THE WATCHDOG
MANEKA GANDHI LOSES WELFARE MINISTRY
NEW DELHI>>"What I expected has finally happened. I have lost the MInistry today," People for Animals founder Maneka Gandhi e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on July 2, nearly four years after becoming the first Minister for Animal Welfare in the cabinet of any nation.
Elected as an independent member of the parliament of India, Mrs. Gandhi asked Prime Minister A.P. Vajpayee to create the animal welfare ministry for her in 1998 as the price of her joining the ruling coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharitya Janata Party. Vajpayee complied by making animal welfare part of the mandate of the Ministry for Social Justice and Empowerment, the portfolio Mrs. Gandhi held from August 1998 until early 2001.
Mrs. Gandhi had previously distinguished herself as a mover, shaker, and implacable foe of corruption during two terms as Minister of Forests and the Environment while serving in Congress Party governments, before her final rift with Congress in July 1996 over leadership failures to address bribe-taking by prominent politicians and public officials in connection with a dam-building project.
Her reputation for incorruptibility served the BJP coalition well during an April 1999 crisis over corruption that briefly toppled the government. Walking into countless remote villages where no other prominent member of the government would go, while battling the after-effects of tuberculosis, Mrs. Gandhi was among the top vote-getters for the coalition nationwide during the September 1999 election campaign that returned the Vajpayee government to office with a stronger majority.
She attributed her surprising stamina to practicing veganism, in a nation where approximately half the population are vegetarians but the overwhelming majority use dairy products.
As Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment, Mrs. Gandhi routed unprecedented amounts of funding and ambitious young talent into animal welfare projects, anti-poverty projects, and efforts to politically and economically empower women.
Her decline in political fortune began after she was reassigned the Ministry for Culture, as part of a larger cabinet shuffle. The animal welfare portfolio moved to the culture ministry with her, and was relatively unaffected, but in her new position Mrs. Gandhi inherited responsibility for oversight of several cultural projects begun by the preceding Congress Party regime, in memory of her former mother-in-law, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and former brother-in-law, Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister. Both were assassinated by Sikh militants.
Maneka Gandhi had feuded with both, accusing Rajiv Gandhi in particular of corrupt political dealings. His Italian-born widow Sonia is now titular head of the Congress Party, which now leads the parliamentary opposition.
Trying to restrain alleged cost overruns and misappropriations in connection with the memorial projects, Maneka Gandhi soon clashed with Sonia Gandhi, with whom she never got along, and when Maneka Gandhi was transferred again in November 2001 to head the comparatively small and obscure Ministry for Statistics, most Indian news media agreed that Prime Minister Vajpayee had demoted her in deference to Sonia Gandhi.
Sonia Gandhi was sensitive enough about the allegation of having conspired with BJP leaders to oust Maneka Gandhi that after Maneka Gandhi was dropped from the cabinet, Congress spokesperson Jaipal Reddy immediately denied that either Congress or Sonia Gandhi personally had anything to do with it.
Meanwhile, another explanation had emerged for the November 2001 demotion. According to the news magazine India Today, "Mrs. Gandhi caused a diplomatic incident" earlier in 2001 by scolding the South Korean ambassador to India over the Korean practice of eating tortured dogs and cats.
"When contacted, Mrs. Gandhi confirmed" having contacted the ambassador three times in recent weeks, India Today continued. "The first was a phone call 'when we discovered that a Korean-owned restaurant in Chennai was serving dog meat. I told him this was illegal,' Mrs. Gandhi affirmed. Soon afterward, residents of the south Delhi neighborhood where Mrs. Gandhi lives complained that the food habits of a Korean diplomat were causing stray dogs to disappear. Mrs. Gandhi was again on the phone, and 'The ambassador didn't deny the allegations.'"
South Korea is among India's most important trading partners and sources of outside investment capital.
Again Mrs. Gandhi took the animal welfare portfolio to her new post. Subsequently, with fewer other ministerial duties, she escalated her work on behalf of animals. As well as promoting enforcement of long-neglected animal welfare laws, and funding Animal Birth Control programs to help Indian cities meet the 1997 goal of achieving no-kill control of street dogs by 2005, Mrs. Gandhi founded the National Institute of Animal Welfare on an eight-acre site in Faridabad, a Delhi suburb.
Conceived as the first animal welfare university in the world, offering a four-year degree, the institute was to train personnel to carry out the ABC programs, other projects of the constitutionally created Animal Welfare Board of India, and the administration of zoos, which in India must be accredited by the Central Zoo Authority.
The campus was 40% completed, and Mrs. Gandhi was recruiting staff in anticipation of enrolling 200 students in residence by fall, when she lost the animal welfare ministryand probably lost funding for the universityas apparent result of a high-profile confrontation with the Indian biomedical research establishment.
"I am again in a battle for my life!" Mrs. Gandhi e-mailed to ANIMAL PEOPLE on May 24. "We raided the premier AIDs research lab in India last week and found a chamber of horrors, rescued the animals, and took them away. Now Health Minister C.P. Thakur and many scientists and journalists are denouncing me all over the place.
