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A Petition to Kill: Efficacious arzees against big cats in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2019

NAYANIKA MATHUR
NAYANIKA MATHUR*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In a political culture that experiences inordinately high levels of petitioning, what makes for a successful petition? This article studies petitions that have been efficacious in their appeals to capture or kill big cats in Himalayan India. The rates of success for any appeal against big cats are low in contemporary India, given the stringent legal regime that is geared almost exclusively towards the protection of the charismatic and endangered big cats as well as the hegemonic position occupied by wildlife conservationism. Furthermore, not only is it difficult to petition against cossetted big cats, but it is also not an easy task for any petition to be heard and acquiesced to. Through an ethnography of efficacious petitions, this article makes three related interventions. First, and in the process of attending to the rarity of a handful of efficacious petitions, this article argues for expanding our conceptualization of what, in practice, a petition is. It does so by outlining the changing forms of efficacious petitions, which can range from a telephone call, a register entry, a WhatsApp message from a smart phone, to the more ‘traditional’ paper-based petition. Beyond its ever-evolving medium, this article demonstrates the criticality of folding petitioning into a wider process that involves planning, performance, perseverance, repetition, and the capacity to elicit visceral responses. Finally, through an ethnographic foregrounding of human-big cat interactions, it demonstrates how an acceptance and elaboration of animal agency enriches the study of politico-legal processes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Special Issue 1: Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia , January 2019 , pp. 278 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 http://www.thepetitionsite.com/821/738/351/demand-justice-for-cecil-the-lion-in-zimbambwe/, [accessed 15 October 2018].

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5 Petitioning as an accepted and, in fact, encouraged mode of expressing dissent has a long history in colonial India that is now well-documented. See Raman, B., Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bear, L., ‘Public Genealogies: Documents, Bodies and Nations in Anglo-Indian Railway Family Histories’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 35, no. 3, 2001, pp. 355–388CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sriraman, T., ‘A Petition-Like Application? Rhetoric and Rationing Documents in Wartime Delhi: 1941–45’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 51, no. 3, 2014, pp. 353–382CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 The interest in bureaucracy and different dimensions of paperwork in South Asia has led to a recent efflorescence of work that examines these documentary forms, including petitions. See Hull, M., Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan, Berkeley, California University Press, 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cody, The Light of Knowledge; A. Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Durham, Duke University Press, 2012.

8 On arzees and their historical roots, see Robert Travers’ article in this special issue.

9 For instance, see Englund for his analysis of the claims made and grievances aired through a popular Chichewa news bulletin broadcast on Malawi's public radio: Englund, H., Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2011Google Scholar.

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12 There is a vast and rich literature on the anthropology of protest, democracy, and claims-making in South Asia that I do not rehearse here. For a taste of the diversity of this work, see Björkman, Lisa, ‘The Ostentatious Crowd: Public Protest as Mass-Political Street Theatre in Mumbai’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 35, 2015, pp. 142–165CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, M., ‘Bandh Politics: Crowds, Spectacular Violence, and Sovereignty in India’, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, vol. 17, no. 3, 2016, pp. 294–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My ambition in this article is to argue for enfolding these associated processes into the wider culture and politics of petitioning, and to broaden out petitioning to include the giving and drafting of a petition as well as participating in public protests/subterranean pressure-application in order to have that petition heard and rendered efficacious.

13 Jalais, A., Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans, New Delhi, Routledge, 2010Google Scholar; Mathur, ‘The Reign of Terror of the Big Cat’.

14 A review of the debate on animal agency is beyond the scope of this article, but see Rees for a succinct summary of the core issues: Rees, Amanda, ‘Animal Agents? Historiography, Theory and the History of Science in the Anthropocene’, British Journal of the History of Science, vol. 2, 2017, pp. 1–10Google Scholar. On big cats and the question of their histories, memory, and capacity to remember and act—be agentive—see the brilliant article by Rangarajan, Mahesh, ‘Animals with Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of Gir Forest, Gujarat, India’, History and Theory, vol. 52, 2013, pp. 109–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 N. Mathur, Crooked Cats: Humans and Big Cats in the Anthropocene, Chicago, Chicago University Press, forthcoming.

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17 Mathur, Crooked Cats.

18 Kanwar, P., Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Pubby, V., Shimla Then and Now, New Delhi, Indus Publishing House, 1988Google Scholar.

19 Wildlife comes under the purview of the Forest Department in India.

20 See http://www.census2011.co.in/census/city/4-shimla.html, [accessed 15 October 2018].

21 S. Ghosal, ‘Cats in the City: Narrative Analysis of the Interactions between People and Leopards in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park Landscape’, Mumbai, A Mumbaikars for SGNP project report. Submitted to the SGNP Forest Department, Mumbai, Maharashtra, 2012; F. Landy, ‘Urban Leopards are Good Cartographers. Human-Nonhuman and Spatial Conflicts at Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai’. In Cities, Towns, and the Places of Nature, (eds) A. Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan Hong Kong, Honk Kong University Press, forthcoming.

