He stands next to Durga in a snap clicked just after the tiny 5-year-old elephant was pulled out of a truck that had carried her all the way from Assam to Madurai’s Meenakshi Ammal temple. A middle-aged man with a stoop and a moustache, beaming in his white shirt and a cream-coloured veshti.
His name is Vaidyanathan Krishnamoorthy. Seva Trust, a non-descript religious charity run by his wife, Anuradha Subramanian, gifted Durga to the temple in September 2026.
Durga, so young she had probably just been weaned, wasn’t the only one to make this long journey from Assam to Tamil Nadu. Anuradha’s Seva Trust also donated four more elephants – three pre-adolescent and one barely adolescent – to temples in Nagapattinam, Kanchipuram and Tiruvannamalai.
Nagapattinam’s Vaitheeswaran Koil got Rupsing, said to be 13 years old. The Arulmigu Anmachaleswarar Temple in Tiruvannamalai bagged Hiralal and Shiva, said to be 8 and 6 years old, respectively. And Kanchi Kamakoti in Kanchipuram got Bijuli, said to be 5 years old.
Over the last month, these elephants have been at the centre of a storm. On one hand, devotees are jubilant. “The arrival of a new elephant at the Vaitheeswaran Temple – after a gap of exactly 23 years – has sparked immense joy and spiritual enthusiasm among local residents and devotees across Tamil Nadu,” reported ABP Tamil from Mayiladuthurai, Nagapattinam.
On the other hand, a number of activists, forest officers and biologists in North-East India, Tamil Nadu and elsewhere have condemned these transfers on various grounds ranging from the trauma of the travel, to what awaits these elephants once pressed into temple servitude to larger questions about their origins.
That said, what we are seeing here is more than a reprise of the old debate on whether religious use of elephants should be permitted.
Over the last 10 years, India’s painstakingly developed protocol for curbing illegal trade in elephants has been hollowed out through legal dilutions like allowing the use of elephants for religious duties.
The largest beneficiaries of this erosion are individuals close to the ruling party – with BJP leaders actively facilitating and effectively gifting even wild elephants to people in their ecosystem.
Krishnamoorthy and Anuradha illustrate this expropriation.
These transfers rely on rushed, highly questionable documentation – including dubious ownership certificates and microchips inserted without clear proof of captive origin.
The significance of “Judicial Krishnamoorthy”
Search for him online and you will find Krishnamoorthy is a director at a Chennai-based firm called Katas Properties – which shares its address with Seva Trust.
In Tamil Nadu’s legal circles, however, Krishnamoorthy is known for a different reason. “In our circles, he is known as Judicial Krishnamoorthy,” a former Amicus Curiae to the Chennai High Court told The News Minute on the condition of anonymity.
Working on this report, TNM was also told that he is close to Amit Shah and Narendra Modi. “He had helped Shah in legal issues,” a relative of Krishnamoorthy told TNM on the condition of anonymity. “It’s this proximity that put him on the board of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD).”
In 2023, commenting on his reappointment at the TTD board (his fourth consecutive term), South First wrote: “He is believed to be close to the BJP’s strong man and Union Home Minister Amit Shah and it is also learnt that he has connections in the higher judiciary.”
Such claims have swirled around him for a while. Till now, in the absence of hard evidence, such assertions have not amounted to anything more than unverified speculation. And yet, as this report will show, the couple received elephants from the BJP-run government in Assam at the very time the Gauhati High Court was trying to rescue nine elephants from Assam that were being allegedly ill-treated in temples in Tamil Nadu.
Working on this report, The News Minute WhatsApped questions about these imputations to Krishnamoorthy and then, a day later, called him to ask if he would be replying. He cut the call saying: “I am sorry. I don’t want to.”
To understand how these transfers happen, The News Minute took a closer look at Seva Trust.
The anatomy of an elephant transfer
Since trade is prohibited in elephants, they cannot be bought or sold – only inherited, donated or gifted. Similarly, since wild capture is prohibited, any elephant changing hands has to be born in captivity.
