Gadapani

Guwahati, Dec. 2: Kaziranga National Park today lost its loveable rogue, a 78-year-old tusker who ferried tourists through the grasslands of the rhino habitat for 30 years before a mid-safari joust with a rival elephant killed an American woman and forced it into premature retirement.

“We will miss him,” divisional forest officer Bankim Sarma said of Gadapani.

Like the Ahom prince after whom he was named, Gadapani had a regal aura about him and was loved by the forest personnel who handled him and the tourists who would marvel at his tusks and ride its back.

Gadapani was the longest-serving worker elephant at Kaziranga, his career beginning with the small “crime” of trespassing into a forest and ending with the one that led to a tourist’s death.

Forest guards seized the tusker at the Digboi forest range in the late sixties and sent him to the national park after his owner — a resident of Digboi town, about 500km from Guwahati — refused to pay a fine for his release.

A maverick in every sense and intolerant of any challenge to his position as the leader of the herd of worker elephants at Kaziranga, Gadapani spent his last years in isolation.

Gadapani’s moment of infamy came on the chilly morning of November 17, 1998, when he attacked rival Bhajan, who was carrying a group of foreign tourists on its back. Mary Brumder, an 80-year-old tourist from the US, fell off the seat strapped to Bhajan’s back and died on impact.

The forest department immediately put Gadapani under “house arrest” in a camp. While serving his sentence, Gadapani was attacked by a wild herd and seriously injured. Around the same time, a probe revealed that he was not entirely to blame for the tourist’s death.

The forest department concluded that the safari managers ought not to have put two tuskers in the same group.

“Gadapani saw Bhajan as a threat to his leadership and had been targeting him for a long time,” the probe report said.

Since being injured in the attack by a wild herd, Gadapani spent most of his time in the elephant “intensive care unit” at Thungru, about 4km from Mihimukh in the Kohora range of the national park. He was shifted to the nearby Sildubi camp on Saturday.

“Gadapani was our prized possession. His long pair of tusks made him stand out from the rest of the pack. He had no fear of rhinos or tigers and always led the elephant safari team in his heyday,” an official said.

Gadapani’s tusks were so long and heavy that forest officials had to cut off a portion of both for him to be able to move freely.