Bengaluru: Despite state forest department officials treating its wounds, a female elephant – that was part of an elephant herd that strayed into Jhargram town in south-western West Bengal – died on Friday (August 16) succumbed to its injuries after a flaming iron rod, allegedly thrown by members of a ‘hula’ party, pierced its back on Thursday (August 15).
Hula parties are a team of people who use means such as beating drums to chase elephants away. However, some hula parties – such as the one on Thursday – can get violent. Members reportedly threw fire-tipped ‘mashals’ – sharp iron rods set on fire – on the elephant. The incident occurred after a man died in an encounter with a tusker that was also part of the same herd to which the female elephant belonged.
A 2018 Supreme Court order prevents the use of ‘fireballs’ on elephants. However, mashals do not qualify as fireballs and that is a loophole, said local conservationists. They also told The Wire that the formation of hula parties has now become a “racket” because the forest department engages them on their payrolls through a tendering process to chase elephants away.
The ‘hula parties’ of West Bengal
People often use methods such as beating loud drums and bursting firecrackers to drive away wild elephants from human habitation and cropland. In some cases, people also throw objects set on fire – including burning rubber tyres – on elephants to drive them away. In a shocking incident in 2021 in Nilgiri district in Tamil Nadu, an elephant bled to death after people threw a burning tyre on the animal. The state forest department apprehended two people for the attack: the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus, is afforded the highest protection as per Indian law under the Wildlife Protection Act (1972) due to its decreasing populations across the country and because it faces numerous threats including poaching.
In some parts of West Bengal, teams that drive away elephants are called ‘hula parties’.
‘Hula’ refers to the long metal pole with gunny bags dipped in burnt engine oil; the other origin of the word comes from the Hindi “hulla” which means to make a lot of noise, said wildlife biologist Aritra Kshettry, who has studied elephants in West Bengal. Local communities in the Chota Nagpur region have used these fire torches or ‘mashals’ for generations to keep elephants away from human settlements, he added.
“A hula party typically will involve 25-50 people with these flaming hula sticks and flashlights who will chase elephants away from human settlements throughout the southern districts of West Bengal,” said Kshettry, National Lead for Elephant Conservation, WWF-India.
The state forest department also employs hula parties to prevent encounters between people and elephants in West Bengal.
Female elephant dies from wounds
After a disturbing video of a violent hula party in Medinipur, West Bengal, went viral on social media last year, officials from the state forest department stated that such violence towards elephants would not be “tolerated” and initiated an internal inquiry into the matter, the Hindu had reported.
However, the violence in hula parties still hasn’t abated, as the recent death of the female elephant on Friday shows.
On the morning of August 15, a herd of six elephants entered a residential area in the town of Jhargram in south-western West Bengal. In the melee that followed, a man died in the encounter. Local sources said that a hula party quickly came to the scene to drive the elephants away; officials of the state forest department were also on site and tranquilised a tusker in the herd. However, members of the hula party allegedly threw a mashal tipped with fire at a female elephant that was part of the herd. The rod caught the female on its back.
In one video shot by onlookers that The Wire accessed, the mashal can be seen burning on the back of the elephant, as the voice of a little girl pleads with her dad in Bengali in the background, distraught, asking him to tell them to “let her [the elephant] go”. In several other videos, the female elephant can later be seen dragging her lifeless hindlegs through the vegetation in an attempt to get away from people.
Local sources on condition of anonymity told The Wire that the incident occurred in the presence of forest department officials as well as the police. Forest officials later took the elephant away to the nearby deer park to treat it: however, this happened a full eight hours later, activists alleged. The female elephant finally succumbed to its injuries on the afternoon of August 16.
“We will find out the person who inflicted the injury on the animal. We will see the end of it,” The Telegraph quoted Debal Ray, the chief wildlife warden of West Bengal, as saying.
Disturbing illegalities
Throwing fireballs at elephants is illegal.
A 2018 Supreme Court order in response to a petition filed by conservationist Prerna Singh Bindra prevents people from throwing fireballs at elephants in an attempt to chase them away from human habitations or croplands. However, there’s a loophole here: mashals do not qualify as fireballs. Moreover, they are usually not thrown at elephants. The original intent behind using a fire-tipped iron stick is to wave it around the elephants to scare it away, local conservationists told The Wire.
In 2018, the West Bengal Forest Department “categorically informed” the Supreme Court that hula parties are “being controlled by the department staff and they are not using any inhuman methods, especially fireballs”. The Forest Department also assured the top court that “any illegal activities in driving away elephants will be dealt with stringently”. So in a subsequent order in 2019, the Supreme Court permitted the use of mashals as an emergency measure in hula parties, as long as they were not being thrown on elephants:
“As an emergency measure, under the direct control of the Forest Department, mashals may be used for the time being only to avoid any deaths and crop damage that may take place and ensure the proper movement of elephants in the corridors. The mashals be used only in an emergency.”
However, a local source who did not want to be named, as they work on ground with communities to conserve elephants, said that the employment of hula parties by the forest department has now become a “racket”.
“The department pays a certain fee to the hula party for every night it operates,” the source said, on condition of anonymity. “There is even a tendering process for appointing hula parties. So it has reached a stage where members of a hula party block the elephants’ paths and prevent them from going back into the forests because only if the animals remain in the vicinity will the hula parties be engaged for work the next night.”
“Throwing mashals at elephants has been happening despite the order, and this recent case too “is a clear case of contempt of Supreme Court orders,” Bindra, also a former member of the National Board for Wild Life, told The Wire. “This — and other violent actions – are abhorrent, unacceptable, serve no purpose and only exacerbate conflict. Where is the accountability: What is the environment ministry doing to monitor compliance? Where is Project Elephant – when we cannot provide safety for elephants, or protect their habitat,” she asked. “West Bengal should have been taking remedial and alternative measures to stop using fire as directed by the SC, but they haven’t.”
‘Aggression will lead to aggression’
Any incident that leads to an avoidable injury/loss of human or elephant life is always unfortunate and represents the extreme manifestation of human-elephant conflicts, Kshettry told The Wire.
“Elephants are a long-lived, sentient species with well-developed memory and cognition. Aggressive tactics towards elephants also lead to high aggression from them towards people leading to more damages,” he said.
Therefore, managing these conflicts would require more “empathy-based approaches and a landscape-level planning for conserving elephants,” he pointed out.
Teams safeguarding people and property from elephants will have to be sensitised with clear SOPs and guidelines. And at the same time, West Bengal needs a vision plan on where elephants can persist in the long term in the southern districts, Kshettry added.
“The state can then adopt measures to enrich long term habitats and also remove elephants from non-viable habitats to minimise the impacts on people as well as elephants.”
Kshettry added that a combination of these short and long term approaches will likely yield positive results for both elephants and people.
