Guwahati, April 22: It is a debate of elephantine proportions, rooted in the jungles of Chattisgarh and spreading across states to finally echo in the Prime Minister’s Office.
At the centre of the debate is Parbati Barua, Asia’s only female elephant trainer. She is being hounded for allegedly using cruel and archaic methods to capture a rogue elephant in Chattisgarh in February, leading to the animal’s death.
A member of the steering committee of Project Elephant, which is being implemented by the Union ministry of environment and forests, wrote to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee recently, seeking his intervention in the matter.
C.C.S. Maunglang, the sole representative of the Northeast in Project Elephant, defended the “northeastern method” of capturing and training elephants as the “best method known”. He pleaded with Vajpayee to protect Barua from unnecessary “harassment”.
The Prime Minister is the chairman of the Indian Board of Wildlife.
Maunglang said elephant trainers from the Northeast feared that animal rights activists, including Maneka Gandhi, could be misled by people whose expertise in capturing and training elephants “is doubtful”.
On the Chattisgarh controversy, he said an elephant had been captured from the Kanha Tiger Reserve on February 5-6 with the help of an expert in tranquillisation (chemical immobilisation process) and handed over to Barua for training.
“The allegation against Barua — of capturing an elephant calf in Chattisgarh by an ‘archaic’ method called mela shikar and then killing it through starvation and merciless beating — is way beyond comprehension and seems to hold no substance of truth,” he said.
The official said the “northeastern method” of training elephants was considered to be the best by no less an organisation than the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)..
There are over 2,500 domesticated elephants in Assam and each one has been “successfully trained” in this manner, he added.
The elephant Barua allegedly tortured to death had been proclaimed a rogue under Section 11 (1) of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 by the chief wildlife warden of Chattisgarh after it killed three persons.
“I am convinced that the death of the elephant was not caused by the northeastern training method. Therefore, the allegations seem far-fetched, baseless and untrue. The art of capturing and training wild elephants in the Northeast has been passed on from generation to generation and there is no crash course or institute to teach this art,” Maunglang said.
In her defence, Barua said not a single expert who really knew about capturing and training elephants had blamed her. “I am sad that the elephant captured in Chattisgarh did not survive. But there cannot be a bigger lie than the allegation that I killed the elephant through cruelty. Training elephants is a way of life for me and I love elephants much more than these people, who are shedding crocodile tears and trying to gain cheap publicity at my cost,” she said.
Barua hails from the royal clan of Gauripur and learnt the art of capturing and training elephants because it was a family tradition.
The mela shikar method, which some people consider cruel, envisages riding two trained elephants and chasing a herd into an open space before zeroing in on one elephant from both sides until it is lassoed and isolated.