The death knell has been sounded, and there
remains no doubt that the Indian tiger - that
awesome and most beautiful of all cats - is
now leaving its last few pugmarks on the short
road to extinction. There is a sense of
helplessness and desperation in all wildlife
lovers about the inevitability of the tiger's
extinction, fuelled not by the ever-decreasing
number of tigers, but by the seeming lack of
concern in this area.
Year after year, optimistic tiger census
figures, generated by dubious means, are
flaunted at us. If these are to be believed,
we have a steady tiger population in the
country, one that is not showing a downtrend
but actually increasing. On the other hand,
the various national and international NGOs,
vociferously engaged in a last-ditch battle to
save the tiger, are giving it no more than ten
years of life in the wilds of India. Their
contention is based on the rapidly growing
incidence of tiger poaching in and around the
various national parks in the country, which
is also indicated by seizures of tiger skins
and parts all over the country.
The recent spurt in tiger deaths near Corbett
& Dudhwa Tiger Reserves have all been
attributed to poisoning by villagers who,
angry at losing livestock to the great
predator, resort to lacing the carcass of the
cow or buffalo killed by the tiger with
massive doses of pesticide. But does
this vile, and purely human instinct for
revenge, in any way dilute the ghastly fact
that the tigers have been poached? The loss
that the entire nation suffers when a tiger is
killed is surely far greater than the loss of
a cow or buffalo of a poor villager. Whereas
giving money to the villager can compensate
for cattle killed by the feline, can even one
dead tiger be replaced? This 'angry villager'
syndrome that we seem to be getting trapped
in, will be a welcome smoke-screen for the
poacher-trader nexus which is thriving
brazenly on tiger bones and parts.
It is quite understandable that a free ranging
cat like the tiger is bound to come in
conflict with humans living in the vicinity of
its shrinking habitat, and constantly making
inroads or trespassing in core areas. It is
also reasonable to give concessions to the
people for whom saving the tiger and its
habitat is just a government job, and a tough
one too. But it is not logical for people who
commit lapses in their job, to evade
responsibility by hiding behind thin
veils.
There was one incident in Dudhwa last year,
where the killing of a sub-adult tiger, whose
body was found in early stages of
decomposition, was explained away by the
authorities as death due to intra-specific
fight. Billy Arjan Singh cried himself hoarse
in meetings and in the newspapers, that it is
the rarest of incidents when a tiger will kill
another of its kind, but to no avail. To prove
his contention that this tiger had been
poached by humans, one activist of the Tiger
Haven Wildlife Trust came up with a photograph
that showed a homespun rope made out of moonjh
grass, knotted around the foreleg of that
tiger carcass. "The big tiger killed this
small one, then tied the rope and wanted to
drag him away", was the wry comment of
this activist, who absolutely discarded the
'intra-specific fight' theory.
Earlier, there had been more bizzare
explanations, when a spurt of killings saw
four tiger carcasses floating in the
waterbodies in and around Dudhwa. These were
attributed to drowning death by suicide,
committed by the tigers following rapid
increase in their population. It was hard to
visualize Indian tigers behaving like lemmings
and jumping into the water to commit suicide,
when even a layman could understand that a
poisoned tiger, whose trachea is choking in
spasms, will rush madly towards water in its
death throes, as those poor tigers did.
The need of the hour is honesty. On all sides.
This virtue, which most of us today don't
consider worth passing on to our children, is
what the tiger desperately needs, if at all it
is to be saved. The forest officials, on their
part, must come forward and admit tiger deaths
that are caused due to poaching, rather than
trying to evade responsibility by evolving
ridiculous explanations for them.
Once a tiger death due to poaching is
accepted, and the acceptance is backed up by
the firm commitment to overcome the lapse, it
would become that much easier to go all out in
evolving and implementing effective
damage-control measures. Otherwise, the forest
department's folly will always be evident to
others, even though ostrich-like, it may have
hidden its head under some convenient, but
unlikely, explanation.
On the other hand, there is the growing
tendency of non-official conservationists to
lay the entire blame on the forest department
officials without taking cognizance of their
limitations in terms of staff, equipment and
commitment. That is the basic reason why these
two protagonists, playing out the drama of the
tiger's extinction, are constantly at
loggerheads. And so, while they keep their
horns locked in adversarial contest, vital
time is going waste, and nothing concrete is
being done. Forest criminals and tiger
poachers are having a field day. Trees are
being felled to fuel illegal activities of the
timber mafia, while tigers are being regularly
killed for their skins and bones, which pass
through greased palms, and find their way into
countries like China, to be sold for
astonishing sums in the black market.
The saddest part of this tragic drama is that
the focus of the tiger killers has now shifted
to Corbett National Park, which was till now
considered the best managed tiger reserve, and
enjoyed a certain level of immunity from the
poacher -- more because of its geographic
layout than any human efficiency. But having
drastically depleted the tiger population of
Dudhwa & Ranthambore, the poachers have now
turned towards the relatively healthier tiger
population of Corbett Park.
Recent reports in the media have placed the
tiger deaths in Corbett at around five in less
than a month, even as meetings were being held
at the highest levels to mark the Year of the
Tiger, and the 'experts' were
congratulating themselves on the formation of
some committee or the other to save the tiger.
In one fell stroke, the tiger killers had
brought to naught all that these committees
stand for, and shattered the mythical
impregnability of Corbett Tiger Reserve. This,
more than anything else, sounds like the death
knell.
Much has already been written and said about
the inevitability of the tiger's extinction
from India, but it still doesn't seem enough
to jerk us out of apathy. The recent tiger
killings in Corbett, and a glance at hard
statistics indicating both optimistic and
pessimistic world population estimates, will
surely make the reader understand that ten, or
even a lesser number of years, are all that
remain for the Indian tiger in the wild. The
experts don't deny that most tiger census
figures are educated guesses, and so it is for
the reader to strike that delicate balance
between the optimistic and pessimistic
estimates of the tiger population.
But whichever way we look at it, if the
present downtrend is not arrested, the tiger
will fade away into oblivion, and we would be
left handling nothing but statistics of what
is probably the greatest Indian heritage.
