Mohammad bin Tughlaq had ruled over vast stretches and tracts of land that today constitute India. He was a great ruler who left behind a legacy. A legacy that is today most identifiable as an adjectival derivative of his name – Tughlaqesque. The word is too complex to have an exact synonym. Tughlaqesque would mean exotic, Quixotic, far-fetched, well-meaning, ill-conceived, arrogant, grandiose, all at the same time. It is also a word that can be routinely associated with India’s later-day rulers. Especially, the ones who have lorded over us since Independence.
There is one Tughlaqesque idea that is doing the rounds these days and the gullible Indian media has fallen flat for it – that of reintroducing the cheetah in India.
Seeing the cheetah in the Indian wild is any Indian wildlifer’s wet dream. It is something that sets our hearts aflutter. But let’s get real and see what this dream is all about.
The minister and his words
The Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh earlier this month announced in the Rajya Sabha that the country was going to reintroduce the cheetah into the wild in India. These are to be brought all the way from Namibia. And translocated to somewhere in Rajasthan. All sounded too good, and the media loved it. One newspaper even went to the extent of saying in the report that the cheetah is the only big cat that is not found in India. The puma and the jaguar, for instance, don’t exist?
Anyway, the minister that day hailed on us a lot of rhetoric. “It is the only mammal in India to have become extinct in India in the last 1,000 years,” he asserted in the House. But conservation biology is all about science and not of pompous oratory. So, to start with, this very statement of the minister needs to be read very carefully.
A thousand years back, one knows, there was no conservation biology. You did not have conservationists. You have no record slash documentation of which mammals then existed in India, or for that matter, anywhere else. No one has any way of affirming what mammal became extinct in India in the year 1199, or the year 1345, or whichever. Scientific documentation is a modern phenomenon and you can talk of extinction of species with scientific accuracy only when you take the last 100-odd years into account.
The Asiatic cheetah was last sighted in the wild the year India became independent. It was declared extinct in 1952. There were stray reports about a couple of the cats being seen somewhere in today’s Chhattisgarh. These were never scientifically confirmed.
If the minister wanted to make a statement of fact on the floor of the House, the closest he would have come to the truth would have been by saying that the cheetah is the only mammal that has become extinct in India in the last 100 years. But a thousand years? Well, that’s diluting conservation biology with political and jingoistic rhetoric. The message that came through was that we Indians have not allowed mammals to become extinct in India in a millennium. Aren’t we Indians just great?
As I said, a 100 years would have been the closest to the truth. But actually, it still is not. In the last 100 years there is record of at least one other major mammal disappearing from Indian jungles – an Indian subspecies of the Javan or lesser one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus inermis), whose population was quite widespread in Assam and Bengal. Even the Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) once populated areas contiguous with Burma. The dates of the first is confirmed, the second is not.
Had the minister talked about the cheetah being the only mammal to have become extinct in India since Independence, he would have been speaking the truth. But these are days of populist talk-shows and frenetic, if not hysterical, television debates. Scientific accuracies be damned, let’s engage ourselves in inciting nationalistic passions.
The cheetah and India
The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is an atypical member of the cat family (Felidae) and is placed in its own genus, Acinonyx. Not many people know that the word cheetah is derived from the Sanskrit word citrakāyaḥ, meaning "variegated body". The subspecies that was found in India was the Asiatic cheetah, or Acinonyx jubatus venaticus.
The last documented sighting of the cheetah in India was in 1947 when the Maharaja of Surguja, ruler of a state in the Central Provinces, killed three during a hunting trip. The species was declared extinct in November 1952. Today, this subspecies of the cheetah exists only as a small population (25-50) in parts of Iran. Estimates vary.
The African cheetahs that exist in the wild now are those in Southern Africa. There are not more than 4,500 adults in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The cheetah has been reintroduced only in Swaziland.
There are only two things that ring in favour of such a reintroduction in India. Firstly, the genetic differences between the African and Asiatic cheetahs are not as much as between the African and Asian elephants. Secondly, you cannot doubt the credibility or integrity of those who are to be involved in the project – the Wildlife Trust of India, its chairman Dr MK Ranjitsinh, who heads the organisation’s Cheetah Reintroduction Programme, and Dr Laurie Marker of the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
So where’s the problem?
The endangered status of Indian wildlife is not a secret. The future is bleak and with today’s zeitgeist being all about so-called development, it has been the country’s forests and wildlife that have been actually paying the price for our rich becoming richer.
This is a country that is barely able to save its existing lions and tigers. Long wiped out from its entire historical range, the Asiatic lion is licking its wounds in Gir. Every few months you hear reports of one being killed in its Gujarat haven. For this reason or that. Every few months there are stories doing the rounds of the tiger vanishing from this national park or that. The government keeps denying these rumours. The fact that the tiger is an elusive animal helps in these summary denials. Just because you haven’t seen the tiger doesn’t mean it is not there, after all. So this was how the Indian government managed to keep the Sariska tiger bones under its bloody carpet till it could.
Moreover, introducing the African cheetah in an Indian environment is not the same as reintroducing the tiger in Sariska. It was not in 2000, but in 1984 that the then deputy minister for environment and forests, Digvijay Singh, had asked for the advice of the Cat Specialist Group of the IUCN on a proposal to reintroduce the cheetah in India. What was referred back to the minister was the IUCN’s guidelines on the same. There are two which stand out: (a) reintroductions should only take place where the original causes of the extinction have been removed, and (b) the species should only be reintroduced if measures have been taken to reconstitute the habitat to a state suitable for the species.
It is difficult to imagine that the original causes of extinction have been removed. It was not hunting alone that saw the extermination of the cheetah, habitat loss was also a deciding factor. And the habitat of the cheetah that existed in 1947 cannot be the same as that does in 2009. Incidentally, Rajasthan, were the mammal is to be reintroduced, also fell in the historical range where the Asiatic cheetah had once existed.
The IUCN factsheet on the cheetah, in fact, confirms this:
Part of the reason for their disappearance in Asia is live captures of cheetahs, which were trained to hunt for the aristocracy. The main cause, however, was likely depletion of the wild prey base, especially gazelles, as well as direct killing of cheetahs and development of their habitat.
All plans now seem to hinge on the hope that the animal will be able to find its preybase of deer and antelope in Rajasthan. The cheetah’s problems – proximity to humans and decline in prey species, after all, are not the same as that of the other three big cats.
It will be tough to reintroduce the cheetah. It will be tougher to keep it alive. And by the time you finish reading this there might be another report of a tiger being killed by a poacher or a lion being poisoned by villagers somewhere in this country where rhetoric rules, and Tughlaqesque ideas hold all currency.
Footnote: You surely did not know this. Between the 1940s and the 1990s, 35 cheetahs were imported into India. All, repeat - all, died in the zoos of Hyderabad, Delhi, Kanpur, Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, and Mysore. Four cheetahs were brought to the Delhi zoo from the United Kingdom in 1990. In less than five years, all were dead. You might say the problem, in this case, lay with inept zoo authorities. But I will assert that there is no way you can prove that Indian wildlife authorities are any better.
