The elephant in the room

The news of a pregnant elephant that died along with its unborn offspring in Palakkad, Kerala, on 27 May, after it ate a fruit stuffed with explosives sent tremors across social media. The way the story was initially reported and how every aspect of that was questioned and proved to be false in the coming days tells a stark story of the role of media in present-day India and the manner in which Indians consume media. NDTV reporter, Shylaja Varma, made three purportedly innocent mistakes in reporting one story: (1) she named the wrong distict, Malappuram instead of Palakkad, (2) she named the wrong fruit, a pineapple instead of a coconut, and finally (3) she said that the elephant was intentionally fed the fatal fruit which turned out to be false. We will examine how each of these falsities or half-truths were stretched out of proportion.

Varma has apologized for one of the mistakes in the
NDTV story

Malappuram is the only Muslim-majority district of Kerala and BJP trolls found a golden opportunity to take the Hindu moral higher ground over the elephant slaughtering Muslims. Soon two Muslim names, Amzath Ali and Thamim Shaikh, of the perpetrators were invented. K Sunil Kumar, Divisional Forest Office confirmed that the elephant died in the Mannarkkad division of Palakkad district. Palakkad Superintendent of Police G Siva Vikram informed that a local rubber plantation worker named P Wilson has been arrested in the matter and two more suspects were being questioned, none named Amzath or Thamim.

Delhi High Court lawyer Prashant Patel Umrao checks 
every box of bigotry in 144 characters

Prashant Patel Umrao
Image source: The Quint

K Sunil Kumar further clarified that there is no confirmation that the animal had consumed a pineapple.  According to U. Ashiq Ali, the investigating officer of the concerned forest department, evidence gathered so far has indicated that the elephant actually took the bait for a crude bomb that was stuffed in a coconut meant to ward off invasive species like wild boars. This also debunks the added condiment of intentional killing. Apparently it is too dangerous to go near a wild elephant and feed it, and Sunil Kumar feels that the locals would know better. Wild boars have been destroying crops in Kerala and lacking the avenue for scientific decimation of these animals, farmers have frequently had to resort to eliminating them. 

Now that we have explored the "how", let us explore the "why". Kerala is one of the states where the spread of Covid-19 has been contained most successfully as acknowledged even by right-wing mouthpieces like Arnab Goswami. This meant an abrupt end to the constant vilifying of the Communist ruled state in right-wing propaganda. But the news of the death of the elephant helped them to orchestrate a fresh campaign against the state and also against Muslims as a square peg in the round hole of the Indian ethos of living in harmony in nature. The beauty of this smear campaign was that it was in the garb of an apparently apolitical story of a collective lack of conscience. So every sanctimonious Twitter celebrity jumped on to the bandwagon while they had conveniently/strategically ignored serious ecological catastrophes like the recent Baghjan oil fire.

 

Virat Kohli,
Indian cricketer.

Virat Kohli, was quick to tweet about the elephant
but he is yet (as of 26.6.2020) to tweet on systematic problems
like environmental clearances to drill for oil in the 
Dibru Saikhowa National Park, or the recent
Baghjan Oil field fires in the same region.

All this does not take away from the fact that such a painful death of a pregnant elephant is tragic. Since 1986, the Asian Elephant has been listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as the population has declined by at least 50%. But the problem is that people were quick to assume the worst about a culture and ideology different from theirs. This reeks of xenophobic tendencies and I claim has nothing to do with genuine ecological concerns. That also explains the selective outrage since the frequent cases of trains hitting elephants which are as accidental as this story do not gain this much traction. It is ironic that the Hindu fundamentalists could take the moral high ground in a story of cruelty to elephants in Kerala, because Kerala has a long and troubled history of domesticated elephants owned by Hindu temples that are subject to abuse and other mistreatment.