GREAT INDIANS

Dr. Salim Ali, Kailash Sankhala and now Billy Arjan Singh. One by one the oaks are vanishing and sadly we have weeds replacing them. The steel spine that is required for tiger defenders is hard to come by today. When I asked Billy how he would like to be remembered soon after he was awarded the Sanctuary-ABN AMRO Lifetime Service Award in 2003, he replied, “I want simply to be remembered as Arjan Singh, a man who loved tigers and fought to keep them alive and safe from humans.”
Born in Gorakhpur on August 15, 1917, three decades before India’s Independence, the feisty ‘Billy’ Arjan Singh was a man ahead of his time and was considered by some to be the very soul of the Indian tiger. A former hunter, he always regretted his part in the tiger slaughter. He stopped shooting in 1960, and actively campaigned to end sport hunting. Unpopular for having helped put 26 shikar companies out of business 40 years ago, his life was always mired in controversy ever since he reintroduced Tara, a hybrid, zoo-born tigress into the wilds of Dudhwa. The forest department insisted that the cat had to be shot as a man-eater, but Billy insisted that Tara’s progeny are still doing well and have revitalised Dudhwa’s tigers. He chose to live near Dudhwa, in a corner of the world he christened ‘Tiger Haven’, from where he worked to protect tigers for over four decades.
Soon after Independence, on leaving the army, Billy had taken to farming near what is now the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve. Once, with his brother Balram and a friend called John Withnell, he shot two barasingha at Bhadi Tal, only to discover that they were a protected species. They promptly reported themselves to the Divisional Forest Officer, who let them off, complimenting them for their honesty in confessing their mistake. Billy was a pioneer settler, but as the years passed, farmers began to migrate in large numbers from Pakistan. When a large company called The Collective Farms and Forests Ltd. cleared 10,000 acres, he could see the writing on the wall and began to seek a halt to the destruction. In 1964, the same year the U.P. State Wildlife Board itself was established, Billy conducted a survey along with Amercian biologist George Schaller in the adjoining Ghola forest, only to discover that the presumed 1,500 barasingha had dropped to 600. Billy then submitted a proposal to protect the endangered barasingha and after some vacillation, Dudhwa became a sanctuary that shared a border with Nepal. And best of all, Tiger Haven was right in the middle of it. He created grasslands, salt licks and water sources to attract barasingha, which he also helped drive with help from Bhagwan Piari (Billy’s faithful elephant), beaters and crackers all the way from Ghola. Had he not done this, the barasingha would have succumbed to guns and land grabbers operating under the protection of Naxalites.
Years later, in 1972, he also managed to get the Kishanpur Sanctuary declared. By then the Wildlife (Protection) Act had also been notified, Project Tiger was on the anvil and, thanks to late Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the tide had begun to turn in favour of India’s wildlife.
When Sanctuary, India’s premier wildlife magazine, asked him what he thought was the main threat to tigers, he said, “Habitat fragmentation. This is what induced a division of one species into eight subspecies. In conjunction with poaching, habitat loss has devastated the tigers and has led to three subspecies vanishing altogether.” Billy suggested that we must have uniform control over tiger habitats, rather than the differentiated administrative control that is the rule today. A WWF gold medal winner, member of IUCN’s Cat Specialist Group, Honorary Wildlife Warden and recipient of the Padma Shree, Billy’s first and last love remained tigers. We would do well to remember his words: “The air we breathe and the water we drink stem from the biodiversity of the universal environment and its economics. The tiger is at the centre of this truth. If it goes, we go.” n Bittu Sahgal, Editor of Sanctuary Asia (Credit: Sanctuary Features)

Bittu Sahgal, Editor of Sanctuary Asia (Credit: Sanctuary Features)