets for leopard attacks. Village groups were formed that have been going from door to door, cautioning children against wandering off to remote alleys.
UP’s Bijnor is famous for its sugarcane fields, but they are also favourite hangouts of leopards on the prowl. It is estimated that about 150 leopards have been prowling around Bijnor’s sugarcane fields in recent months – that’s an alarming figure, given that they’re inhabited zones.
53 killed in Chandrapur
On March 20, 2023, a chilling report surfaced, revealing that 53 people died from tiger and leopard attacks in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra in 2022. That’s a lot of people considering we’re only talking about a single district.
Tiger attacks claimed 44 of those lives, while nine others were killed by leopards. The Chandrapur deaths included women and children.
Let’s now move on to Uttarakhand. On April 17, 2023, after several weeks of tension following a steady rise in cases of tigers attacking humans, several villages in the northern Indian state were placed under a temporary night curfew to avoid further tragedies.
The curfew banned villagers in two Uttarakhand districts from venturing out between 7pm and 6am. Schools were shut for two days, and vigilant groups were formed to keep an eye on the paths leading up to the villages.
Days later, on the night of April 25, 2023, a ghastly incident was reported – yet again – in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor district. Rizwan Ahmed, a villager in Udaipur village in the Rehad region, watched in horror as a hungry leopard jumped over a wall, dashed into his house, and attacked his five-year-old girl Arshi, leaving her dead.
Two days later in Bijnor again, on April 27, 2023, a leopard killed four people, including two children, in the Nageena region in just one week’s time. Following this worrying burst of deaths, Bijnor’s divisional forest officer urgently recommended the chief wildlife warden in Lucknow to declare the leopard a man-eater and allow permission for its huntdown.
Forest officials and experts from the nearby Pilibhit Tiger Reserve are trying to locate the leopard. Numerous cages have been strategically placed at various locations to catch the big cat.
Then more recently, on May 18, 2023, Manisha Singh, a resident of Moosepur village in Bijnor, looked on frozenly as a leopard pounced onto the front-yard of her house and dragged away her six-year-old daughter, Yashi. Her mangled body was located hours later in a nearby sugarcane field.
Hell in UP’s Bijnor
Bijnor has been going through hell recently. During the last three months, at least seven villagers in the UP district were killed by leopards. Five of them occurred between April 19 to 26, 2023.
Wildlife officials swung into action and used cages with live animal bait to successfully capture 10 leopards, according to a district forest official. The 10 big cats were transported to the nearby Amangarh forest reserve and released there. Bijnor continues to remain tense.
Apart from the terror reign of big cats in UP, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, and Karnataka, Bengal’s Sunderbans are perpetually in the grip of a similar threat. The traditional wild honey hunters of the region in southern Bengal frequently fall prey to predatory Royal Bengal tigers.
Wildlife enthusiasts find booming tiger population numbers welcoming. But on the flip side, it’s a growing concern that India’s wild tiger count has risen above 3,000. Why are tiger numbers in India not very pleasant news? Well, because of the rising risk of big-cat attacks on defenceless rural Indians.
India is home to 75% of the tiger population on the planet. According to an October 2023 estimate, there were 3,682 tigers in the country. Their numbers have escalated during the last 10 years.
Not all tiger and leopard attack deaths are reported to the authorities. Going by only the officially confirmed cases, as many as 108 villagers were killed in tiger attacks in the country between 2019 and mid-2021.
Cheetahs of Kuno
Even the much-hyped Cheetah reintroduction project in 2022 has left a bad taste in the mouth. Oban, a Namibian cheetah that was transferred to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh against its wishes, escaped on April 2 and sparked terror in nearby human settlements.
It was spotted at a village in Vijaypur 20km away from the park, before being captured and released back into Kuno’s jungles.
If what’s going on in UP, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, and Bengal’s Sunderbans is collectively not major enough to be a national crisis, then what is? Curfews, both declared and undeclared, are being imposed from time to time to protect villagers, especially schoolchildren, from big-cat attacks. If this is not a national emergency, what is?
So, here’s the big problem. When big cats kill villagers in India, nobody gives a damn. The press runs news of these attacks as stray incidents. These reports don’t make it to the day’s top headlines.
But when poachers and people in self-defence kill tigers and leopards, it gets wide and critical coverage in the mainstream media. Villagers hunting down predators to protect their children get bracketed along with money-making poachers, and both parties are together projected as scheming villains trying to persecute big cats, and jeopardise biodiversity and the planet.
