Opinion Reversing history

In India,the open scrub grassland habitat of the cheetah has historically overlapped with the lion’s range,and significantly,the reasons why the cheetah should not be brought back are the same which have dismantled lion conservation in the country. A proposal to move a handful of lions from Gujarat to Madhya Pradesh — a sort of insurance policy against the threat of epidemic in Gujarat — has been gathering dust since 2004 even as a Supreme Court case rages; Gujarat,the state to have the last wild population of Asiatic lions in the world,has a mantle it does not want to share. But it’s also symptomatic of the larger illness that plagues all wildlife conservation in the country: the fact that despite having several national parks,no protected area is actually “national”.

While the Centre provides crores of rupees in funds,unlike in other schemes,it cannot point out where states are going wrong. And just the past four years have shown us that many states are stuck in a time warp where symbols continue to be larger than animal protection itself. Madhya Pradesh,which calls itself the “tiger state”,lost its last tiger in Panna this year. At a national conference this year kicked off in New Delhi by the prime minister,Gujarat officials insisted the lion was their (exclusive) “pride”. In MP,where Panna’s tigers were lost to poaching,in some instances in connivance with locals,an astounding 5,500 villages are within two kilometers of protected areas. Unsurprisingly,amidst elaborate welfare and human relocation exercises,the state turned a deaf ear to calls from the Centre that its tigers — above 35,between 2002 and 2009 in Panna — were being poached. And the existing structure,with the actual animal,protected or not,being to its last claw a property of the state (unlike,say,the US,where national parks have some federal control) meant

the Centre can do little but write letters.

And our present Central and state-level conservation policies also show us that we have no tolerance for stray animals: in the past one year,straying tigers,leopards and elephants from forests in Uttarakhand,Uttar Pradesh or West Bengal have been shot or locked in zoos,the most famous being the Lucknow man-eating tiger which,after being allowed to range over UP for six months,was shot in February this year. This is because Project Tiger,Project Elephant,Project Snow Leopard make no concessions for strays; we expect our animals,like us,to follow the neat lines of our power point presentations. The moment the animal crosses the lines of the protected area or state borders,its survival is dependent on the whims of local officers.

Bringing the cheetah back to India will mean us taking a hard look at our conservation policies,which repeatedly seem to believe that a) animals should never,ever go extinct and b) they should always stay in protected areas,and definitely not over-run state borders. Another argument goes that we should save our tigers before we fantasise of bringing in any other good-looking big cat. (In the past 300 years,800 species of plants and animals are believed to be extinct and can no longer be found in the wild. Apart from the cheetah,the Himalayan quail,the pink-headed duck,and the two-horned rhino are no longer recorded,but clearly it’s the lure of a top predator which has excited machineries into action.) The pro-cheetah argument believes that bringing back the cheetah will help protect its rolling grassland habitat,establishing precisely that conservation in India should not be about tigers. But this is an issue which has actually nothing to do with the browbeaten tiger,unwittingly the touchstone of Indian conservation. Bringing the cheetah back will be reversing the hunting ills the country once had. Cheetahs were shot easily with modern rifles,the last one being shot in Chhattisgarh in 1968. The identified cheetahs to be brought here are from Namibia,with about 5,000 years of separation from the Asiatic cheetah,now only found in Iran. Bringing them here will be changing history,being India’s first decisive,and definitely romantic step,towards bringing back an extinct animal. It will be a paradigm shift.

But the shift cannot and should not be made unless we take this opportunity to mark a similar paradigm shift in our conservation policies. In this case,human money can’t help the animals. Only that feted human quality: intelligence and adaptation,in creating radical new policies,can.

neha.sinha@expressindia.com