"There is a cabinet reshuffle coming up, and this is perfectly timed for that," Mrs. Gandhi continued, recognizing the possibility that she might soon be politically sacrificed.
She was, but Thakur lost his job too.
Indian news media were mostly sympathetic to the cause of scientific research. Most were sympathetic as well to the production of vaccines and snakebite antivenins from blood serum drawn from horses, another branch of the biomedical industry that Mrs. Gandhi kept under close surveillance.
At the same time, there was widespread revulsion at some of the laboratory conditions exposed by the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals, appointed by the Animal Welfare Board and chaired by Mrs. Gandhi since February 1996.
The abuses were documented in a 110-page Pictorial Guide on the Status of Animals in the Animal Houses of Indian Laboratories, compiled by Dharmesh M. Solanki of the CPCSEA and published by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals/ India, based in Mumbai, on June 8.
The biomedical industry, "sacrificing" animals in the name of science, might not have had the clout to oust Mrs. Gandhi if she had not simultaneously been conflicting prominently with devotees of religious animal sacrifice, including King Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah of Nepal, who visited the Goddess Kamakhya temple in Guwahati, Assam, on June 27 to sacrifice a buffalo, a goat, a sheep, a duck, and a pigeon.
Gyanendra was in India primarily to discuss national defense with BJP leaders. Told that the sacrifices were planned, Mrs. Gandhi informed his entourage and news media that they would be illegal under the 1960 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. People for Animal Rights applied for a restraining order against the sacrifices, but the Jhalukbari police detachment, asked to enforce it, failed to do so, citing an exemption in the 1960 law for sacrifices conducted "in a manner required by religion."
Most Hindu religious scholars agree that animal sacrifice "is forbidden in the Hindu scriptures for the modern age," as Brahmin teacher Vasu Murti explained in a recent Internet denunciation of the practice. Yet sacrifices are still routinely performed by Nepalese Hindus, whose rituals and teachings were long isolated by geography from the mainstream of Hindu belief, by members of the relatively large and influential Kali cult, and by scattered rural communities.
Among the practitioners of animal sacrifice are many members of regional Hindu fundamentalist political parties, who at the national level support the BJP coalition.
Heavy military security kept animal welfare inspectors and advocates at a distance from the Goddess Kamakhya temple while the animals were killed by royal priest Acharya Raguhunath Aryal. Aryal flew in from Kathmandu especially to do the ritual bloodletting in front of Gyanendra, his wife Queen Komal Rajya Laxmi, and his daughter Princess Perna.
As protest erupted from animal advocates around India, Gyanendra returned to the temple on June 28 to sacrifice a goat.
"The king has committed an unpardonable crime by showing utter disrespect to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act," said PfA spokesperson Sangeeta Goswami. "The king and the priest should be booked and punished."
Although Maneka Gandhi was sacrificed on the altar of political expedience, Bihar and Jharkhand state governor V.C. Pande on June 4 ruled via his Principal Secretary, Mithilesh Kumar, that animal sacrifice is not "required by religion" for Hindus, and should therefore be halted within Bihar and Jharkhand.
Pande moved at request of Acharya Kishore Kunal, vice chancellor of the Kameshwar Singh Darbhanga Sanskrit University.
Bihar and Jharkand formed a regional Animal Welfare Board only this year, the last state in India to do so.
The Madras High Court during the last week in July ordered Tamil Nadu state authorities to show cause why they should not be enjoined from allowing any animal sacrifices to occur within Tamil Nadu. First Bench chief justice B. Subhashan Reddy and Justice D. Murugesan acted in response to a petition brought by A.V. Krishna Moosad of Trivandrum, who cited the Tamil Nadu Animals and Birds Sacrifice Prohibition Act of 1957, the Tamil Nadu Animal Preservation Act of 1958, and the 2001 Slaughter House Rule, an amendment to the act, all of which forbid animal slaughter or sacrifice outside of a designated, licensed, and inspected slaughtering facility.
Mrs. Gandhi had also recently clashed with the federal Ministry of Agricult-ure over a five-year plan which according to the Times of India called for lifting the national ban on beef exports, removing restrictions on buffalo slaughter, allowing bullocks to be killed at any age, weakening the federal Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, opening more authorized slaughterhouses, moving jurisdiction over slaughterhouse zoning from the local level to the state level, and forming a national Meat Board, with a mandate to double Indian per capita meat consumption.
After stripping Mrs. Gandhi of the animal welfare portfolio, Prime Minister Vajpayee gave it to the agriculture minister. Vajpayee soon found himself compelled to rescind it, however, because of the conflict of interest widely perceived in India between promoting animal welfare and promoting beef consumption. Rumors were already flying that at least one senior agriculture ministry official had taken a bribe for nonenforcement of animal welfare laws.
U.S. legislative bodies have never seen a conflict in assigning enforcement of the federal Animal Welfare Act to the USDA and putting state agriculture departments in charge of enforcing humane laws, but rather than cite the U.S. example to defend the initial reassignment, Vajpayee passed the animal welfare portfolio next to current Minister for Forests and the Environment. T.R. Baalu, of Chennai.