Big cats vs Rural humans
Our question to city folks who are obsessed with projects such as tiger conservation: Why the double standards? Why are unglamorous rural human lives less precious than the hyped lives of predatory big cats?
Why is there a perfect sync among city-based powerful and policymaking stakeholders when it comes to the treatment of the two contrasting trends – that of big cats killing humans, and that of humans killing big cats?
Government authorities, policymakers, politicians, corporate powers, elite clubs, foreign-funded NGOs, environment and animal rights experts, advisers, celebrities, wealthy artists, and the mainstream media – they are all guilty of the double standards. What double standards? – That the lives of spectacular big cats are more important than the lives of unglamorous rural humans.
Now, why is there such a smooth and seamless agreement among all these parties? Is it because of a certain crude reality? – That elite Indians, leading cocooned lives in protected areas, are safe from big-cat attacks. At the end of the day, it’s only the villagers living on the margins of society, in faraway forests and wetlands, who are at risk of these attacks – not the urban elites.
In fact, is it more than just a case of collective moral bankruptcy? Are there forces apart from domestic urban elitism that are at play here? Is the growing trend of tiger conservation in India superimposed on Indian society from outside?
To get to the bottom of this, one first needs to understand that despite being an independent country, there are multiple fronts and spaces in which foreign players continue to pull the strings in India and influence the way the Indian public thinks about life.
The foreign hand
There are at least 17,000 foreign companies that operate on Indian soil today. More than 54,000 church-run schools ensure the English language continues to remain a powerful tool of communication for the country’s most influential 8-10% of the population.
There are countless foreign-funded NGOs, think-tanks, research centres, embassies, and embassy-style cultural outposts that seek to shape the narrative for India’s cultured elite. For example, Hollywood films are a rage in our drawing rooms, often pushing agenda-laced messages from the West.
And our favourite information systems, such as the mainstream media, books, research material, cultural programmes, and special events, are often influenced and even manipulated by forces from abroad.
So, in this atmosphere of a pronounced foreign cultural influence, it’s only natural to assume that this twisted concept of prioritising the lives of predators over rural humans is partly an imported or superimposed one. It’s a perverse concept that trains our minds to imagine that rural human lives are expendable, but the lives of tigers, leopards, and cheetahs, and other prominent wild animals need to be protected at all costs.
Now, in the context of the Western tendency to treat certain ‘types’ of humans as inferior beings to wild animals, it’s worth recalling a blood-curdling story from America of the 1800s and 1900s. Back then, there was a widely accepted trend in America of White people openly using Black babies from slave-origin families as live baits to lure alligators for hunting purposes.
Here is a detailed account of this incredibly dark past about America with shocking illustrations. A video report from Empire Diaries can be seen below:
A flimsy excuse is often dished out whenever we hear of tigers killing innocent villagers in India. The excuse is: the loss of human life is inevitable because we have to pay the price for trespassing onto the habitat of the predators.
Now, the counter-argument here is that why don’t governments and policymakers find ways to give rural people living on the margins a better living, so that they won’t need to venture into risky big-cat territory for their livelihood? We’re not talking about millions of people here; only the targeted populations in the most vulnerable villages of a few states.
Or at least, why not give the villagers cover by putting in place a robust safety system that will restrict rogue predators and safely send them back into the depths of the forest? Won’t such a government-maintained safety net give hundreds of thousands of sugarcane farmers, for example, a sigh of relief.
Proactive tactical measures are the need of the hour, not knee-jerk reactions. For a country’s government that has a robust and sophisticated space mission, solving this crisis in our backyard shouldn’t be that hard.
Let’s discuss an example from southern Bengal and neighbouring southern Bangladesh in the context of the save-the-tiger campaign and hoopla in South Asia. We hear of numerous debates about the human-predator conflict on the forested islands of the Sundarbans in the two countries. But those debates never focus on finding an easy solution of giving state-backed protection or cover for honey collectors.
Such a solution would serve multiple purposes. It would help save precious human lives, allow the urban elites to enjoy the wild honey, and also ensure that the predators stay away from preying on humans – at least not at an alarming rate.
WWF on India’s tigers
The homepage of the WWF’s (World Wide Fund for Nature) website once ran an atrocious report about the honey hunters of the Sundarbans. The report’s heading says: Harvesting honey and protecting tigers. Ideally, the heading should be: Harvesting honey and protecting humans.
The Switzerland-based international NGO has made it very clear who is more valuable for them in the Sundarbans – it’s the tigers, not the humans.
