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A Petition to Kill: Efficacious arzees against big cats in India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2019
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
References
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8 On arzees and their historical roots, see Robert Travers’ article in this special issue.
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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.
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29 Cf. Hull, Government of Paper; Cody, The Light of Knowledge.
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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.
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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.
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