Follow every pug mark

Document well, good citizens, we may be the last generation to see the tiger roaming wild

The present ruling dispensation in distant, imperial Delhi claims to derive its lineage from Indira Gandhi. Whatever good or bad impartial historians may say about her performance while in power, no one will deny the fact that she had a passionate feeling for the soil and the stubble of this land of ours and had a great love affair with the hapless denizens of our forests. She will definitely be remembered as the leader of free India who banned shikar and who tried her best to preserve the environment. The present government need have no fears that it will be remembered along these lines. Sanskrit texts refer to India as “the land where the blackbucks roam”. Raja Dushyant found his son Bharat (after whom this unhappy land is named) riding on a glorious tiger. Never mind. Our government of the day is determined to go down as the one that stood and idly watched as tigers and blackbucks disappeared from India. Informed historians of the future will crucify our whole generation for this if nothing else.

Faced with the inexorable march towards the tiger’s extinction, our great government will appoint a high-powered committee to study the reports of a dozen earlier committees and recommend the appointment of yet another committee. Everyone knows, except the Government of India and its committees, that the tiger is being systematically killed in order to supply bones and organs to newly affluent Chinese consumers who believe that body parts of wild tigers (as distinct from the body parts of tigers bred in captivity) have unique medicinal properties. Any employee of the Indian consulate in Hong Kong can buy tiger bones and tiger nails quite freely. Dozens of photographers have given us graphic evidence that many residents of Lhasa are openly and proudly displaying tiger skins as part of their new designer garments.

The present ‘omrah’ (for the interested reader, the collective name for the courtiers who surrounded the sultans of medieval Delhi) seem to be the only people blissfully unaware of the ‘market’ for murdered tigers. Our prime minister and the UPA president have visited China in recent times. They can leverage the friendships they have built with Chinese leaders to intervene on behalf of the unfortunate tiger. Will they? Surely whatever their other predilections, the Chinese leadership cannot be serious supporters of the racket that passes for ‘trade’ in the limbs of the tiger. And in the year of the Beijing Olympics, they are seriously concerned about international opprobrium in matters like these. Our silence will ironically let them off the hook.

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If you have visited any of our forests recently, you might, if you are lucky, bump into a forest guard. As part of budgetary austerities, state governments have stopped recruiting forest guards for many years now. The idea seems to be that as the existing ones retire, the species of forest guards can go extinct simultaneously with the tiger that they are supposed to protect. If you do happen to meet a forest guard, he is likely to be wearing torn chappals as the budget for shoes has not been approved, and he is likely to be carrying an antique rifle that became obsolete many decades ago.

The poachers have no budgetary constraints of a similar nature. They have SUVs, night-vision goggles, AK-47s and cell phones. Millions of poor Indians find the budgetary space to buy cell phones with prepaid cards, but our bloated environment ministries are loath to provide forest guards with the same. We have budgets for imported bullet-proof Mercedes cars for our VVIPs; we have budgets for hundreds of safari-suit-clad security personnel for our leaders; we have budgets for changing the names of cities as a substitute for improving them; we have budgets for bloated meaningless committees where we can park our inconvenient cronies; we have budgets for florid press advertisements from various comic ministries lying blissfully as they make claims to non-existent achievements. We have created a BSF, an RPF, a CRPF, an ITBF and a CISF — but when it comes to creating a Forest Protection Force, suddenly our fiscal constraints surface.

Why can we not have a vigorous group of security guards for our wildlife? Why can they not be equipped with GPS devices (why bother being a pretend IT superpower if we cannot do this), with goggles that can help pick out poachers in the dark (you can buy them in any department store in the US), with telescopic rifles of the automatic or semi-automatic variety (you can order them cheap from the bazaar in Peshawar), with sturdy shoes to trudge in the forest (ordinary tourists seem to be able to afford these), with vehicles that can move fast along jungle tracks (we do have a world class automobile industry, don’t we), with mobile telephony that can help them access each other (we have the fastest growing mobile telephone industry in the world — but I guess we choose not to leverage it)?

The mandarins of Delhi will tell you that they cannot do all these because forests are, constitutionally speaking, a ‘state subject’. This is the ultimate irrelevant red herring. If the Centre can use the power to give or withhold grants to states under its Urban Renewal Mission, why not have a similar forest protection mission and provide incentives to state governments to upgrade their forces of forest guards? Of course, where there is no will to act, it is best to appoint another committee.

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I have a suggestion for the readers of this newspaper. Please keep detailed daily, weekly, monthly diaries. Archivists and historians of the future will find these records of the citizens of India of 2008 useful. After all this was the year when we all watched and acquiesced in the extinction of our national animal. Our grandchildren can watch the tiger only on Discovery and National Geographic channels. That must suffice for them.

The writer is student and observer of contemporary India

jerry.rao@expressindia.com