Activists documenting elephant torture in Kerala face intimidation and assault
In March 2020, Preethi Sreevalsan, animal welfare activist and founder of Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), based in Thrissur, and Sally Varma, Honorary Animal Welfare Officer, Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI), encountered Kalidasan, a celebrity tusker, who was chained on the temple ground in Olarikkara, Thrissur, with no shade or water.
The Kerala Captive Elephant Rules firmly prohibit the parading and chaining of elephants under the sun from 11am to 3pm. But when the activists pointed this out and tried to arrange a water tanker for the elephant, a mob surrounded them hurling verbal abuses and threatening physical violence. They were later subjected to harassment on social media, where a virtual mob accused them of interfering with the temple festival.
This kind of mobbing, intimidation and harassment on social media and even physical attacks on activists who try to document the suffering of captive elephants in Kerala has become increasingly common in recent years. Ironically, those doing this call themselves aanapremis, literally, ‘elephant-lovers’, people who celebrate captive elephant performance, regardless of suffering for the animals themselves. “Owners, mahouts, festival-organisers and aanapremis are wary of any attempt to look into elephant suffering,” says Preethi Sreevalsan.
Instances where people who engage in documentation of mistreatment and torture of elephants being intimidated and doxxed have been recorded. An aanapremi profile posted a live video on Facebook several months ago (not being linked here to protect privacy of persons involved) which showed a mob accosting a middle-aged man for allegedly taking photos of elephants and passing them on to VK Venkitachalam, an activist who runs Heritage Animal Task Force. The video was taken down soon but has been archived on YouTube. The video, evidently meant as a public message, warns fellow elephant-lovers about the person and asks them to ensure that he is allowed “not even on the roads, not just on pooram (festival) grounds”.
The second part of the video, laced with profanity, lays bare the potential for mob violence. We see the man being forced to call the activist; he explains how he has been held up and there is threat to his life. He’s also asked to end his antagonism with the aanapremis. When the activist on the other end of the phone asks him to lodge a police complaint, men who mobbed the photographer showers him with extreme verbal abuse, “How dare you approach the police, how dare you lodge a complaint! We will kill him if you don’t end this!”
What brings the real and virtual mob together is the thought that the photographer and the activist are driving the loss of livelihoods of mahouts and other workers who are part of the captive elephant economy. We see men in the video addressing themselves as ‘janangal’ (people) and ‘nattukar’ (residents) making it an issue of the whole town, and not one concerning a single group with vested interests.
Recently, Abhijith Surendran, an ‘elephant-lover’ himself, posted on his local aanapremi Whatsapp groups that an elephant, Thrisivaperoor Karnan, was in agony and in the danger of meeting the same fate as Chulliparambil Vishnushankar, a celebrity tusker who died in September at the young age of 36. Karnan, according to reports, died in October 2022 due to septicaemia. It was the fifth jumbo death recorded in the districts of Thrissur, Palakkad and Kottayam in less than a month. Although the official cause of Vishnu’s death was acute foot rot disease, even aanapremi media handles struggled to hide the fact it was due to a history of torture at the hands of mahouts who changed every year.
Surendran’s photograph and name were circulated in other elephant-lover Whatsapp groups, accusing him of clicking photos of Karnan’s suffering and ‘misusing’ them by forwarding them to activists. He was baited into a vacant tethering ground at Irinjalakuda where the contractor, along with others, allegedly attacked him with a knife and broke his skull. He was threatened with death if he filed a police complaint.
Journalists aren’t spared either. Earlier this year, the online Malayalam news channel, UTV News, was covering an incident of a captive elephant breaking out of control in Palakkad after being forced to walk on tarred roads in the noontime heat of April. The elephant was finally shackled in an empty field where the mahouts subjected him to heavy punishment.
A video shows a man striking sharp blows on the elephant’s joints, while another prods below his knee with a stick. A few minutes into the beating, the mahouts notice the videographers and shout at them. They try to manhandle the newspersons, wasting no time in dialogue and reasoning. When the police came to diffuse the situation, the mahouts went back to stand guard at the boundary of the field. They stop the reporters from shooting and the elephant is seen only up to this point in the video.
The latter part shows the police officer saying that the injured have been shifted to the hospital. The officer’s narration is punctuated with the staccato blows on the elephant, six in thirty seconds, resounding in the background but we don’t see the camera focusing on the torture..
Recalling the Olarikkara incident, Preethi Sreevalsan says the really sad part is that they received zero support from the police. “The Circle Inspector came and behaved very badly, shouted at us and told us off in front of the entire crowd,” she says. The police often decline to intervene when they are requested to protect the rights of journalists and activists to continue documenting the elephants, hastily resolving the crisis by siding with the majority and shutting down the cameras.
Kerala society has always been split between sympathy for the enslaved elephants and an apathy originating from the all too normalised notion that violence cannot be eliminated from their management. Vaatal, the denial of water (the disciplinary tactic used in Olarikkara) and ketti-azhikkal (the process of bringing an elephant under the control of a new mahout through punishment-enforced training) are considered indispensable methods to instil fear and resignation in an elephant to make them manageable.
Yet the extreme violent reaction towards the attempts by media and journalists to document it betrays the fear of owners and mahouts regarding their cruel acts getting exposed. Rising awareness about the kind of violence the elephants are subjected to has also made the age-old narrative of care and privileges of Kerala’s captive elephants difficult to sell. A total 17 captive elephants have died so far in 2022 in Kerala alone.
The suffering faced by elephants is sought to be diminished by pitting it against the unrelated issue of mahout livelihoods and preservation of traditions. This polarised atmosphere has also exposed fellow aanapremis, who express genuine concern for elephants to the risk of violence and ostracisation.
The place of activist work
Documenting elephant experiences of captivity, foregrounding their voice and investigating the numerous physical and psychological tactics used to domesticate them assume great importance in present times.
The 2022 Amendment to the Wildlife Protection Act will lead to the decriminalisation of easy and irresponsible elephant trade for religious purposes. This Act can be given legitimacy only by hiding elephant experiences of captivity’s innate violence. Activists and citizens who care about elephants play an important part in undoing the mindset that produced this amendment—that an elephant can be held for labour in captivity with attention to the elephant’s own interests and without inflicting any unnecessary suffering. Investigative footage proves that there is no such thing as ‘minimal, permissible suffering for ensuring both human and animal wellbeing’. As far as captive elephants are concerned, pain comes only in hordes.
Veteran elephant rights activist, VK Venkitachalam testifies that people who photograph scenes of suffering and speak up about the same have no need and burden to tolerate the harassment and assault of pooram organisers and mahouts.
He states, “We have not just a constitutional right to document cruelty meted out to a living being. We are also duty-bound to do so. Neither the mahouts nor the police have any right to prevent someone from photographing an elephant.” Venkitachalam says the police, considering the increasing incidents of violence on activists and others, institute protections for them at pooram and tethering grounds. The police should implement constitutional law and not the law of the vehement majority, he says
Krishnanunni Hari is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Literature at EFL University, Hyderabad. He writes on issues related to captive elephants in Kerala.