Compared to the Trump Tsunami that has the US president literally flooding the media with new and almost always controversial statements every day, our leaders and their politics appear almost dull.
Even as he announced drastic job cuts in his country and the stock market went into a deep dive, Donald Trump found the time to promote his close friend and confidante Elon Musk’s electric car, Tesla, on the lawns of the White House. The concept of conflict of interest clearly does not exist in the era of Trump that we have now entered. There may be a few parallels in India.
Meanwhile, in India, the stock markets have been volatile. And there are other raging controversies, such as on the language issue and delimitation. But our prime minister seemed unperturbed as he spent a day endorsing the efforts of Anant Ambani, son of Mukesh Ambani, in setting up an animal rescue facility and what some may call a private zoo – Vantara in Jamnagar.
Modi posed, stroking a lion who was safely ensconced in a glass cage. He was also photographed feeding tiger cubs. And all this promotional material was amplified without a question by mainstream media. There were no queries about the facility, how many animals it had, from where these animals had been brought, at what price, and whether the environment in which they were caged was suitable for them.
One newspaper did raise some questions shortly after Modi’s visit to Vantara. The Telegraph ran a story quoting a report by the Wildlife Protection Forum of South Africa (WAPFSA) which raised some uncomfortable questions about Vantara. Strangely, that story has now been taken down. And the PDF of that report as well as the statement by WAPFSA has also disappeared from its website.
But before that happened, it was mentioned in reports in Down to Earth and in Scroll, amongst other independent portals.
The PDF of the WAPFSA report, which this columnist accessed before it disappeared, pointed out that Vantara had purchased wild animals from South Africa, some of which were endangered.
It stated: “According to published articles, between 2019 and present day, the Radhe Krishna Temple Elephant Welfare Trust and the GZRRC have amassed what is described as an extraordinary assemblage of wildlife, including multiple endangered species. GZRRC started, according to the exact terminology of a published article, with an opening ‘stock’ of 1873 animals and during one year 2022 – 2023 acquired a further 1946 animals.”
GZRCC stands for Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre, an affiliate of Vantara.
The Down to Earth story also mentions the animals in captivity at Vantara and quotes WAPFSA: “Most wildlife experts agree that placing animals in any captive environment is itself a form of mistreatment. A life in captivity in a zoo, no matter how advanced the zoo facilities may be, can never equal a life lived in natural surroundings. Captivity enforces conditions upon wild animals in which they are not adapted to thrive.”
Earlier in the year, Deccan Herald carried a story reporting that activists in Assam were worried about the way 21 captive elephants had been transported from Arunachal Pradesh to Jamnagar for the Vantara facility.
But these are exceptions. No questions asked or raised, no effort to get the back story. That now is the dominant norm in most of mainstream media when it comes to anything endorsed by the prime minister or the government.
For instance, after Vantara, Modi visited the 58th tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh. An obvious question that any self-respecting media organisation should have asked is: how are the other 57 doing?
Tiger sanctuaries were enthusiastically promoted in the 1970s when Indira Gandhi was the prime minister. Project Tiger was hardly ever questioned except by a few journalists and activists. Anil Agarwal, the pioneering environmental journalist who set up the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), wrote this in “The State of India’s Environment 1982: A Citizens’ Report” about Project Tiger: “Project Tiger is a spectacular landmark in our efforts at wildlife conservation. A serious flaw in this approach, however, is highlighted by the situation in the Periyar Tiger Reserve. Here, several tribal villages were shifted out of the core zone. Dispossessed of their habitat, the tribals soon lost the little land they were given as compensation, and became pauperised. At the same time, the authorities did not remove four cardamom estates in the heart of the core zone”.
Since then, the rights of forest dwellers have found support, and the Forest Rights Act was passed in 2006. The law is not perfect but at least it recognises that forests are not just for animals but also for the people who have always lived there. However, as with so many reasonably good laws in this country, it is observed in the breach. Unless people protest, no one pays heed to such rights, particularly when the people involved are at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
And of course, only if people come out in substantial numbers on the streets does the media pay any heed to what they are saying.
Agarwal’s observations of the Periyar Tiger Reserve are echoed even today in other tiger reserves. Take this story by The Hindu’s Odisha correspondent Satyasundar Barik on tiger sanctuaries in the state. He points out that not only were the Adivasis forced to relocate but that out of four tiger sanctuaries in the state, one has no tigers and yet vast lands have been emptied out for it
And this story in Down to Earth points out that even today, literally thousands of Adivasis are being evicted from lands they have occupied for generations by the process of creating inviolate spaces for tigers and other wildlife.
“These evictions are affecting nearly 400,000 Adivasis, who are now fighting to defend their homes and heritage. Protests have erupted in major tiger reserves such as Nagarhole, Kaziranga, Udanti-Sitanadi, Rajaji, and Indravati. Demonstrators are calling for an immediate halt to what they describe as illegal actions by the government.”
You will not know any of this if you only follow mainstream media. Of course, there was a time when newspapers devoted space to environmental stories, even those that made the government or corporations uncomfortable. But that is in the past. In today’s media reality, the only environment that interests the mainstream is what happens in big cities. So, air quality, and sometimes water quality, will feature as environmental stories.
Meanwhile in the rest of the country, not only are thousands of Adivasis being displaced, but rivers are being poisoned, glaciers are melting, land degradation is evident, and the mad pace of infrastructure construction everywhere is turning cities, and even small towns into dust bowls.
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