Since 2019, according to wildlife experts 200 elephants have been put in trucks with feet shackled by heavy chains and transported to Ambani’s new wildlife resort.It appears to be quite a wild venture as these poor beasts are kept confined to an enclosure and maintained under a strict routine.Some of them must be newly captured and given a short training in domesticated life.
Reportedly these enormous creatures used to feed daily on huge wild bamboos,plantain trees and even massive forest trees as well as reed-like tall elephant grass.For exercise they would be compelled to walk together for a fixed time every day.Their lives are not bound to the natural community of herds but to an artificial social environment. Mahouts would take them down to nearby rivers and wash in flowing water where they would often be allowed to play and cavort with delight.Then kept with legs wrapped in heavy chains but in semi-wild environments which used to be pretty common until recently even in towns but now found in outskirts near frontiers.This is what I have gathered from someone who has been involved in protection of wild life
In BANTARA,(Star of the forest?),the Ambani resort would feed them on Khichri,Chapatis and Laddoos,pure Hindu vegetarian food, kept in a confined environment and under a totally alien environment like circus elephants.
The Ambani park has reportedly plans to bring as many as 1000 elephants from Assam,Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura,which together used to be the territory where from time immemorial herds of wild elephants used to move in herds on accustomed migration routes through dense forests round the year.
Now systematic heavy felling of trees for mining,exploration and oil drilling and four-lane/six-lane roads until access to Myanmar and Southeast Asia is reached, are depleting forests.
The results have been scary.As forests are emptied there would be scores of landless squatters who follow to set up ramshackle huts and try to bring the land under the plough.
Loss of forest cover force herds of elephants into villages and even towns,gobble up green or ripe crops,lay waste acres of cropland and orchards.Predictably in the process they also kill people.Imagine the horrors of such deaths.The elephants are in such rage that they throw into the air or trample to death and grievously injure even inoffensive people who meant no harm.For a few months every year dozens fall victims to such ghastly deaths.
I have learnt from a recent newsreport here that the new location of the elephants bears a signboard saying it is an animal ‘rescue and rehabilitation centre’.
Apart from elephants there are also dozens of wild animals transported from Northeastern states on the basis of the claim on the signboard.
If ‘rescue and rehabilitation’ had been the sole objective of this mammoth project the logic behind trucking the hapless but rather intelligent and sensitive animals over a distance of three thousand kilometres was surely odd.It could have been done much better at the point of origin.For these elephants are used to a tropical climate with heavy rains and dense forests,and not to that of a state in Northwestern India.
The signboard might not mention certain other darker aims.
in the recent past a solar power company called ‘Azure’ belonging to the Adani group had been granted possession of several thousand hectares of land on the edge of the Mikir hills that had supported many small peasants for ages.The area used to be visited by wild elephants in certain seasons of the year,and they were unused to the strange-looking installations of the infrastructure of the company.
Their reaction was predictable. Disturbed by these intrusions the elephants trampled them into fragments several times.Like the small farmers who were evicted by the state government on the ground that they were not in possession of documents of ownership,the elephants too nursed a grievance.It is to be noted that they were not ‘illegal migrants’ but genuine ‘sons of the soil’
Then one morning fifty-seven elephants including baby elephants and the lone tusker who used to follow the herd around were found dead on the hillside facing the village and lying close together.Locals and wild life experts suspected foul play and believed they had been trapped and electrocuted by high voltage electric traps set up the night before.The forest department of the state on the other hand stoutly maintained that they had been struck down by an extremely powerful thunderbolt.Popular outcry about this method of eliminating obstacles to ‘Vikash’ might have dismayed corporate investors,and it is possible that this ‘benign and humane method’ of rescue and rehabilitation has been designed to avoid public clamour against irresistible ‘vikash’.
Huge swathes of forests have been mowed down destroying elephant habitat and making them homeless in this region in recent years by corporate fortune-hunters and the train of scavengers like financiers of rat-hole mines,leaving the once lush green area a ghastly smoky and dismal wasteland. Electrocuting the homeless elephans in the face of huge public outrage would be risky.Hence perhaps the resort to this less unpopular and modernized method of charity and animal welfare.
Of course even their fabulous wealth may not be able to cope with the numberless wild animals suddenly left homeless and deprived of sustenance.The only way left for leopards was to sneak into villages and prey on domestic animals and for elephants to raid cropland and granaries.The uncomprehending people try to chase them away and face the raiders’ blind rage resulting in fatalities.The press in search of headlines calls it ‘man animal conflict’,and it is picked up by social media and politicians.
Actually it is a clear case of corporate-nature and corporate-indigene conflict.The Prime Minister in his ‘man ki baat’ has praised Sri Pradeep Bhuyan,an Assamese philanthropist for finding a solution to this ‘conflict’.His method was to sneak and persuade peasants on the border to grow rice in 200 bighas of land and allow wild elephants to feast on.Reports say the method had been strikingly successful and the elephants have become friendly.With due deference to Sri Bhuyan’s noble venture it must be said that there is not so much land to spare in thickly populated areas.
And it is not known how the story pans out in the end.Maintaining such a hugely expensive project without any return on costs seems unlikely in the long run considering the general trend of corporate charity in India today.
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
