Cover Story: Savage Harvest

Earlier shikaris had a code, now it's a free-for-all, like this in Punjab

The defence forces are culpable too. When she was prime minister, Indira Gandhi, the political force behind the Wildlife Act, had even convinced the three defence chiefs to issue a statement declaring that anyone from the forces caught hunting would be court martialled. The reason: everyone knew the defence forces loved hunting. Says a wildlife expert: "You have to understand the psyche. Here are a bunch of men at far-flung posts with guns in their hands and nothing to do. Hunting suddenly becomes as glorious as war." The North-east is ridden with such examples. In fact, one such officer told India Today how his non-commissioned officer would turn up every week saying the men wanted meat. "I would shoot animals, then make the men pick up the empty shells so I could file a report of exchanging fire with a group of insurgents."

PRICES...

Any animal is available: for a price
Wild Boar (full): Up to Rs 10,000
Sloth bear pelt: Rs 5,000
Chinkara: Rs 1,000-5,000
Partridges: Rs 25-50
Quail: Rs 10-100

....PALATES

Hunting's gourmet tradition

Khad Khargosh: Full rabbit (Rs 250), skinned, lapped with masala, with ghee in its stomach. Packed in leaves and smoked.

Wild Boar Pickle: A great draw across the North-west, even Maharashtra. The skin, saanth (Rs 250-300 a kg), is a delicacy because of its fat.

Sambhar Paya: Made with bone marrow and masala, hunters treasure this exotic soup (the meat costs Rs 150-200 a kg). The meat itself is often roasted.

But what makes this new breed take to hunting? One reason is that hunting in India has always been a way of life -- an ethos, even (more so today) a status symbol. In the good old days, when hunting was the prerogative of the nobility, a maharaja's worthiness could be determined by the number of tiger skins he had collected -- a booty of 100 tigers was a fair benchmark. Indeed, the number of kills, in a sense, was a measure of their masculinity. It is no coincidence that Salman Khan, so macho that he can't keep his shirt on in his films, was caught hunting black bucks -- shooting them down and then slitting their throats. Similarly, the other filmstar who has a history of hunting offences also happens to be the muscle-flexing son of a former MP. This machismo is addictive. In Rajasthan, for instance, Rajput boys eagerly prowl the desert sands for game, young studs in their open jeeps with the scent of a kill in their nostrils.

Besides this strange mix of status and machismo, the other reason for hunting today is meat. In the capital, the staff of certain embassies hold regular barbecues of delicacy meats in their swish south Delhi bungalows. Most of the venison (blue bull, cheetal or hog deer) and wild boar is available in Nagaland markets. Similarly, in Chandigarh the upper-end social circuit exchanges wild meat pickle as gifts. In western Uttar Pradesh, a Central minister during Chandra Shekhar's administration was caught red-handed serving cheetal meat at a New Year's party. To date, wildlife officials point out, family members living in his farm just on the periphery of Rajaji National Park go on regular shooting orgies. In Uttar Pradesh, rich farmers along the Sathiana belt near Dudhwa National Park are known to feast on swamp deer. In the '70s, wildlife figures put the population of swamp deer in the area at 1,600. Today, no more than 50 survive. Similarly, in the Karera Wildlife Sanctuary of Madhya Pradesh, hunters have wiped out more than 3,000 black bucks, pushing down their population to 500.

Such large-scale hunting can only be done if forest guards are looking the other way. Problem is, these rich, influential hunters can easily wave off the forest staff, most of the time even ensuring their covert help in the hunts. Sometimes, the forest officials themselves develop itchy trigger fingers. In Arunachal Pradesh's East Kameng district, a forest ranger along with his contractor friends shot a hog deer from atop an elephant right inside the Pakhui Wildlife Sanctuary.

Trouble is the underpaid and overworked forest guards in this country are a motley group of disillusioned men whose beats sometimes cover as much as 50 sq km of forest that they patrol on rickety bicycles. For instance, the forest tract in Uttar Pradesh that stretches over 400 km from Kanpur to Saharanpur has only 14 guards. Right now, the whole of Punjab has only 40 forest guards when even the sanctioned strength is 62. Says Additional Inspector General of Forests S.C. Sharma: "What can you expect? There are no funds." According to him, the Environment and Forest Ministry gets less than 1 per cent of the GDP, out of which less than 4 per cent goes towards forests. The Salman Khan incident has spurred the ministry into some serious introspection: it plans to have crack commando teams in all states to protect wildlife, an organisation set up on the lines of the Narcotics Control Bureau to go after the big-time hunters and special award schemes for forest guards who show exemplary courage. But as of now, these are half-baked, knee-jerk ideas that will take a while to implement.

An interesting fallout of the entire controversy is that it has once again raised the debate of whether hunting should be legalised. Old-time shikaris believe that legalising hunting in a small way would bring in the bucks. During the days of legalised hunting a company, say Allwyn Cooper (run by the Shukla brothers of Madhya Pradesh), would charge $2,500 (Rs 1.06 lakh) for a 15-day tiger hunt. Today, they say foreigners would be willing to pay $30,000 (Rs 12.75 lakh) for a crack at the tiger. At the expense of a few, their reasoning goes, you can save the rest. Besides, it would also ensure less poaching. The logic: licences should be given to hunters of repute who look upon the sport as a disciplined activity and once in the jungle would ensure that poachers are kept out.

The old shikaris point out that the Indian Wildlife Act is a list of don'ts that in any case is ineffective since every huntable species has slipped into a fast track towards extinction. A classic case is the tiger: there is enough habitation in the country right now to sustain 10,000 tigers but their current population only hovers around 3,000. This is because poaching is rampant. Says K.K. Singh, a former shikari: "Bring back the educated shikari and you might even save the tiger."

But there are many detractors of this suggestion. First, implicit in the legalised hunting theory is the fact that, unlike the rest, the gentleman shikari is capable of self-restraint. But history disagrees. The ornithologist Salim Ali wrote about a conversation that took place in 1953 with an old man with palsy who braced his rifle on a stick. "I'm happy today because I've shot my 1,100th tiger," he told Ali. The man was Ramanuj Saransingh Deo, the maharaja of Surguja, who ended up with 1,157 tigers.

There are several others like him. Points out Mahesh Rangarajan, a conservation expert currently researching a book on shikar: "Records show that 20,000 tigers were shot for sport alone between 1860 and 1970." Many experts feel that hunting, especially after World War II and with the advent of express rifles, killed large populations of wildlife. Later, many of them, like repentant butchers (Jim Corbett is one example) too up the cause of conservation. "Besides", argues M K Ranjit Singh, former forest secretary and the architect of the Wildlife Act: "In today's world, letting a few hunt while others watch isn't feasible."

But perhaps in the end the Salman Khan incident itself brings hope of a solution. Ranjitsingh believes that to save the fauna one must create and adhere to the doctrine that animals are divine and that killing them is wrong. Just like the Bishnois. Involvement of the local communities, after all most of them aren't happy about senseless killing, could be the real answer. To somehow give them a stake, make them monitor the jungles, encourage them to rise against poaching -- that is the only hope left for conservation. Otherwise, there is no way to stop wildlife from falling prey to the insensitivity of humankind.