Mrs. Gandhi told ANIMAL PEOPLE that she was not well acquainted with Baalu, but knew the ministry, having held the same post herself and having handled animal welfare matters from that office under the Congress regime.
It was as Minister for Forests and Environment that Mrs. Gandhi in 1989 initiated legal action to enforce a long neglected provision of the 1972 Indian Wildlife Act, allowing confiscation of all lions, tigers, leopards, nonhuman primates, and bears from traveling shows and circuses, and it was in cooperation with the present ministry staff that Mrs. Gandhi finally started the confiscations in May 2001, after winning a decade-long court battle with representatives of the circus industry.
"Over the past year, the ministry's Central Zoo Authority has, with the help of state police and nongovernmental organizations, seized and relocated 158 lions, 38 tigers, six bears and two panthers," the Times of India said. "Under the new notification, Baalu will now look after prevention of cruelty to animals, matters relating to pounds and cattle trespass, and the administration of `gaushalas' and `gausadans' (cowsheds and houses)."
Baalu was expected to be mainly a caretaker for the animal welfare portfolio, which political analysts suggested would soon fade to obscuritybut he had other ideas.
If the biomedical industry really hoped they were rid of Mrs. Gandhi, Baalu had a surprise for them.
"Asked on Tuesday about former minister Maneka Gandhi continuing as chairperson of the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals, environment minister T R Baalu said, 'Let her continue,'" The Times of India reported on July 23. "Gandhi's term as chairperson is till 2004. 'It's a sensitive matter,' said Baalu. 'I have just taken over. Sister Maneka is more knowledgeable than me, and there is no confrontation between us.'"
With Mrs. Gandhi removed from the animal welfare ministry, other opponents of her policies emerged to pursue their special interestsamong them Minister of Textiles Kashi Ram Rana, who sought to lift a national ban imposed on the trade in shahtoosh, a fabric made from the fur of endangered chiru antelope. International traffic in shahtoosh is forbidden by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
Noisiest, however, were foes of street dogs, seeking to replace the ABC sterilization and vaccination programs with poisoning or catch-and-kill. Though poisoning and catch-and-kill neither lastingly reduce the street dog population, nor control rabies, still a relatively common disease in India, they do create patronage jobs for poorly skilled supporters of local politicians. Demands for dog-killing, amplified nationally by the Times of India and the Deccan Herald, were especially prominent in Surat and Bangalore.
Surat, as Mrs. Gandhi often mentions in explaining the ABC approach, aggressively poisoned street dogs in August 1994. After the dog poisoning, when the Surat rat population predictably exploded, the city poisoned rats. Fleas carrying bubonic plague then leaped from dying rats to humans, the most accessible alternate hosts. The result was the deadliest outbreak of plague anywhere in the world in half a century. At least 693 people were infected; 57 people died.
C. Dhananjay, secretary for a group called Stray Dog Free Bangalore, meanwhile drummed up public panic by asserting that because rabid dogs sometimes bite cows, "Unless milk is well-boiled, there is a risk of exposing children to rabies."
The Hindu called Dhananjay's claims "bizarre," which was something of an understatement.
Reporter K. Satyamurty of The Hindu also described a case in May 2002 in which Harish Prasad, 11, was "rushed to a private nursing home with sudden convulsions and high fever. He was diagnosed as having rabies in the basis of a 'water test,' as narrated by his father, Gopal Krishna. On the advice of the doctors at the nursing home, the boy was removed to the Isolation Hospital where, after showing a glass of water to the boy, the doctors confirmed the diagnosis. The doctors had the boy's arms and legs tied, and told the distrought father that 'If he is still alive, we will treat him tomorrow.'"
Employed by the National Tubercul-osis Institute, Gopal Krishna told institute director P. Jagota, M.D., what had happened.
"On learning that the boy was never bitten by a dog, Dr. Jagota had him shifted to Manipal Hospital," Satyamurty continued, where he was found to be suffering from viral meningitis, was properly treated, and fully recovered within a month of treatment.
Dr. Jagota told Satyamurty that most cases of alleged rabies she hears about turn out to be misdiagnosed cases of other diseases causing raging fever, and most cases of dogbite she hears about result from people keeping purebred pet dogs tied up at their homes or shops most of the time, resulting in excessive territoriality.
Street dogs who "survive the cruelty of nature, traffic, and starvation," Dr. Jagota said, tend to be "affectionate and always eager to make friends with humans." She strongly endorsed the ABC approach to street dog population control, and recommended adopting street dogs as pets.
Of her dismissal, Mrs. Gandhi herself wrote that, "A Zen story may be applicable: A crow had a piece of meat in his beak and as he flew, he was pursued by hundreds of other crows. He tried to elude them and went up and down and sideways and whatever. Finally, he let the piece of meat go, and the other crows sped after it. Said the crow in relief, 'I may have lost the meat, but I have gained the sky.' But is there anything to eat in the sky? We will now find out."
>>M.C.