22 The sub-discipline of animal geography has had a particular emphasis on space and the animal. It demonstrates how notions of in- and out-of-place beasts have developed. See, for instance, Philo, C. and Wilbert, C. (eds), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations, London, Routledge, 2000Google Scholar; Wolch, J. R. and Emel, J. (eds), Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, London and New York, Verso, 1998Google Scholar. In India, there has been some significant work that argues against the popular perception that big cats live within their proscribed spaces such as tiger reserves. See, in particular, Athreya, V., Odden, M., Linnell, J. D. C., Krishnaswamy, J. and Karanth, U., ‘Big Cats in Our Backyards: Persistence of Large Carnivores in a Human Dominated Landscape in India’, PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 3, e57872, 2013Google Scholar.

23 Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), Guidelines for Human-Leopard Conflict Management, Delhi, Government of India, April 2011.

24 Camera trapping remains to be studied in greater depth, but see N. Mathur, ‘The Beastly and the Beautiful: Caging and Camera Trapping Big Cats in India’, Paper presented at the ‘Traps: Technological Mediations of Human-Animal Encounter’ Conference at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 26–27 September 2016. For an analysis of the effects of radio transmitters and animal tracking on wildlife, see Bebson, E., Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010Google Scholar.

25 Mathur, Paper Tiger; Jalais, Forest of Tigers.

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28 The demands were: 1. To protect the common man there must be instant amendments made to the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972; 2. Provisions must be made for immediately killing the man-eating leopard wherever it might be. A provision must be made for compensation and the amount for the death of a human being should be immediately raised to Rs 10 lakh; 3. Set up a tribunal to look into compensation for the death of domesticated livestock, and 4. Whoever takes on a bagh must be awarded with a prize (for his/her bravery).

29 Cf. Hull, Government of Paper; Cody, The Light of Knowledge.

30 Cf. Jalais, A., ‘Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers became “Citizens”, Refugees “Tiger Food”’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 40, no. 17, 2005, pp. 1757–1762Google Scholar.

31 On the history of the dharna, including threats of suicide or forms of murder, see Singha, A Despotism of Law, pp. 86–90.

32 Until 2000 present-day Uttarakhand used to be a part of the larger provincial state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). The mountain-dwellers of Uttarakhand have an expressive way of distinguishing their lives from those lived in UP. They claim that ‘the mountains are at peace’ (pahar shanta hai) in contrast to the wider history of communal and caste tensions in UP. This reputation of peaceful mountain-dwellers (paharis) is one that is universally present among state agents of Uttarakhand as well.

33 This profound belief in the power of the written word has been noted by several anthropologists of India. See, especially, Das, ‘Signature of the State’; and Mathur, Paper Tiger.

34 This story and many similar such accounts of bagh murders in Uttarakhand are never allowed to enter official files and documents as they are in direct contravention of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. According to that statute and subsequent injunctions such as MoEF 2011, a leopard can only ever be captured or killed subsequent to the awarding of a hunting permit for that specific leopard. This hunting permit can only be given after the accumulation of adequate evidence that the big cat in question is, indeed, a man-eater. As there was no time for this cumbersome bureaucratic process to take place, this murder was kept strictly off record. More than the illegality of such actions, forest and district officials are careful about what details about the deaths of leopards enter the records for fear of provoking the ire of conservationists in India.

35 On the file, and the authority it commands in the structuring of state bureaucracy in South Asia, see Hull, M., ‘The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in a Pakistan Bureaucracy’, Language and Communication, vol. 23, nos 3–4, 2003, pp. 287–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Mathur, Paper Tiger.

37 Naturally, this situation of a WhatsApp arzee being a canny tool of communicating with the state will remain so for as long as its numbers remain low, which is the current situation in Uttarakhand. The phenomenon of what can be called ‘tweet arzees’ is currently on the rise too in India. For instance, see the visas that have been issued to some Pakistanis in the course of 2017–18 after they tweeted their distress to the Indian foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj.

38 Malik, A., Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiments: Oral Narratives from the Central Himalaya, New York, Oxford University Press, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Barry, E., ‘A Castle Receives a Weekly Delivery of Delhi's Secret Desires’, New York Times, 8 November, 2015Google Scholar; available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/world/asia/a-castle-receives-a-weekly-delivery-of-delhis-secret-desires.html, [accessed 30 October 2018]. This newspaper report draws upon Taneja, A. V., ‘Jinnealogy: Everyday Life and Islamic Theology in Post-partition Delhi’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 3, no. 3, 2013, pp. 139–165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Taneja, ‘Jinnealogy’ traces this practice to a form of governance that was common in fourteenth-century Delhi, when royal guards were removed and subjects were allowed to enter the palace to directly petition the Tughlaq sultan.

41 Bear, Laura, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.