The big dilemma that Maneka Gandhi faces

Her response to the orchestrated killing of a tiger in Maharashtra shows that her forbearance has its limits

All of us have gifts. Maneka Gandhi’s gift, amounting to a passion has been animals. She knows all that can be known about animal needs, animal behaviour. And, more to the point, she knows all too well how we humans mistreat animals, in the wild and in domestic or un-civilian care. And this makes her rage.

This also makes Maneka Gandhi who and what she is. William Blake’s great poem ‘Tyger, tiger burning bright’, she must know by heart. As the one with ‘A robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage’ has to be her Bible. For the last five years, however, in keeping with the decorum of cabinet protocol and the dharma of politics, her rage over our mistreatment of animals has had to be caged. Her department being Women and Child Welfare, her natural, spontaneous, instinctive care for animals in distress has had to be a slow, internal burn. The number of elephants being electrocuted or trainmowed, migratory pelicans being bludgeoned on their tranquil lake-perches for meat, spotted deer dying in great number of food poisoning must be galling to her.

But her response to the orchestrated killing of a tiger in Maharashtra, shows that her forbearance has its limits. And, exploding, she has said she will fight this among other ways, politically.

I am not sure what that means but I assume, going by the normal sense of the phrase, that she intends to speak about this not just as an animal rights protector to animal rights violators but as a political leader to other political leaders and, more specifically, as a political leader from one formation, NDA, to others within the same formation who have jurisdiction over the site of what she has called “the ghastly murder” of the tiger.

It is important that before proceeding any further she gives the Maharashtra side of things close and serious attention. The tiger is perilously endangered, of course, but one has to be a local villager to know what it means to be terrorised by a wild animal be it feline, bovine or any other.

Was the action in Maharashtra driven by tiger-hate or sheer fear? This is no idle thought but an existential question on human-animal conflict and the role of the State in that bitter dilemma.

Maneka Gandhi’s gift being what it is, her rage being what it is, when something goes beyond her endurance level, she must protest according to her beliefs and, praise be to her, protest she has. How has that been taken by her political comrades?

Ashoka, who gave, in his Pillar Edict V what may be called the world’s first prototype for a Wildlife Protection Act or at any rate its inaugural list of protected species, is not the NDA’s favourite figure from history. Why? Because he forswore imperial and supremacist ambitions, especially the method of war and conquest, and made Hinduism’s greatest reformer, the Buddha, his preceptor.