By September 15, the other four elephants had been dispatched as well. By the 25th, and had reached, again in a tearing hurry.
Three things are worth noting in this chronology.
One, in Tamil Nadu, the paperwork for Durga – spanning the order for an inspection of temple facilities, the inspection itself, the drafting of the inspection report, and Dogra’s approval based on that report – was processed in 7.5 hours flat.
Two, on several occasions, bureaucratic paperwork seemed to have been prepared in anticipation of judicial orders. In Assam, owners applied for permission to transfer their elephants and the state’s PCCF (WildLife) sought their health certificates even before Seva Trust applied to the Madras High Court seeking permission to bring these five elephants.
In his WhatsApped response to TNM, Dogra disputed the suggestion that Tamil Nadu fast-tracked the transfers. He said the application – asking Tamil Nadu’s Forest Department to inspect facilities at the recipient temple – came from the Chief Wildlife Warden (CWLW) of Assam on August 20 but was processed a fortnight later on 4 September. When TNM asked if Assam had preempted the September 2 Madras High Court order, he said: “That question pl pose there.”
Tamil Nadu, Dogra said, processed paperwork only after the High Court order. He also said Tamil Nadu’s role was limited to assessing the facilities at the recipient temple while questions of verification, application scrutiny, health assessment, microchipping and DNA testing were Assam’s responsibility. “The order for transfer is also issued by Assam authorities and permit is issued by them including escort of vet, so that’s monitored by them,” he said.
TNM has written to the Assam government asking it to comment on this sequence. We also asked the state government and Anuradha Subramanian why elephant owners sought transfer certificates well before the nod from the HC had been received – and about the speed at which these elephants were transported.
This article will be updated when they respond.
Three, given the Madras High Court order, the legality of the transfer stood on the claim that each of these elephants is captive-born. Here, too, questions abound.
Krishnamoorthy and Anuradha are not the only ones to benefit from such largesse. During Covid, four juvenile elephants from Assam to the Jagannath Temple in Ahmedabad. “We had been told, in mid-2019, that Amit Shah had promised to donate “do joda haathi (two pairs of elephants)” to the temple if the BJP returned to power in national polls that year,” a person familiar with these transfers told this reporter in 2023. “These were shown as captive-born but one had a bullet wound in its foot. They came from Kaziranga.”
TNM has written to Amit Shah, the Jagannath Temple and the Forest Department in Assam asking them to comment. This report will be updated when they respond.
, a temple atop a four-storey building in Greater Kailash and patronised by BJP and AAP leaders almost bagged an elephant till the transfer was by the Delhi High Court. Vantara, the private wildlife collection of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s family, too has with contested origins, mostly from Arunachal Pradesh.
Where are these elephants from?
Going by the Assam government’s paperwork, Durga, Bijuli, Shiva, Hiralal and Rupsing are all captive-born and privately-owned. Their owners agreed to ‘gift’ them to these four temples.
This claim deserves a closer look. Why would Samsul Hoque (Hiralal’s owner) donate a captive elephant in his custody to a temple in Tamil Nadu?”
Indeed, according to a former Wildlife Crime Control Bureau official in North-East India, four-year-olds like Durga now sell in Assam’s grey market for about Rs 20 lakh. A person familiar with these transactions pegged that price even higher – at Rs 60 lakh to Rs 80 lakh for a calf. Even if the owner was struggling to maintain the calves but wanted to avoid an illegal sale, he handed them over to the local Forest Department.
Things get stranger yet. When Guwahati-based news organisation Northeast Now sent its reporter to Torani, the village where Hiteswar Moran – who gifted Bijuli to Kanchi Kamakoti – is based, local residents said they do not know anyone by that name.“According to them, Hiteswar Moran does not exist in the village,” said Mahesh Deka, executive editor of Northeast Now.
Take a closer look at these contradictions and you will see how elephant trafficking has resumed in India.
Elephants have been traded in India for long. They have been dragged out of forests and put to work — by temple managements, armies, loggers, mendicants and others.
The country began trying to curb this trade in 1972, when the Wild Life Protection Act (WLPA) outlawed private ownership of Schedule 1 animals — including elephants. In 2002, it brought in additional protections — capture of wild elephants was banned; so was commercial sale of elephants. Anyone acquiring an elephant, especially a young elephant, had to prove its heredity from an already domesticated mother.
An elaborate protocol was laid down. “Whenever a female captive elephant becomes pregnant, the owner has to report it to the divisional forest officer,” . “The local veterinary officer has to confirm the pregnancy, and return soon after delivery to confirm the birth, along with a local forest officer. When the calf turns three, blood samples are taken from the mother and calf to be sent to a designated lab to confirm parentage through DNA testing… Once the testing confirms captive parentage, the calf is micro-chipped.”
Introduced in 2002 — and rolled out nationally in 2008-09 — micro-chipping was meant to be the final blow to elephant smuggling.
“During nursing, the mother-calf relationship is obvious,” a person familiar with the transaction said. “After weaning, around the age of 4, you do not know which is the mother and which is the calf. And so, around the time of weaning, calves are micro-chipped.” If any elephant was left out, it would be considered illegal. Confiscation by the state would follow.
With these measures, India staunched the elephant trade. By 2010, the number of elephants transported annually from Assam to other states had fallen to just six, down from 77 in 2006, according to a much-cited 2011 by Chaturbhuja Behera, a regional deputy director at the time in the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. Over the last 10 years, though, most of these gains have been lost.
One reason is the BJP. The WLPA had imposed a blanket prohibition on all elephant transfers of a commercial nature – making an exception only for education, scientific research and scientific management. In 2022, the BJP amended the Act to also allow the transfer of captive elephants for “”.
With that, in a development which has not received the attention it deserves, demand for elephants grew. Prices — paid clandestinely in return for gift deeds — rose as well, climbing from (in Namsai, Arunachal) to, as this article said above, Rs 60 lakh to Rs 80 lakh this year in neighbouring Assam. Down south, these prices are even higher. “The price of an elephant in Tamil Nadu now stands at Rs 1.5 crore,” said the person familiar with these transactions. “In Kerala, it is even higher — Rs 2.5 crore.”
Both observers and forest officers in North-East India say Arunachal and Assam have seen a resurgence in the capture of wild elephants. New trafficking gangs have come up even as old gangs have re-activated. This includes people like , who hit the headlines in 2024 for trying to move 10 elephants to Kerala; , who has been accused of holding a five-year-old elephant for sale, albeit with a microchip that couldn’t be read; , who claimed in 2020 to have brought 200 elephants from Assam, Bihar and elsewhere to Kerala; and others.