The No-Win War — Kalyan Varma

In conflict, they say, there are no winners or losers; there are only survivors. The truth of that statement is brought home vividly as the captured elephants of Alur are broken, and tamed.

It had the feel of a victory procession. As the truck carrying the captured elephant passed through villages and towns en route to the training camp at Matthigodu, one of three forest camps in Karnataka that received the Alur captives (the others are Ranigate and Dubare), people lined up to cheer. They knew the story of the conflict in Hassan; they knew of the deaths of people in that conflict and had heard of the devastated lives and livelihoods. For them, the capture of Hassan's elephants was victory in a war they had thought would never end.

We were following the second of the adult elephants captured at Alur — a majestic bull with impressive tusks, who swayed on the flat-bed lorry that carried him to camp. He has since been named Srikanta, in honour of the late Maharaja of Mysore Srikantadatta Wodeyar. The three-hour drive took us over five hours to complete. At many places, electric wires hanging low from their poles posed a hazard; the mahouts had to push these aside with long sticks in order to let the trucks pass. And when the caravan passed through the bigger towns, the press of people gathered to watch the captive slowed progress down even further.

The trucks eventually entered the Nagarhole National Park and stopped at Matthigodu elephant camp to offload Srikanta. Once he was loaded into a kraal — an enclosure made of thick logs of teak wood, constructed in a cross-hatch pattern for additional strength — the restraining ropes were removed. Vets checked the captive's vital signs and treated the wounds it had incurred during the process of capture, ranging from rope burns as he fought his restraints to the cuts inflicted by the tusks of the kumkis.

The Breaking

"Taming" is a catch-all word that encompasses the many laborious steps involved in breaking down the independent will of a wild, free-ranging animal and making it obedient to the commands of its mahouts. The process varies across the country. In south India, the mahouts use kraals to contain the elephant while they work with them. During the initial stages, the objective is to weaken the elephant physically by rationing food and water to subsistence levels. The combined effects of the confinement and the physical weakening make the elephant less aggressive, more docile, more resigned.

As the wild one gets used to captivity the actual taming process begins, with the mahouts teaching him various basic commands, rewarding him with lumps of jaggery when he obeys and punishing him when he does not. At the most basic level, the captive is taught to lift its trunk on cue. In this fashion, the mahout-elephant relationship — one of dominance and dependence — is constructed.

The process is most refined in Tamil Nadu, where a form of positive-reinforcement training is in vogue. The mahouts here carry on inherited traditions of taming, as per which they spend copious amounts of time with the captives, using rewards most often and punishment only rarely. The elephants learn that obedience to commands brings immediate rewards; punishment is reserved for extreme cases of recalcitrance.

In Karnataka, the process of taming falls somewhere between the less gruesome Tamil Nadu model and the extreme brutality of the northeast; reward and punishment are harnessed in equal measure. It takes time to establish the bond between the mahout and the elephant — anywhere from a month to upwards of eight months, depending on the personality of the individual elephant and the strength of his will and determination to resist.

At the time of writing this, the basic bond between Srikanta and his mahout, Vishwa, has been forged. The elephant responds to the mahout and as a result, has been freed from the kraal. He is a tall, strong tusker, and in due course, could well become a kumki and take his part in other capture operations. Is it primarily this experience, of having gone through the capture and taming process, that makes the kumki so empathetic to the wild elephant he helps capture?

Including Srikanta, 18 of the 22 elephants captured in Hassan were taken into captivity and have now been tamed. Three individuals were translocated, while another female fitted with a radio-collar was released in the same area in order to understand her herd and their movements better.

After the Capture

The capture and taming of elephants dates back to antiquity. Seals from the Indus Valley civilization dating back to 2600 BC show evidence of tamed elephants; Plutarch in his histories writes that Alexander's army refused to cross the Ganges because, among other things, six thousand war elephants awaited the Greek army on the opposite bank. By the time of the Guptas, elephants had also acquired cultural significance; Chanakya's Arthasastra devotes considerable space to plans for the management of forests containing elephants.

That said, no culture is carved in stone. We evolve as a society and with it, our attitudes to various things once taken for granted also evolve. Moreover, we now know, realize and recognize elephants as sentient beings — much like humans — in terms of their society, family structures and bonds, and intelligence.

The most common question in the wake of my previous story was "What happens to them now?" Ironically, that is the same question forest officials and conservationists in Karnataka have had to ask themselves. These elephants were not captured to help meet the needs of temples and the tourist trade. The court mandated their capture in order to deal with a conflict situation. The forest department thus had few options open.

The most obvious was to release the captured elephants in some distant forest. This has in fact been done with one small herd from Alur — an adult female, a calf and a juvenile male were released in the MM Hills forest region. Thanks to GPS tracking, we know that the collared female continues to wander vast distances through the forest; her behaviour indicates an inability to settle down, to be 'at home' in any part of the unfamiliar terrain.

Releasing elephants in alien forests comes with its own problems. Elephants, particularly males, have a documented habit of coming back to what they consider their home. It happened in Hassan earlier; the same behaviour has been documented in Sri Lanka and other parts of the world, where elephants released in alien forests have walked over 500 km to return to their original range — walking through unfamiliar territories, including villages and cities, causing chaos all along the route.

In essence, then, all that will be accomplished by shifting the Alur elephants to another forest will be a transferal of the problem from one location to another. Further, throwing strange elephants into a forest where elephant families are already established will lead to territorial fights. Forest officials are clear that they don't want to keep them — they have no budgets, no manpower, to manage that many elephants. The dilemma therefore remains unsolved.

A Personal Note

In the course of my months-long reporting for this story, I have come to realize there are no easy answers. I watched the capture of these elephants, and felt disturbed for days on end thereafter – but I also spent time with the families of those dead in Alur and witnessed the aftermath of elephant raids, and I can see why the court ordered their capture. Since capture was inevitable and release in other forests was ruled out, they had to be tamed. I watched and documented that process, too, and it was equally traumatic to witness the will of a wonderful, wild animal being brutally and systematically broken down.

The Srikanta I saw first was the proud bull who, despite being tranquilized and roped to five kumkis, fought long and hard in the forest of Alur — a fight so majestic that when he fell, the crowds willed him back onto his feet. When I saw him last, that pride was gone; the light in his eyes had dimmed; the majesty of his wild self is now just a memory for the few who saw him then.

But in the final analysis, he — a member of the herd that had caused so much devastation and cost so many human lives — has survived. He is still alive. And somehow, to me, that matters.

Maybe the answer is a combination of solutions: the forest region, where elephants should be allowed to roam free; the human regions, where elephants are deemed trespassers; and the in-between buffer regions, where man and elephant over time have to live side by side, sharing resources. The plan requires investment — for which the government and others need to step in.

And as we evolve as a society, we need to wean temples and tourist sites away from the practice of keeping domesticated elephants. Once the sources of demand are cut off, the supply chain — a lot of which is illegal today — will be snapped. This means awareness, and mounting public pressure on courts and governments, none of which is likely to happen overnight.

This concludes the reporting on the Hassan conflict and the capture of the elephants. This story is part of the Nature without Borders project.