From the Department of News That Shouldn’t Be News: Two lions were sent from Tripura’s Sepahijala Zoological Park to North Bengal Wild Animals Park in Siliguri, in a very standard animal exchange. The lion’s name is Akbar, and the lioness’s is Sita. End of story.
Right?
Thanks to India’s bottomless national supply of busybodies, it only takes a bog-standard day of nothing at all happening for a wild reaction to follow. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is not known for its phlegmatic temperament, in fact, it’s famous for putting the fundament back into fundamentals—but even for them, this is a bit pathetic.
Have they run out of humans to harass, that they’re now picking on zoo SOPs? On the other hand, everyone is used to the VHP’s tantrums; people laugh at them and get on with life.
So the VHP filed a writ petition in the Calcutta High Court claiming blasphemy, assault on religion, and generally hurt sentiments, because a lioness named after a Hindu female deity was housed with a lion named after a Muslim emperor; people laughed at them, partly from amusement, mostly from contempt, and got on with life. So far, so normal—haha, how absurd, end of story.
Right?
So tragically wrong.
The Court disapproved of the writ petition, as you can imagine—but not in a good way. The judge thought that the VHP should stop focusing on its hurt feelings, and focus on the hurt feelings of all of society. Why limit yourself to a writ petition when you could do a Public Interest Litigation (PIL)? In other words, he thought the complaint reasonable enough to hold as a societal standard.
He breathed fire at everyone about the ‘controversial’ names. Would you name an animal after Rabindranath Tagore, roared the court. Would you name animals after gods, mythic heroes, freedom fighters, or Nobel laureates, would you?
Before you could say WTF, the Tripura government had suspended the state’s principal chief conservator of forests (wildlife and ecotourism), Prabin Lal Agrawal, on whose watch these blasphemous lions had been named. At this point, WTF no longer covers it; the only sane response is to climb into Kafka’s lap and suck one’s thumb.
The case of the love jihadi lions is one of those increasingly common instances in which the democratic petticoats of Old India are hoicked up to reveal the khakhi knickers of a New India, gloriously free of institutional rationality.
The Calcutta High Court may not be bursting with judicial role models (viz ex-justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay, who was in talks to join the BJP while he was still on the bench, and is now in the BJP), but no matter how moth-eaten, Indian courts are the last recourse of the Indian citizen. It is the collapse of this institution that is quickly turning mirth into strangled coughs.
What deserves only a hearty bit of pointing and laughing now requires a tediously thorough rebuttal. It’s the kind of buzzkill you might experience if the party clown you hired for your kid’s birthday suddenly put a gun to your kid’s head.
The Indian Express took one for the team by running a scrupulously researched 1,200-word story on the history of names given to Indian lions and tigers. It featured a timeline and everything, and dozens of sentences like this: “At least 13 tigresses have been named Sita/Seeta/Seetha by 12 zoos in Karnataka, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Assam, Punjab, Bihar, Rajasthan and Odisha since 1974.”
Nobody should have to do this story. Our institutional responses should be better. Our collective skin should be thicker. The lunatics shouldn’t be running the asylum. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
We might already be wearing the knickers over the petticoats. It’s a terrible look.
(Mitali Saran is an independent writer, editor, and columnist. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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