The Tripura government, on Saturday, February 24, has suspended the state’s principal chief conservator of forests (Wildlife and Ecotourism) Prabin Lal Agrawal for naming a lion ‘Akbar’ and a lioness ‘Sita’. The government has stated that he had allegedly misnamed it, which led to a controversy over the names of the two lions. The issue started after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) went to the Calcutta High Court seeking to rename lioness ‘Sita’ - a character from the Hindu epic Ramayana. They said that ‘Sita’ was accompanied by a lion named ‘Akbar’, named after the Mughal emperor, which they said was the same as blasphemy. On February 22, the HC observed that VHP “espoused the cause of a greater section of people of our country belonging to a particular religion” and ordered that the petition be reclassified as a public interest litigation (PIL) and transferred it to a regular PIL bench.

According to reports, the pair of lions were shifted from Sepahijala zoo in Tripura to North Bengal Wild Animals Park in Siliguri of Bengal earlier in February, under an animal exchange programme, along with a pair of black bucks and leopard cats. In exchange, a pair of tigers, a pair of leopards, hill mynah, Indian peacock, gold peasant and silver peasant were sent to the Tripura zoo. Agrawal, who was working as the chief wildlife warden of the zoo, had reportedly registered the names of the lions as ‘Akbar’ and ‘Sita’. 

A single-judge bench of Justice Saugata Bhattacharyya came down heavily on the West Bengal government for naming the lions ‘Akbar’ and ‘Sita’ and questioned if lions would be named ‘Swami Vivekananda’, ‘Ramkrishna’, ‘Ashoka’ or ‘Tagore’. The West Bengal government informed the court that the naming was done in Tripura and that it was considering renaming a lion named ‘Akbar’ and a lioness named ‘Sita’.