The WWF – which staunchly backs tiger rights activism in India – has an outpost or ‘embassy’ in the country, which is dedicated towards ending wildlife trafficking and protecting various species. Fair enough, they are honestly going about their mission of seeking to safeguard endangered wild animals in India.
The WWF’s India wing has a website that spells out its mission. It is to prioritise the protection of the following species: Bengal tiger, Asian elephant, Indian or greater one-horned rhino, Ganges river dolphin, Snow leopard, Red panda, among others.
The ‘tiger widows’
Take another chilling example, that of ‘tiger widows’ of the Bay of Bengal. Who will take up the cause of the ‘tiger widows’? The uneasy rise in the number of widows across the Sunderbans is a least discussed crisis in coastal Bengal and coastal Bangladesh.
Men from the impoverished families of the mangrove forest areas of these two countries have been routinely been falling victim to predator attacks because they’ve been compelled to venture deep into the jungles to collect honey and crabs to earn a livelihood.
There are certain villages whose entire male populations have been wiped out due to predatory attacks, resulting in women being left stranded in the forested villages. They’re nowadays called ‘tiger widows’, having lost their men to tiger assaults, and yet, they hardly make it to the news headlines.
On the basis of the WWF’s global and India websites and their content about projects such as ‘save the tiger’, there are geopolitical questions as well as humanitarian questions that need answering.
First, the geopolitical questions: Who gives the WWF authority to decide on how India should handle its biodiversity? What are the origins of their deep involvement in India’s wildlife management? Do we really need an NGO from Switzerland to tell us how to handle our jungles and our wild animals? Can’t we Indians ourselves tackle our own biodiversity? Does the WWF have a hidden agenda in promoting tiger conservation in India?
Second, the humanitarian questions: How does the WWF conclude that tiger rights – as published on their global website – are more important than protecting defenceless villagers in the Sunderbans? Why should we as Homo Sapiens not prioritise other Homo Sapiens in the human-predator conflict scenario?
Most importantly, isn’t this approach of prioritising various wild species for protection – as listed on the WWF’s India website – not an insult towards the helpless villagers living in fear right now in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, and the Sunderbans?
Who will list these people as a priority who need urgent protection? When will Indians and the foreign players collectively stop insulting them?
India’s own bias
One might argue that it’s unfair to squarely blame only the foreign forces for this mis-prioritisation of lifeforms. After all, India has its own legacy of tiger protection drives – read: hype. We have the National Tiger Conservation Authority, established in 2005 on the recommendation of the country’s Tiger Task Force. Dozens of tiger reserves were set up under its supervision.
We also have Project Tiger, a dedicated mission for tiger conservation in India, set up in 1973 focusing on boosting the breeding of the animal in Bengal.
Then we have the Wildlife Institute of India, an autonomous body set up by the government in 1982 to carry out biodiversity-related research. And then, of course, more recently, we saw the roll-out of the Cheetah reintroduction programme in Kuno.
Having said that, there’s ample circumstantial evidence – not direct proof, though – of a high degree of foreign influence on India’s policymakers and the mainstream media about how they should interpret human-predator conflict scenarios.
Flashback to 1990s
If you turn the clock back to the 1990s when India experienced the cable TV explosion, we saw multiple Western wildlife and biodiversity-related TV channels wowing audiences across the country – especially in the big cities and townships.
It started with Discovery Channel. Then the offerings moved on to NatGeo Wild, Animal Planet, BBC Earth, and a few others. Discovery Channel and Animal Planet are owned by US-headquartered Warner Bros. Discovery. NatGeo Wild is owned jointly by National Geographic Society and Walt Disney Company, both American mass media giants.
Add to all that the easy availability and popularity in Indian schools, colleges, homes, libraries, and bookstores of monthly editions of the popular National Geographic magazine, and it becomes self-evident precisely how influential foreign – especially Western – networks are in shaping Indians’ understanding of wild animals.
Also, back in 2010, Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio famously paired up with India’s environment ministry with the aim of using his image to help “save” India’s tiger population.
Well, it’s always open to debate as to whether external forces knowingly gaslight urban Indians, leading comfortable lifestyles in concrete jungles, into believing that big-cat lives are more precious than rural villagers’ lives. But if you closely study the Anglo-American West’s perpetual obsession with India’s wildlife, it’s highly probable that this dystopian perception is a Western import.
Are we Indians culturally and mentally too colonised to think on our own feet? How much persuasion will it take for animal rights activists in the big cities to realise that rural human lives are not expendable?
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