Tiger, tiger, fading fast In the scrub, your day is past What disgraceful Plan or Rule Made Conservation an elite tool?
with apologies to William Blake
There is a story going the environmental rounds in Andhra Pradesh that the Forest Department has more conservators than there are tigers in the State, and this despite the Sri Sailam reserve being the largest of the Project Tiger sites in India. A recent tiger census came to nothing; one believes not a single animal was sighted and the few pugmarks found added to the confusion over numbers.
The three-decade old project, with India having primary responsibility for saving the tiger, was inaugurated with much fanfare by the international conservation crowd led by the World Wildlife Fund. Interest in tigers goes back to the time when rajahs and captains couldn’t look one another in the eye unless they had killed a number of these beasts in sport. Mogul miniatures attest this fact. John Nicholson of 1857 fame is known to have sabred tigers from horseback. Jim Corbett after whom our most famous wildlife sanctuary is named became immortal thanks to the man-eaters of Kumaon. ‘Vizzy,’ India’s favourite cricket commentator during the great days of Vinoo Mankad and Vijay Hazare, himself shot over a dozen tigers in as many days in what became Kanha Park, all the while drinking ganga-jal transported from Varanasi. But he nowhere figures in the top tiger terminators of his time. The Maharajah of Bikaner is said to have shot over 3,000, while the old Maharaja of Sarguja (now in Jharkand) could kill no more than 1,800, though he festooned forest trees with tiger-signaling telephones and ranged rifles like golf clubs in his hunting jeep. Parkinson’s disease disabled his left hand for teacups but not for rifle barrels! In fact, killing a tiger was a rite of passage for the ruling classes – from Lord Willingdon, who disturbed his entourage’s sleep by dragging along a roaring tiger in the last bogie of his train for the morning’s shikar, to the District Collector or Forest Conservator, who would tell tall stories of the ‘kill’ while patting the glassy-eyed stuffed head of the 12-footer which had almost ended the sahib’s career. Even the great royal patrons of the WWF, Prince Philip of England and Prince Bernhardt of Holland, were known as avid shikaris, till they saw their hunting grounds vanishing.
The feudal aristocracy of Europe knew how to preserve game, and hang hungry poachers who would eat what they massacred at pleasure. The notorious Brandeis Commission of the mid-nineteenth century brought a European prescription for the control of Indian forests, and by an act of expropriation, which far outdid the depredations of Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse, made the government owner of all forest land. Even the British commissioners of Madras found this too much for their conscience to swallow, and so the government obligingly waited till they had all retired before giving effect to the Forest Act. Not that Indian kings in olden days did not have hunting rights in parts of the forests; but villagers also had their rights, as did animals in areas designated as ‘ elephant forests.’ This was customary division of forest areas, as attested by the Arthasastra, whose author, Kautilya, was not known to give away any rights unless forced to.
The greatest impact of ‘scientific forestry,’ which disinherited all tribal communities, and made them interlopers in their own homeland living under sufferance, was first to destroy the teak forests of the Malabar to feed the Royal Navy, and later wherever axe could reach to help build railway lines and maintain the huge armies of the Empire during the World Wars. The great Indian forests have shrunk to a fifth of their original size, fast losing their capacity to support animal life or tribal communities. Even after Independence, great swathes of Central Indian forest were clear felled to accommodate refuge populations, despite the demurral of famous conservators like Kamta Prasad Sagariya.
The great Munda and Santhal rebellions during British days, among countless others, were followed after Independence by the Gond upsurge in Madhya Pradesh. All were suppressed with the ruthlessness of conquest, leading to unquenched discontent among suppressed peoples, later igniting into the naxalite movement across the country. Murder, extortion, rapine, and constant humiliation suffered by tribals to this day make forest areas a veritable war zone, and hence incapable of being protected.
The elite international environmental NGOs and bodies, whose Third World branches glitter with the leaders of the social register, can have little patience with the plight of the tribals, whom in their own circles they consider as the rascals responsible for poaching. As old growth forest loses out to scrub land, fewer the animals that appear, and more the armed guards that are emplaced to guard emptying reserves. Miserable poverty and governmental oppression of tribal communities are the two best ways for ensuring destruction of forests and the killing of wildlife. Great scarcity drives people to make inroads on their own natural resources, and oppression surely leads to disaffection and tacit connivance with poachers. Anyone who has lived in jungle areas, or talked on friendly terms with tribals, knows that they are quite aware of the benefits of bio-diversity; they know that carnivores maintain a symbiotic relationship with herbivores; and that every tiger signifies at least 25 square kilometers of healthy forest, stocked with plant and animal life.
