Joke

This news is wrong and an agenda-driven one when it says someone deliberately fed a pregnant elephant with a cracker-stuffed pineapple.

Still worse when communal colours are added to it, shamelessly.

Interestingly, in most of the media coverage, the name of the district in which this cruel incident occurred is changed to suit the agenda of a section.

Also, there is a concerted effort going all around to vilify the name of the state. Some sections from the state are actively on it, while some stretch their imagination to see if this has any relation with the literacy rate of the state…

They all forget it conveniently that the sensitivity of the people in there brought the story out in public while such incidents elsewhere would have passed as a usual thing.

While the total number of elephants died in conflicts with humans in Indian in the last five years (2014-15 – 2018-19) was 510, this was 42 in Kerala. In train accidents 77 (Kerala - 3); electrocuted – 333 (Kerala - 19); by hunters – 71 (Kerala - 18); by poisoned food articles etc -29 (2). In the meantime, the total number of humans killed by elephants in the same period was 2,361.

Farmers have traditionally used such unethical means to kill wild animals that threaten their crops. No doubt, this too should come to an end with better technologies in place to scare them away. At the same time, a meaningful discussion on this should also go beyond the shallow grounds of so-called animal lovers that they have risen in revolt against the state and its people.

Maneka Gandhi and her elite disciples, who sit in the cosy-ac rooms of Mumbai and Delhi and debate on this should know the speed at which her own government gives environmental clearance to sensitive projects will only pave the way for more human-wildlife conflicts in future.

Such projects and the way they are approved by her government have close connections with the rise in such conflicts that saw a disproportionate leap in recent times.

The pandemic and the lockdown were good excuses for her government to clear several such projects last month over a 10-minute video conference for each case basis, which otherwise involved lengthy and cumbersome processes such as nods from National Wildlife Board, Forest Advisory Committee, Expert Appraisal Committees and a number of public hearings.

And what is all this for? That the industry can easily lay their hands and plunder the resources of the country without any accountability? That the city dwellers can have an uninterrupted power supply for their homes and night clubs? That when the original owners don’t have access to drinking water you Delhiites and Mumbaikars get 24hr water supply?

What else for?

Just see the plight of the people who get displaced by such projects. Just see how it affects their lives for the selfishness of a minority. Just see the kind of troubles our reckless rape on nature pushes them into. Human-wildlife conflict is just one among them.

Do our debates on them even cover that much space as did the plight of a single animal?

When our policies drive a vast majority of us incomeless, jobless, landless homeless etc, and when millions have to depend on what they cultivate on their small patches of land - sometimes illegally on public land, fighting all eccentricities of nature - as their only source of food, what happened here becomes an inevitable fight for survival.

This is not to say about the one particular incident in question, rather this is to show how several such episodes will become unavoidable within the ambit of policies we follow currently.

This is also not to defend the cruelty that a hapless animal was subjected to but to point out to the way we belittle the existence of millions among us. For example, how insensitive we are about the thousands, including children under the age of 10, still are walking 1000s of kilometres from Mumbai and Delhi to their village homes in UP and Bihar; how senseless we are about hundreds of them falling dead on highways for want of food, water and medical help!!

The position is clear: animals do deserve dignity, but that simply doesn’t mean they get primacy over the livelihood of a fellow human. That never happens logically even though some of us at times wish that were the case.

The theory of survival of the fittest is about animals and it is yet valid a theory in science. And humans are animals, too, in the first place. Thus, it is their natural instinct to fight for survival. So, the trump up of animal-love of some should in no way demean the fight of millions of us to exist on earth with dignity, for any reason whatsoever.

Biocentrism is a meaningful theory - worth practising - but it becomes worthwhile for consideration only after we have learnt to accord all humans the same place at the least as a species.

Until then the hue and cry made in the name of an animal will only have the aroma of a joke.