Valmik Thapar's new book is like pugmarks on a familiar trail

Valmik Thapar has been an influential and consistent advocate for saving the tiger and wildlife, but the prescriptions in his latest book are out of sync with the needs of India's deepening democracy

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SAVING WILD INDIA A BLUEPRINT FOR CHANGE  
Author: Valmik Thapar
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Pages: 145
Price: Rs 499

This book is actually a policy prescription for Prime Minister Narendra Modi on how to save the tiger. It is authored by avid naturalist and tiger lover Valmik Thapar. Others are welcome to read it as well. Thapar has undoubtedly been India’s most enduring, influential and passionate TV-era naturalist documenting tigers in the wild. He has deployed his deep passion and just as deep baritone to make the business of saving tigers his life.

Expectedly, the book contains advice he has proffered for years to anyone in the seat of power who was willing to listen. Many of these people, cutting across political fractures, have then put him on boards and authorities that concern wildlife — especially the tiger. His book reflects his passion and doesn’t cloak the influence he has wielded in the hope of protecting the tiger, though he suggests the latter has been of little use besides causing him to spend too much time on too many government bodies.

For anyone who has tracked the heated arguments Thapar raises once in a while on the endangered cat and what should be done to conserve it, the book offers little that is new. This is expected. Thapar has been consistent in the views he has vouchsafed either from his perch at the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve or the corridors in which the tiger-loving inhabitants of Lutyens’ Delhi roam. He continues to see dwindling political support for conserving the tiger coupled with rapid economic development that puts colonial-era notions of ecological conservation at odds with deepening democracy in India. But he is not one to give up on his blue-print for saving the tiger.

He ought to. The tiger may not change its stripes but the nature of Indian democracy is ever-evolving and the question of saving the tiger, really, is just one subset  in the larger puzzle of how an emerging economy can deal with its natural resources and its poor.

Thapar’s big-ticket offers in the book: privatise forestlands and wildlife parks just as they do in Africa;  create more centralised super-power committees with near-absolute powers such as the Supreme Court’s Centrally Empowered Committee on forest matters; do something to dilute or hopefully undo the Forest Rights Act that gives back rights over traditional forests to the tribes; revamp the Indian Forest Service for more dedicated officers for wildlife protection; bring in the NGOs; use funds collected from cutting down forests (called CAMPA funds) to revitalise forest protection; send the funds directly down to the field level even, if required, bypassing the state and central bureaucracies; set up better scientific research.

Thapar and several who agree with him largely retain their belief in a centralised wildlife-saving legal regime. It is the kind Indira Gandhi helped avid nature lovers, hunter-turned-conservationists, wildlife-loving royals and well-intentioned but powerful individuals create conservation through fiat in an era when tribes and poor could be ignored, displaced and abandoned at whim. Hopefully, that time is not about to return and haunt the country under Modi.

Thankfully, many from the new generation of ecologists and conservationists respect Thapar for his passion but do not agree with his prescriptions in their entirety.  They comprehend that bypassing democratic processes to “conserve” aesthetic values of some natural resource for the more empowered only creates more conflict. They understand that saving the tiger and wildlife in general at all costs is usually at the cost of only the poor. The cost has to be calculated and who will bear it too has to be explicitly discussed.

Valmik Thapar

When Thapar talks of private wildlife reserves of the kind run in Africa, he forgets that they come laden with a history of apartheid and destruction of the lives of indigenous communities in most cases. He misses that the Forest Rights Act is perhaps the only piece of legislation that attempts to inject a notion of democracy in India’s forests — on which depends the lives of 275 million to 400 million people (the majority being the poorest).  He ignores the fact that the forests are resources with many conflicting demands on it besides the rights of the poor — from the premium-paying tourists who want to see the tiger without a poor unwashed villager in sight, to the medicinal plant trader, the paper and pulp industry, the beedi manufacturers and, of course, those who want to dig the coal from under or run a highway through it.

The lack of democracy in Indian forest governance has given the political leadership and the forest bureaucracy absolute discretion over decades to dole out rights over India’s forests to all these powerful lobbies at their will. This stifled the possibility of rejuvenating forest-based economies. It also gave the business of environmentalism a bad name among the poor and has constantly encouraged powerful lobbies to ask for yet more discretionary benefits (for proof, recall the coal scam).

On this long list of powerful lobbies competing for India’s natural bounty, wildlife documentary makers or tourism operators definitely fall very low in the pecking order. But the poor and tribes who live off these forests are only beginning to find mention in the small print on this list.

It would have been refreshing to read Thapar beseech the prime minister to entrench democracy better in India’s forestlands. Instead, we only have his long-existing beliefs served in 145 pages and enclosed by a new dust jacket.