When Azgar Ali Khan, the son of Nawab Shafat Ali Khan, shot Avni dead on the night of November 2, the villagers of Borate in Ralegaon Taluka of Yavatmal District distributed sweets and burnt firecrackers. “We will now be able to enjoy Diwali without the fear of being attacked,” they said. Since June 2016, 14 people ranging from 20 to 60 years of age have allegedly been killed by the tigress. That she was a man-eater was established by the fact that in some cases, she not only killed people but feasted on their bodies along with her two 11-month-old cubs.
Agitated villagers who lost their loved ones to the man-eater stormed the offices of the State’s Forest Department and demanded that Avni be shot. The helpless Forest Department obtained a High Court order that ruled that Avni could be shot dead only if all other measures to capture her alive failed. This attracted the attention of wildlife activists who appealed against the High Court order to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, however, refused to intervene in the matter.
The hunt for Avni went on for 47 days. Italian sniffer dogs, elephants and paratroopers were deployed to find her. When these efforts did not yield results, the Forest Department invited Nawab Shafat Ali Khan, a hunter, ironically with an impressive track record, to scour the forests for Avni. The High Court order notwithstanding, appeals to save Avni’s life came from countries as far as Canada. Even the President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, said that Avni must not be killed.
To the villagers of Yavatmal and to the officials of the Forest Department, these appeals seemed unrealistic, as Avni’s depredations would go on unabated if her career did not end. The villagers were certain that if Avni continued to be on the prowl, more lives would be lost.
Armed with the High Court order, the Forest Department finally gave Shafat and Azgar Ali Khan the green signal to capture Avni. What they did not anticipate was that, given the hype that Avni had generated, this was not going to be without its share of trouble.
A piquant situation arose when Avni was killed. Maneka Gandhi, Union Minister of Women and Child Development, environmentalist and animal rights activist, accused Sudhir Mungantiwar, Minister of Finance & Planning, Forests, Government of Maharashtra, of mala fide intentions. She asked Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis, to dismiss Mungantiwar. On his part, Mungantiwar justified the killing of Avni for the havoc she had caused. He suggested that wildlife enthusiasts of Maneka Gandhi’s ilk were armchair activists with no knowledge of ground realities. They had never seen a tiger except in the Jijamata Udyan (Bombay), he and his colleagues sarcastically said. Mungantiwar also felt that Maneka Gandhi’s statements would destroy the morale of the Forest Department. As to Maneka Gandhi’s demand that he be removed from his post, he asked her to qualify that with the undertaking that if Devendra Fadnavis did not remove him from his post within a week, she would resign from her post as Minister of Forests in the Central Government. Nawab Shafat Ali Khan, maligned by the media, also planned to sue Maneka Gandhi.
What irked Maneka Gandhi and other wildlife activists all over the country was the Maharashtra Forest Department’s decision to invite Shafat and Azgar Ali Khan to capture Avni. They called these men “trigger happy” and accused them of having animal blood on their hands — the Khans have been shooting wild animals in Vidarbha, including 300 wild boars, the prey-base of tigers, since 2009. They pooh-poohed Azgar Ali Khan’s claim that he first attempted to tranquillise Avni, but shot her in self-defence when the animal charged at him. “If that were the case, the bullet would have frontally landed on the tiger’s forehead and not on its stomach,” an activist explained. Another activist, Gauri Lekhi, pointed out that Khan shot at Avni from a distance of merely 10 metres. “Even Jim Corbett never shot a man-eater from so close a range,” Lekhi said. “He usually sat up in machans and waited for the tiger,” she added. Saad Bin Jung, who claimed he “lived with tigers”, called the intervention of the courts in the Avni case “a bad precedent”. He said it was the job of the Chief Wildlife Warden of the state, and not of the judiciary or the Central Government to decide how a man-eater should be dealt with.
In the light of all the attention bestowed on her, Avni is today a star. She has passed into a legend, like Jim Corbett’s man-eaters of Kumaon and his man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag.
(To be continued)