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WILDLIFE: CORBETT NATIONAL PARK
How Many More?
Weeks
after five tuskers were felled in Corbett, ill-equipped forest staff are
left groping for answers as the poachers roam free
By
Sayantan Chakravarty in Corbett
All is quiet in
this vast Himalayan jungle, except for the occasional call of the hornbill.
As the group of forest officials treads gingerly ahead in search of poachers,
a stench begins to rise from the bowels of the jungle. The winding track
dips into a leafy creek. No humans here, just the putrefying, half-eaten
carcass of a large adult tusker killed at Paterpani in the Core Zone of
the Corbett National Park on February 8. Fresh pug marks suggest that
tigers have been approaching the dead bull, Bhanda, regularly. Above them
circles a flock of hungry vultures ready to feast on the remains after
the tigers depart.
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AGONISING DEATH: An elephant felled by a poisonous
dart had its tusks brutally hacked in the national park in February
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A series of daring strikes in the past three
months saw five elephants fall prey to a powerful poaching mafia which
has spread its tentacles in the supposedly well-guarded wildlife sanctuary.
Trailing the poachers is a tough task, as Brijendra Singh, the park's
honorary wildlife warden who has spent the past 20 years preserving it,
will testify. Singh is the driving force behind the 150-odd forest guards
who undertake daily missions into the heart of the jungle. He wants the
poachers-probably numbering only five but "highly skilled at jungle
craft"- stopped at any cost. In a desperate bid to isolate the poachers,
officials closed the park for a day and even used helicopters to search,
but to no avail. Now, the CBI too has joined the hunt.
The urgency to pin down the hunters is mounting
as the poaching mafia is increasingly striking at will all across the
country. Between July 1998 and October 1999, about a dozen tuskers were
poached in the forests of Cooch Behar in West Bengal. The modus operandi
was same as that in Corbett.
The poachers are interested in the ivory which
fetches more than Rs 50,000 per kg in the international market, the ban
on ivory trade having been lifted. A tusker, on an average, yields 15-20
kg of ivory. In 2000 alone, an estimated 100 elephants fell to avaricious
poachers in various sanctuaries signalling an escalation of a trend that
had been subdued for much of the 1990s. For the past three years, elephant
mortality is touching the soaring levels the notorious Veerappan had taken
it to in the southern ranges in the 1980s.
With Veerappan on the run, his role has been
usurped by dozens of groups who usually operate independently and chalk
out their own turf. But the Corbett killings have shown that there may
be a larger group operating on a much wider scale. Singh has dubbed it
the "Chisel Gang" for their unique method of hunting. It is
simple, but deadly. The poachers lie in wait of pachyderms armed with
muzzle loaders. When they spot a tusker, a 6-cm-long, chisel-like iron
dart soaked in lethal pesticide is fired from close proximity into the
animal's underbelly.
In Bhanda's case, the velocity was such that
the dart ripped through an inch-and-a-half of skin and a muscle layer
equally thick before smashing one of the ribs, a penetration even a bullet
cannot achieve. The massive animals would have staggered, fallen, picked
themselves up and carried on painfully for a kilometre or two, before
finally collapsing. The poachers must have spoored them and brutally hacked
off the tusks with giant cleavers.
The deadly poison, believed to be a pesticide
called Thiodine used in tea gardens, would have resulted in quick death.
Says B.M. Arora, director of the Bareilly-based Indian Veterinary Research
Institute who analysed the poisoned arrowhead that felled Bhanda: "The
elephants survive gunshot wounds for days. But in the recent killings,
the darts have such lethal poison that once they enter the brain, death
is swift. And agonising."
Warning signals in the past have not been taken
seriously. And there have been plenty of these, for instance, when a local
villager, Ram Singh, the 27-year-old son of a well-known poacher, boasted
recently that he would make "Corbett dance on one finger". Ram
Singh had been picked up for questioning after the December killings and
that had infuriated him. His threat had been delivered before a fellow
villager from Kalagarh and forest guard Vinod Kumar. Ram Singh had sworn
that he would become a big-time ivory trader in no time. Some time in
January, and again in February, three men were spotted near Ram Singh's
house, one carrying a muzzle loader. The forest officials were informed,
but obviously it failed to register.
For the investigators Ram Singh is a key link
in the poaching trail. Ten years ago he had been arrested along with his
father Jagga when fresh tiger skins were recovered from their house. Jagga
had told a senior forest official that he had visited "a friend"
in Delhi's Gali No.11, Sadar Bazar, to sell the skins. That, of course,
happens to be the den of one of India's best known poachers, Sansar Chand.
Chand's track record in the poaching game is
awesome. So too are his political connections. In the past 25 years, Chand
has been implicated in 25 cases of poaching, involving skins of every
conceivable wild animal. He has been convicted by the Supreme Court once,
and by lower courts on a number of occasions. Even as recently as February
6, the Delhi Police registered a case against his brother after recovery
of leopard skins. Wildlife activists and enforcement agencies describe
him as the nation's Poaching Pasha. He is also a link in the international
group reportedly running an extensive racket to procure white gold-as
ivory is still called.
If Ram Singh has links with Chand, then the
implications of the Corbett killings are serious. Speaking to INDIA TODAY
at Kalagarh police station, Ram Singh, one of five accused detained for
questioning by the Uttaranchal Police, said he wasn't involved in the
poaching. "In fact, I wasn't even present at Corbett on those particular
days," he said. It's a claim the investigators, including the CBI,
do not believe. Given Ram Singh's family background, coupled with his
enormous knowledge of the wild Corbett terrain, he is a prime suspect
in the tusker cases.
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