Editor,
Rahul Gandhi took time off the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Uttar Pradesh to rush to visit the families of victims in his constituency in Kerala’s Wayanad, where elephant attacks caused three deaths in three weeks. However, such deaths have unfortunately become a regular phenomenon in our country.
Kokila Mahato was asleep in her two-storey mud house in Dhekipura village, 11 kma from Jhargram town in West Bengal on 29 December last year when an elephant barged into the house. According to her elder son, Prafulla Mahato, the elephant first broke a window and looked for something inside with its trunk. After failing to take anything out through the window, it broke down the door and took out his mother at about 3 am. There was no time to rescue her as she was trampled within two minutes.
A villager said that an elephant had rammed into the same house the previous year and grabbed two bags of paddy. A forester with working experience in the elephant zone of Jungle Mahal said that the same elephant could have raided the house again, remembering it as a source of food.
Nilanjana Das Chatterjee who did research on human-animal conflict said, “The government must ensure a proper elephant habitat and natural sources of food.”
On the same day, Tara Tamang (55) was grazing cows in the Nagarkata area of Jalpaiguri in West Bengal when a wild elephant came out of the Dayna forest and chased her. She failed to outrun the animal and was killed.
In November last year, Budheswar Adhikary (65), Ananda Pramanik (61), Rekha Rani Roy (68) and Jayanti Sarkar (48) were killed by elephants when they were working in the fields in Cooch Behar, West Bengal.
If the victims were elephants instead of being poor human beings, their deaths would have evoked much more public sympathy all over the country. Avni, a man-eater tigress, is said to have killed 13 humans at the Pandharkawanda-Relagaon forest of Yavatmal district in Maharashtra during the period from 2016 to 2018.
Avni could not have been caught alive despite serious efforts and had to be killed in November 2018. After its death, it got much more public sympathy than what each of its victims got after their deaths. Even a contempt petition was filed in court against Maharashtra officials for rewarding people who had killed Avni.
A couple of years ago, Norwegian authorities faced criticism for their move to kill a walrus. But what the Norwegian Fisheries Directorate Director General Frank Bakke-Jensen said in response needs to be followed in India. He said, “We have great regard for animal welfare, but human life and safety must take precedence.”
This shows their higher regard for human life. It is definitely one of the reasons why Norway remains either at the first or second position in the Human Development Index year after year.
Generally elephants and other wild animals do not have access to a rich person who travels by car and lives in a safer place. Animals have access to those poor people who work in the fields to produce corps, so that all of us can eat; who graze cows, so that all of us can drink milk. It is really perplexing that their deaths evoke little public sympathy.
The struggle of the villagers who have been trying to survive amid frequent attacks of elephants and other wild animals does not find a place in popular movies and in popular discourse.
I cannot stand animal slaughter. It makes me feel sick. But I love animals as much as I hate a callous attitude towards poor villagers. There is no quarrel between the love for our poor workers and the love for animals. However, the latter cannot justify the absence of the former.
Authorities should see to it that elephants have enough natural sources of food in their habitat round the year. There should be effective fencing, so that no elephant or other wild animal can break it to enter a village.
Sujit De