Years after the conservative English columnist Bernard Levin had got us so outraged we have now provided evidence — with 12 lifeless bodies — that he was absolutely right. Dead on the money.
Levin, after visiting India, had written that the world was making a serious mistake in entrusting Indians with the Taj Mahal. He found the monument in a state of decay. The Taj, he said, was part of the heritage of the entire world, not just India. Therefore, it was the responsibility of the international community to take it over from the Indians. The column, widely quoted in our media, had caused instant outrage. Today, Levin could well turn around and ask us to hand our tigers over to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), if not to the Woodley Park in Washington.
The tragedy at Orissa’s Nandankanan zoo is not merely that 12 tigers have died, most probably due to medical negligence, or that another five may die. The real tragedy is that it underlines our deep-seated callousness and lack of concern for our own heritage, whether natural, historical or architectural.
In any civilised society a scandal of this kind would have caused wide outrage, filled the front pages and primetime news bulletins for days. At least some heads would have rolled. Here we merely have some officials on TV cameras trotting out excuses but refusing to even say sorry, as if what happened was no more than a normal blip in a day’s work.
It is unrealistic to expect heads to roll for the deaths of beasts in a society which abhors the very idea of accountability. Where not even a havaldar loses his job after 10,000 Pakistanis occupy the heights of Kargil for months, it is difficult to expect that senior officials would be fired for the deaths of 12 tigers. But what is more worrying is the general equanimity with which our people, by and large, have responded to this.
Would they have reacted just as coolly if one of our great historical landmarks, the Sun Temple at Konark, for example, had collapsed, instead? Or the Taj Mahal? The worrying thought is, perhaps, they would have. Of all the nations and societies that inherited great historical, architectural and natural wealth, we Indians are probably the most callous and unconcerned. The saddest, and starkest, example of that mindset is the Taj. For decades, we let it decay under pollution and vandalism. In fact, if it wasn’t for rising international concern and a combination of NGO andjudicial activism, the Taj would have looked a lot worse than it does now.
What is common between the tigers and the Taj? The answer is quite simple. Both are vital symbols of our heritage. So is the one-horned rhino, the caves of Ajanta, the lions of Gir, the temples of Thanjavur, the wild asses of Kutch and the ruins of Hampi. But do we really care? There is something inherent in our national culture that makes us so insensitive to this. The Taj may have been saved by the Supreme Court. But please take a look at the other great monuments. The Sun Temple at Konark is under grave threat from decay and erosion. We have left it in the custody of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and forgotten all about it. Please visit it to see how little the ASI cares about it. The only place where you will find its personnel is at the booth selling entry tickets and chances are they will chide you for bothering them on a lazy afternoon.
Also read: Taj is a grandiose work of art, restoring it will take time
If an MP only asked the ASI, one of the most ridiculous and ludicrously secretive of all government departments, the figures of its collections at the entry gates of our great monuments, they will prove one of two things– Either that we Indians don’t even care to visit them, so why bother protecting them? Or, that they are only being run like government-funded private properties, to be milked by touts and corrupt officials for now and forgotten later. Some kind of archaeological Nandankanan, the zoological parks of our history.
Even a religious connection does not always help. Sikh religious organisations, in the name of celebrating the tercentenary of the Khalsa, have destroyed and “rebuilt” their old heritage, lining ancient gurudwaras with modern marble, demolishing ancient buildings, filling up medieval wells to widen the highways taking you to the major gurudwaras. The only protests have come from a very small, committed minority of Sikhs like Patwant Singh and Meeta Rai based in Delhi. Even in Punjab, the dominant response has been, history is fine, but you have to get a move on in life.
This, when the rest of the world is learning the value of these assets. The natural and historical heritage is also a money spinner. Even in a so-called Third World country like Brazil, the rain forests are not only being preserved now, they are being “exploited” as a powerhouse of eco-tourism. Scores of eco-friendly resorts have come up and are usually filled to capacity with tourists flown in from around the world. For all their fame and awesome size, the rain forests do not have the kind of wildlife, the big cats and cows that you find in the Indian bush. But our wildlife does not even attract a fraction of the tourists Brazil does. And when they go back, they cannot even take back a `I saw the Tiger’ T-shirt.
From trivialising our wildlife resorts into kitty party huts to defacing our monuments, from killing tigers by the dozen in our zoos to burying our historical sites with rubbish and worse, we display the same, very Indian, Nandankanan index of callousness. A tourist will have to be particularly brave to reach out to the incredible ruins of Hampi and then have to survive the filth and the stench while admiring the great works of craftsmanship in that open-air latrine. Go to the magnificent rock temples along the beach of Mahabalipuram. Then smell the evidence of the same criminal callousness in the black rocks piled alongside. They were ostensibly put there to save the temples from erosion, but nobody remembered to build adequate toilets in the vicinity. So tourists, mostly devout Indians, use the gaps in the rocks instead.
There has to be a reason why the treasures we have inherited attract so few foreigners. Just the city of Paris attracts 20 times more tourists than all of India. Tiny Austria gets 10 times as many as India. In fact, for every Austrian, eight tourists visit the country annually. Even little Maldives brings four times its population each year to its coral islands. In another decade, this “poor Third World” nation of less than a million people may attract more tourists than all of India.
Maybe Levin was right. Maybe what he really should have said was that we did not deserve this wealth in the first place, that God was unfair to the rest of the world in parking so much of it in callous, uncaring India. Or maybe those tigers should have been in the Amazonian rain forests or at least in the Woodley Park Zoo, instead. Who knows, then, they may still have been alive.
Also read: How East India Company introduced rewards for killing India’s ‘dangerous vermin’ tigers