The wildlife at Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh had a gleaming, silver visitor a few days back: a helicopter ferrying chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan landed in the park's buffer zone.
A noisy, high-speed convoy drove him and his wife to the core area where they spent the weekend in the forest rest house. Blue-beacon vehicles drove at top gear through the speed-restricted zone to pay obeisance: the park's director, the collector, the superintendent of police... the entire gamut of administrative and police machinery hotfooted it to Kisli's Khatiya gate, heralding a circus that VIPs in this country are ringmasters of.
Kanha stretches over 1,945 square kilometres, comprising a core area of 940 square km and a buffer zone of 1,005 square km. The Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, amended in 2006, specifies that the core zones or 'critical tiger/wildlife habitats' must be inviolate. The guidelines were circulated by the National Tiger Conservation Authority in November 2011. In July 2012, the Supreme Court issued an interim ban on tourism in core areas of tiger reserves, taking note of the failure of the authorities to protect tigers whose population had dropped below 1,500 in national parks. In October that year, the Supreme Court lifted the ban, but tourists could no longer stay in the core area.
The axe fell on Kanha's Bagheera log huts, loved by wildlife enthusiasts for decades, and the state tourism corporation moved out to new accommodation at Mocha, 5 km from the park entrance. The facility was handed over to the forest department, which also has the rest house and camps for its patrol team.
Tiger parade
On April 8, the park authorities announced the closure of link 7 of the Kanha trail "till further notice". This would have been a routine matter if it weren't the most populated tiger zone. The chief minister's arrival coinciding with this added grist to speculation. Over the next two days, the legendary Indian VIP spectacle was enacted to the hilt. Forest department elephants were appropriated to herd tigers to the trail along which the chief minister's jeep and entourage traversed. Nearly a dozen tigers were sighted (read paraded) for their benefit, after which Chouhan, his wife and the coterie posed for photos with the elephants. The forest department, which takes every tourist jeep to task for speeding (an objectionable act especially when alarm calls herald the movement of big cats), chose to look the other way. Even the jeep of the ranger exceeded the 20 kmph speed limit with impunity. Food was catered by the state tourism facility at Mocha, the forest department's frugal resources possibly being unsuitable for a chief minister's palate.
Unfortunately, this scenario is prevalent everywhere in India, the world's most populous democracy, where the common man is deprived at the cost of the leader he elects. Reservations, especially on helicopters, are cancelled whenever dignitaries travel and even accommodation, booked months in advance, is at the mercy of politicians and bureaucrats. Divine intervention cannot save the poor souls who happen to have chosen the favourite holiday destinations of chief ministers!
While tracking tigers at Kanha, Chouhan would have seen sundry peacocks dancing. But if he thought the performance in iridescent plumes was a salute to him (I was amazed to see him taking a salute from the entire entourage at 6 am when he emerged for the morning safari), he is sadly mistaken. April is the month when the utterly unimpressionable peahens are wooed, not a demeanour a chief minister deigns to exhibit from his high perch.