None of these four temples sourced these elephants on their own. Instead, the whole operation was handled by Seva Trust according to letters the charitable institution wrote to Tamil Nadu’s Chief Wildlife Warden and the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department on July 9 this year.
How did the Trust obtain the elephants?
The roots of this transfer lie in mid-2025. That is when Anuradha Subramanian requested Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma to donate four elephants. According to sources, she met him first in Guwahati and sent him a reminder in writing. The Assam government then agreed in principle to donate the elephants provided that the required approvals would be obtained from Tamil Nadu.
In letters written to TN’s officers, Anuradha cites her letter to the Assam CM and that state’s willingness to donate. “The Trust addressed a formal Proposal and Request Letter dated 4th September 2025 to Shri Dr. Hemanta Biswa Sarma Ji… humbly requesting the donation of one captive elephant each for the said temples, to enable the performance of traditional rituals as per the agamic procedure… The Government of Assam has responded to this request with willingness, in-principle, to consider the proposal favourably once all clearances are received from Tamil Nadu.”
TNM has written to the Assam CM’s office asking why the state government decided to give these elephants (which rose from four to five) to a private (and relatively unknown) trust. This article will be updated when they respond. We also wrote to Anuradha asking her if she had met Sarma before she sent him this letter. This article will be updated when she responds.
Between September 2025 and July 2026, two processes played out.
The first was in Assam. In the two months that followed the meeting between Anuradha and the Assam CM, ownership certificates for at least three of these five elephants were created – Durga (October 24, 2025), Hiralal (November 6, 2025) and Shiva (November 19, 2025). The ownership certificates of Bijuli and Rupsing are not in the public domain.
Given ownership certificates are prepared after micro-chipping, it is not clear why these three elephants (all of differing ages; 5, 8 and 6 years) got their ownership certificates in the same 26-day period. A microchip with a unique number is implanted in a freshly weaned elephant to establish its parentage – and to track it for life.
The second was in Tamil Nadu.
In July 2020, Tamil Nadu’s Forest Department under the AIADMK government had blocked the transfer of an elephant called Fulmala to a Trust in Kanyakumari citing Section 43(1) of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. This section says that a person who has a certificate of ownership for a captive animal, animal article, trophy or uncured trophy cannot sell, offer it for sale, or transfer it in any manner for commercial consideration.
Thereafter, in March 2023, a single-judge bench of the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court also ruled against further acquisition of elephants by private individuals or religious institutions in the state. In June that year, after an appeal from the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, a division bench of two judges granted an interim stay.
The bench was still hearing the matter, said Arun Prasanna, the founder of People For Cattle in India (PFCI). In the meantime, he said, the flow of new elephants into the state had stopped.
In May 2026, there was a change of guard in Tamil Nadu, with the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) forming the government.
Between July and September 2026, Seva Trust got the TVK led state machinery to act at lightning speed to process the elephant transfers. In fact, Durga’s permission was granted in less than eight hours.
On July 9, Seva Trust wrote to the Chief Wildlife Warden of Tamil Nadu and the state’s Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department seeking permission to bring in four elephants. Twenty days later, on July 29, it wrote to these departments again proposing an SOP “governing the participation of elephants in religious functions”. On the same day, it also filed a writ petition in the Madras High Court seeking such a SOP.
Over the next month, between August 18-29, all five ‘elephant owners’ in Assam applied to the Assam Forest Department seeking permission to transfer their elephants to these temples.
On September 2, the Chief Justice of Madras quashed the 2023 order preventing TN temples from acquiring elephants, saying donation of elephants born and raised in captivity is permissible under law.
On September 4, according to official communication between the departments, reviewed by TNM, at 1.36 pm, Rakesh Kumar Dogra, TN’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF) and Chief Wildlife Warden, wrote to forest officers in the districts where these temples stand seeking a “detailed inquiry and physical verification” of their facilities for elephants with “specific reference to the requirements prescribed under the Tamil Nadu Captive Elephants (Management and Maintenance) Rules, 2011”. The report should be sent within 15 days from the date of receipt, says his letter.
