A jumbo gap in Kerala’s violence data

Thiruvananthapuram: The state government seems to have grossly underestimated the danger from overworked festival elephants. Forest Minister Thiruvanchoor Radkhakrishnan said in the Assembly that only nine captive elephants had turned violent and three people killed during the just-concluded festival season from November 2014 to April 2015.

However, Heritage Animal Task Force secretary V.K. Venkitachalam said that 308 captive elephants were involved in 1,868 instances of them  flying off the handle since January 1, 2015. And it was not just three who were killed but 10.

Most of the incidents involved elephants used for religious festivals. The Task Force picked these figures from newspaper reports across the state. “How can the minister say that only three were killed when all the 10 deaths were reported on the front pages of  newspapers,” Mr Venkitachalam asked.

Of the 10 people dead, five were mahouts. The other five included a veterinary doctor, an elephant owner, an ex-serviceman, a driver and a vegetable vendor.

The first death this year on January 11 was that of the state’s foremost tranquilisation expert, Dr C. Gopakumar, 45, who had at least 150 successful tranquilisations to his credit. He was killed when a disturbed elephant he attempted to sedate went after him, gored him and crushed his chest with its forehead at Vaypoor near Thiruvalla.

On February 21, a makhana or tuskless male elephant, whose name has not been revealed, killed its mahout at the temple near Faroke in Kozhikkode district after it returned from a long temple procession. On March 21, it was a tragic collateral damage. Panmana Saravanan, an elephant with a roguish history that was used in a temple festival in Alappuzha, ran wild for nearly six kilometres and knocked down an ex-serviceman reading a newspaper in front of his house and stomped him to death.

Shockingly, the elephant that replaced this one, Chirakkadavu Thiruneelakantan, which too had killed four people before, killed its mahout in the same temple premises two days later on March 24. Then on March 27, a 19-year-old elephant named Korattikkara Vijayakrishnan, which had run amok 27 times before, killed its mahout at a temple near Kaippamangalam in Thrissur district.