Slowly the feeling has sunk in that a holistic approach is needed; hence the World Wildlife Fund being re-named laboriously as the World-Wide Fund for Nature. But for elite givers their concern is still signified by the cuddly panda, whose bamboo forests have been much destroyed by slash and burn cultivation. But there is a lesson here that none has learned. The tribals at fault are supposed to have migrated from their traditional eastern Tibetan homelands a couple of centuries ago. Attracted by the vast profits the British were making in the early half of the nineteenth century by pushing opium on the hapless Chinese, they grew opium themselves to corner part of the lucrative market. When the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong came to power in 1949 all opium trade was banned. Even as the drug barons left Hong Kong for greener pastures in the West, the tribals took to slash and burn agriculture. Clearly, the difficult answer here is introduction of sustainable agricultural methods suited to the region, rather than offering a few jobs as tour guides or teashop owners. But to do so, one must know something about agriculture.
We in India are very much better placed. The agricultural practices of tribal communities are by and large eco-friendly, despite concerted attempts by ICAR staff to wean them away to mono cropping, and the use of pesticides and hybrids. If many practice podu or slash-and-burn cultivation, this perfectly sensible technique became dysfunctional only after the forest cover shrank alarming under the inroads made by greedy contractors, and corrupt or negligent officials. What tribals need is technical and financial support for sustainable mixed farming practices integrated into the forest eco-system. They need supportive capacity building for social development, and environmental stewardship. Perhaps, the Joint Forestry Management programmes funded by the World Bank are helping forest officials, NGOs, and tribals take small steps towards each other in new support. Perhaps, small experiments as conducted at Mudumalai park, where 40 families have been provided houses, land, and help towards organic farming, could help local people live by and protect the park. What they do not need is further policing, or exclusions from their homelands.
At last, the penny is beginning to drop in high places, mostly because of the potential multi-billion dollar business that could be generated out of medicinal plants in forest areas. Successful extraction of active principles for the pharmaceutical industry may require first-level processing to be carried out in forest villages. The bio-diversity of our forests shelter several living gold mines, and we need to partner tribal communities if we wish to get at them. They can no longer be excluded from their homelands. In fact, neither the forests nor the bio-diversity of the country can be saved without tribal communities taking leadership in protecting their own environment. Last year, the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister announced a business plan to develop medicinal plans, backed up by a Bio-Diversity Board advised by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan. Mr. Digvijay Singh said he planned to use the services of 20,000 forest village communities in promoting conservation: “We want people’s participation in forest conservation. Towards this end the state government intends to organise a chief ministers’ conference on forest conservation shortly,” and added, “the forests could provide necessary raw materials for promoting various agro-industries…” (The Economic Times, May 11, 2001)
Even the ponderous IUCN has at long last produced a paper on The Common Ground shared by agriculturists and conservationists; communities and wildlife. No longer is it dogma to exclude people from Edens where the white elite can play God. But the conservationists’ pervasive propaganda has soaked in, turning privilege into public welfare, prejudice into science. The Indian Board of Wildlife continues to advocate that tribals should have access to minor forest produce only “in the forest outside of national parks and sanctuaries." The Supreme Court, perhaps stung to protective activism by such advice, has ruled that no-one may make a living out of minor forest produce from a national park area, not even by picking up fallen leaves. Now, for example, no tribal woman may any more collect even a beedi leaf from the Kinneresanni protected area in Khammam district. Harsh Sethi, writing in The Hindu on New Year’s eve warned that when bio-conservation parks came up: “ Locals now complain that they now suffer from two kinds of terrorism - development and environment, both seen as destroyers of livelihoods.” And what should they do? File a writ praying that an enlarged Bench may review the ruling in view of latest facts, and their vanishing livelihood, meagre as it is? But no one in this land of wall-to-wall litigation has ever advised tribals about their constitutional rights. So, what should they do? What Birsa Munda did long ago when he fought the British; or what some of their boys do today in the forests of Andhra Pradesh?
Several great imperialists have done their best and worst, and departed – the Maharajahs, the Moguls, the British, the Nehruites – the land has borne all, the people even more. The time may now be not to think of great deeds, of leaving our imprint on one and all. But to let the humble and the dispossessed have their time and space. By trusting the simple, we may win through to a better understanding of who we are, our land, and all the life we share it with. Time to heed Ashish Kothari, one of India’s best known environmentalists: “Wildlife conservation and social justice both require us to move towards a model in which local people are central partners in managing and benefiting from conservation.” (The Hindu Feb 5, 2002) Then, this land may come to beautiful life, in a way no imperialist could have dreamt of; and we may still see a scene far more wonderful than a Mowgli living in peace with Baloo the bear, and Sher Khan the tiger.
Dr. Vithal Rajan
Former Director, Ethics & Education
World-Wide Fund for Nature-International