At 7 pm that day, less than half a day after the order from Dogra, Revti Raman, the District Forest Officer for Madurai, submitted the inspection report for Meenakshi Amman Temple, where Durga was to go.
A couple of hours later, at 8.58 pm, Dogra put his stamp of approval allowing Durga’s transfer from Assam to Madurai. His counterpart in Assam too seemed to treat the case as a top priority.
On the same day, Vinay Gupta, PCCF (Wildlife) and Chief Wildlife Warden of Assam, wrote to Manas National Park seeking fitness certificates for four elephants, including Durga.
On September 7, Seva Trust moved the Madras High Court saying it wants to bring five – up from the earlier four – elephants from Assam. The court directed the State to take a decision on the pending applications within a week and posted the matter for September 16. On the same night, Durga was dispatched from Manas.
She reached Madurai Meenakshi Temple on September 13. She had been transported 3,000 km in six days, getting her to Madurai in time for the Kumbhabishekam ceremony at the temple on the 17th.
This speed, however, violated the SOP submitted to the court and TN government, which was proposed by Anuradha herself saying: “No elephant shall be transported beyond 125 km per day; Transportation by vehicle shall not exceed six hours per day; Transport vehicles shall be fitted with speed governors restricting speed to 25 km per hour.” If the SOP was followed, the truck carrying Durga would have taken 24 days to cover the distance of 3,000 km.
By September 15, the other four elephants had been dispatched as well. By the 25th, Hiralal and the other three elephants 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 were shipped 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.
In another instance, 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 stayed by the Delhi High Court. Vantara, the private wildlife collection of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s family, too has received elephants 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 could have 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,” Himal SouthAsian wrote in 2024. “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 paper 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 “religious or any other purpose”.
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 Rs 25 lakh to Rs 30 lakh in 2023 (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 Omanakuttan Pillai, who hit the headlines in 2024 for trying to move 10 elephants to Kerala; Ashraf Ali, who has been accused of holding a five-year-old elephant for sale, albeit with a microchip that couldn’t be read; V Shaji, who claimed in 2020 to have brought 200 elephants from Assam, Bihar and elsewhere to Kerala; and others.
In a related development, forest officers began finding more elephants with holes in their ears — “a standard training practice to rope and train a young – mostly wild captured – elephant, used commonly in Assam,” as The Centre for Research on Animal Rights, headed by the academic Alok Hisarwala, has written.
In tandem, micro-chipping has been hollowed out. “The microchips implanted in elephants come from the US,” said the person familiar with these transactions. “It is easy to get them. Inserting them into an elephant is easy as well. All you need is a syringe.”
With that as prologue, now consider Durga, Hiralal, Bijuli, Shiva and Rupsing.
Things that don’t add up
A closer look at the documentation for these elephants reveals a clutch of other contradictions.
The ownership certificates for Durga, Shiva and Rupsing say each has a small hole in their earflap. As mentioned earlier, the holes are used to capture and train young wild elephants.
Rupsing, one of the four elephants originally meant to go to the Jagannath Temple in Ahmedabad, also had a bullet wound in his left foreleg when first inspected by the Forest Department in 2019 — again a likely sign of a wild capture.
There are other puzzles. Durga, just four years and seven months old, has a longer trunk (120 cm) than seven-and-a-half years old Hiralal, (90 cm). Bijuli, said Prasanna, is even smaller but is said to be a five-year-old. These mismatches raise questions about the ages being claimed for these elephants.
In addition, in the case of Durga, Hiralal and Shiva, the ownership certificates are provisional. Their validity is “subject to final decision of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India in WP(c) No 743/2014, dated 01-11-2018 in the matter Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation Center Vs-Union of India & Ors and subject to change accordingly,” their certificates say at the end.
Dogra didn’t respond to TNM’s question on why Tamil Nadu accepted elephants which only had provisional certificates.
In this matter, the petitioners have sought better implementation of the WLPA and a census of all captive elephants. As for Rupsing, the document attached by the Assam department is not even an ownership certificate. It is an inspection report.
