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Journalism of Courage
Could a tiger ‘sighted’ a few kilometres from the Line of Control in Jammu’s Rajouri be the big cat that set out in a northwest direction from Uttarakhand’s Rajaji Tiger Reserve, travelling more than 500 km, over two years?
We may never know because the ‘sighting’ by the Army’s Road Opening Party (ROP) close to the Rajouri-Poonch highway on the slopes of Pir Panjal mountains at a height of 6,000 feet has landed the Jammu and Kashmir forest department and the Army on opposite sides.
While the Army ROP has clicked a photograph of the tiger, the forest department has concluded that the image appeared to be “photoshopped” as no sign of tiger presence has been found in the area despite repeated ground surveys over six months.
The Army PRO in Jammu declined to either confirm or deny the tiger sighting. Sources in its Udhampur base said the local forest department ruffled feathers by asking the ROP for the mobile device used to take the tiger photo in order to verify its authenticity. The request was ignored, closing the communication channel.
What makes the ‘tiger sighting’ particularly intriguing is the missing coordinates of a young male tiger that ventured out of Uttarakhand’s Rajaji Tiger Reserve in November 2022.
By August 2023, the tiger had negotiated farmland, highways and rivers to reach Renuka Wildlife Sanctuary in Sirmour district of Himachal Pradesh, after making a brief stop at Haryana’s Kalesar National Park. It has not been traced since.
Asked if the tiger ‘sighted’ on the Bhimber Gali (BG)-Surankot road connecting Rajouri and Poonch could be the Rajaji tiger that went off the radar last August, Dr Bivash Pandav of Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India said “it is very much possible.”
Tigers have been found at altitudes much higher than Jammu’s. In 2012, one was camera-trapped at 13,800 ft in Bhutan’s Jigme Dorji National Park. In Uttarakhand, tigers were recorded at 12,000 ft in Askot Wildlife Sanctuary in 2016 and at 11,256 ft in Kedarnath Musk Deer sanctuary in 2019. For the Rajaji tiger, if it did actually find its way up to Rajouri, the real challenge would have been the tenuous forest connectivity between Uttarakhand and Jammu.
“The Shivalik forests are connected until Ropar (Himachal Pradesh) which is not far from the southern tip of the Pir Panjal range. It is very much possible that the Rajaji tiger used the functional connectivity to reach the Jammu region. But its long-term prospect there is uncertain,” said Dr Pandav, who has studied tigers of Rajaji TR since 2003.
Former head of Project Tiger Dr Rajesh Gopal said he would not “bet against a tiger finding its way through mixed land use” areas. “Dispersing male tigers are known to walk long distances against all odds. In the past, such sightings were also reported from the hills of Himachal but could not be confirmed due to the transient nature of the animals,” he explained.
Dr Dharmendra Khandal, who has studied tiger dispersal from Rajasthan’s Ranthambore tiger reserve over two decades, explained that a cat dispersing over hundreds of kilometres may not stay put at one location for too long to be tracked easily.
“If a tiger has walked over 500 km, it is looking for a suitable forest to settle down. Typically, such a tiger is unlikely to hang around in one forest patch for too long. Probably that is why it was not spotted again in the area where it was photographed,” he said.
There was a delay of two weeks between the ‘tiger sighting’ on July 5 and the first spot inspection by the local forest staff on July 18. Asked if camera traps were installed in the area, Amit Sharma, wildlife warden, Rajouri-Poonch division, said that the field staff did not find any tiger signs — such as pug marks and scat — and local grazers did not report any loss of livestock either.
“Surprisingly, only one photo was taken even though the tiger was seen relaxing. The photo appears photoshopped, otherwise the presence of such a large carnivore cannot go undetected for six months. Nobody responded to our request for access to the handset used to take the photo. I will now seek permission to close the case,” he said.
J&K Chief Wildlife Warden Sarvesh Rai and National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) member-secretary G S Bhardwaj confirmed Sharma’s conclusions.
Explaining the Army’s reluctance to engage, a senior officer in Udhampur said, “A soldier’s mobile is not up for scrutiny for volunteering information. Every agency has its mandate and a Road Opening Party is not supposed to stop and film tigers. It’s preposterous to suggest that one of us doctored a photo but we don’t want any controversy and have closed the chapter.”
While Himachal’s Sirmaur and Haryana’s Kalesar forests had a sizeable tiger population until the late 1800s, Jammu was never part of India’s tiger map. In the 1990s, however, there were contested reports of two tiger sightings from Rajouri’s Dera Gali and Kathua’s Billawar areas.
Explaining that these could be tigers dispersing from lower areas, Dr Gopal said that tiger reserves, like Rajaji, are the source from where surplus tigers fan out looking to populate ‘sink’ (vacant) areas.
“In this source-and-sink model, it is natural to lose some dispersing tigers. The idea is to develop important areas as viable tiger habitats. Jammu is a little far out but a proposal to declare the forests in Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh), Kalesar (Haryana) and Simbalbara (Himachal Pradesh) as an inter-state tiger reserve has been pending since the early 2000s,” he said.
