Given a choice between voters and tourists, power-hungry governments inevitably tilt towards the former. This has been the scenario throughout June, in what is being touted as a man-animal conflict, from Maharashtra to Assam, Himachal to Kerala.

India, which boasts of some of the world’s finest wildlife sanctuaries and shamelessly touts its tigers, rhinos and elephants to lure visitors, is now witnessing a reverse trend. From east to west, leopards and elephants are trapped, killed, or maimed for life with electric fencing, while rhinos are poached and tigers hounded out of their habitat. All for the sake of land sharks and illegal occupants of forests.

Encroachment into wildlife habitat is a recent phenomenon. Despite the Supreme Court ban on felling and transport of forest produce, the hills are being denuded through rampant quarrying and forest cover drastically minimized. Most of the time, the timber lobby works in consonance with corrupt politicians. Every renowned national park, from Bandhavgarh to Thekkady, has witnessed a mushrooming of human habitat in the forest periphery. Smaller animals are poached, thereby disrupting the food chain and resulting in attacks on mankind.

Strange vigil

Following the brouhaha over leopard attacks on settlers around Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park, livestock like pigs, chicken and even rabbits were released into the sanctuary as prey for its big cats. This, despite warnings by naturalists that diseases harboured by such domesticated animals could infest the wildlife. Plans are afoot to add stray dogs to the fodder list, so that human encroachers can continue to plunder the forest wealth.

In a classic case of role reversal, Maharashtra’s deputy “conservator”, Ashok Khadse, “trapped” 104 leopards in Junnar and is combing the Borivili park for more. Shiv Sainiks have formed vigilante squads to help encroachers “cope with the leopard menace”, instead of shifting the 33,000 infiltrators without further ado. If wild animals can be translocated, why not the migrant population? Why is the essential buffer zone being treated as refugee colonies with government sanction?

Surprisingly, states like Rajasthan appear to have put the problem in the right perspective. In Ranthambhor National Park for instance, snarling leopards frequent the Maharaja’s former hunting lodge, which now accommodates a few tourists. There have been attacks on the staff returning home by night, but these have not prompted the authorities to tranquillize and trap the creatures in unwieldy cages, or send them to zoos.

Who’s intruding?

In several other states, however, the situation is vastly different. Animals are considered intruders and therefore dispensable. When grief-stricken villagers of Deepor Beel in Assam held special prayers on Saturday in memory of three elephants mowed down by a speeding train, they were clearly in a minority.

Not only are road and railway tracks laid through elephant corridors, even reserve forests are no longer sacrosanct. An example is the army cantonment at Narengi near Guwahati, located in an elephant corridor between the Amchang and South Amchang reserve forests. In stark contrast to the “memorial service” for the slaughtered elephants, the army unit has asked the forest department to “check depredation by wild elephants.” This is a “conflict” that is entirely man-made and aimed at creatures who cannot quote their “rights” in spite of a human-orchestrated Wildlife Act being in place.

Once upon a time, India’s wildlife was its pride. Today, protests by environmentalists and animal enthusiasts are uncharacteristically muted. Talk of biodiversity and ecological imbalances, glossy brochures touting India as a destination for “wildlife tourism” should be abandoned till such time that our social attitudes change and we can manage to slough off these vestiges of hypocrisy.