TNM also asked Anuradha and the Forest Departments of Assam why these elephants were moved on the back of provisional certificates – and what they will do if the Supreme Court passes an adverse report. We also asked if Rupsing has an ownership certificate.
In recent years, added the person familiar with these transactions, while waiting for a good price, traders have begun to leave elephants with proxy owners. “People are sourcing multiple elephants and keeping them with different individuals, so that it doesn’t look like one individual who is trading,” said the person familiar with these transactions. “As of today, 400+ captive elephants in Assam have documentation issues,” he said. “There is often no clear trail of maternity or ownership, and the age of the elephant doesn’t tally with the age of microchip.”
In the case of these elephants, there is an additional puzzle. While ownership certificates say these elephants are owned by private individuals, the letter sent by Assam PCCF (WL) Vinay Gupta to the field director of Manas National Park and Tiger Reserve on September 4, 2026, seeking “health soundness” for four of these elephants (except Bijuli) says they are living in Manas National Park. If they were privately owned, why were they in Manas?
It has also been alleged, by Assam Congress spokesperson Reetam Singh, that money changed hands for these elephants. “Transaction amount for the five elephants transferred to Tamil Nadu was Rs 6 crores,” he tweeted on September 21, 2026, adding: “Lottery Martin @ Santiago Martin paid the amount on behalf of the Krishnamurthy couple.” On being contacted by The News Minute, Singh said he had heard this from government sources working in the field.
Santiago Martin, who owns and operates several lottery companies, was the single largest buyer of electoral bonds in India. Martin’s wife Leema Rose Martin is an MLA representing the AIADMK while his son-in-law Aadhav Arjuna is a minister in the new TVK government.
TNM asked Martin, Aadhav Arjuna and Anuradha to comment. This article will be updated when they respond.
For all these reasons, questions have been raised about these transfers – ranging from their origins to whether they were purchased or donated.
“On these elephants, we have absolutely no clue where these came from,” Krishnamoorthy’s relative told TNM.
There might be, however, one easy way to find out. While India still doesn’t have a country-wide database of captive elephants, said the person familiar with this transaction, Assam’s Forest Department maintains a register. “It has all details of the micro-chipping — the mother’s number, her child’s number, the owner’s name, and so on,” he said. “It can verify the genuineness of micro-chipping.”
Given that captive-born elephants have to be micro-chipped at the time of weaning, any elephant which doesn’t show up in this chronological record is bound to be wild caught. This document, he said, is tightly guarded. “Not only is it not online or in the public domain, even forest officials are unable to see it. Only three people are privy to it — MK Yadava, DD Gogoi and PCCF (WL) Vinay Gupta.”
Of these, Yadava retired in February 2024 as Assam’s PCCF but was subsequently re-employed as special chief secretary for forests by Chief Minister Sarma, despite opposition even by the Union Environment Ministry for violations like illegal forestland diversion. Gupta has been under a cloud for another elephant transfer sans protocols. As for Gogoi, he is a retired conservator of forests.
TNM wrote to Himanta Biswa Sarma, Yadava and Gupta asking why this register is not in the public domain. This article will be updated when they respond.
In the meantime, India faces large questions – has a marketplace for Assam elephants taken shape again? Why do these elephants’ records show near simultaneous registrations, holes in the ears, and mismatches in size? Did Assam’s forest department double-check the validity of micro-chipping? Why did the state government and Forest Department hand these elephants to a private trust run by a person seen as close to the BJP?
As things stand, the Assam government consented to these transfers at the very time the Gauhati High Court was trying to rescue nine elephants from temples in Tamil Nadu for grievous mistreatment. “On August 16, 2026, the High Court passed an order saying the High Powered Committee should inspect and rehabilitate these elephants or bring them back,” said Prasanna. “And then, within 20 days, Assam decides to give five more elephants to Tamil Nadu even though it knows the state is a habitual offender.”
We asked the Assam government to explain this about-turn. Similar questions were sent to TVK ministers as well asking about its reversal of state policy on temple elephants. This article will be updated when they respond.
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