The silenced roar

For a country said to be afflicted by anniversaryitis, India should have been readying for Sariska’s special year. Twenty-five years ago this majestic patch of the Aravallis was declared a tiger reserve and enrolled in a grand venture to rescue the big cat from what for a moment appeared certain extinction. With its comparative advantages of proximity to Delhi and Jaipur and its palatial architecture, it has over the years maximised the hunt for a glimpse of the striped mammal. Today that hunt has acquired a chilling urgency. This year not one tiger has been sighted. The Rajasthan government has in response constituted a task force. But for India, Sariska must ring the alarm bells on a project that could be going swiftly wrong.

For a variety of possible reasons, in reserves across India, the tiger count is suddenly on the decline. Ranthambore is reporting up to 18 missing tigers this year. In Dudhwa in UP, in Indravati in Chhattisgarh, in Corbett in Uttaranchal, in so many other parks, the pug marks are fading. Problems of poaching, shrinking habitats, recurrent droughts, depleting prey bases, and maladministered inbreeding threaten to reverse the successes of Project Tiger. There is a tendency to separate issues related to endangered species as problems of animal rights. This is wrong and dangerous. Ecological reversals are intimations of holistic imbalances. Depleting flora or fauna can be warnings of severe crises awaiting entire societies. As Jared Diamond so provocatively declared in his new book Collapse, societies can choose whether they fail or survive. They make this choice based on how they react to ecological crises. Inhabitants of the Pacific’s Easter Island must have thought they were making place for growing population as they kept levelling forests, little realising that in the process deforestation would wipe out all of them. Similarly, the tiger’s retreat must alert us to underlying environmental dangers.

In rehabilitating the tiger — from poachers and from faulty administration — we would protect its habitat as well as the food chain that sustains ecological balance. It is not only about the tiger. It is about all of us.