He stands next to Durga in a snap clicked just after the tiny 5-year-old elephant was pulled out of a truck that had carried her all the way from Assam to Madurai’s Meenakshi Ammal temple. A middle-aged man with a stoop and a moustache, beaming in his white shirt and a cream-coloured veshti. His name is Vaidyanathan Krishnamoorthy. Seva Trust, a nondescript religious charity run by his wife, Anuradha Subramanian, gifted Durga to the temple in September 2026.
Durga, so young she had probably just been weaned, wasn’t the only one to make this long journey from Assam to Tamil Nadu. Anuradha’s Seva Trust also donated four more elephants – three pre-adolescent and one barely adolescent – to temples in Nagapattinam, Kanchipuram and Tiruvannamalai. Nagapattinam’s Vaitheeswaran Koil got Rupsing, said to be 13 years old. The Arulmigu Anmachaleswarar Temple in Tiruvannamalai bagged Hiralaland Shiva, said to be 8 and 6 years old, respectively. And Kanchi Kamakoti in Kanchipuram got Bijuli, said to be 5 years old.
Over the last month, these elephants have been at the centre of a storm. On one hand, devotees are jubilant. “The arrival of a new elephant at the Vaitheeswaran Temple – after a gap of exactly 23 years – has sparked immense joy and spiritual enthusiasm among local residents and devotees across Tamil Nadu,” reported ABP Tamil from Mayiladuthurai, Nagapattinam. On the other hand, a number of activists, forest officers and biologists in North-East India, Tamil Nadu and elsewhere have condemned these transfers on various grounds ranging from the trauma of the travel, to what awaits these elephants once pressed into temple servitude to larger questions about their origins.
That said, what we are seeing here is more than a reprise of the old debate on whether religious use of elephants should be permitted.
Over the last 10 years, India’s painstakingly developed protocol for curbing illegal trade in elephants has been hollowed out through legal dilutions like allowing the use of elephants for religious duties.
The largest beneficiaries of this erosion are individuals close to the ruling party – with BJP leaders actively facilitating and effectively gifting even wild elephants to people in their ecosystem.
Krishnamoorthy and Anuradha illustrate this expropriation.
There you have it. Over the last ten years, the BJP has not just been passing contracts and concessions to its cronies. It has also been handing India’s wildlife to people in its ecosystem. We had the infamous instance of Vantara. Thereafter, it has also been handing out elephants to a temples across India. These five elephants are just an instance.
This too is cronyism. Even India’s precious biodiversity is being seen as a personal fiefdom to be gifted around. Do read: https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/how-bjp-helped-judicial-krishnamoorthy-get-five-elephants-to-tamil-nadu.
Leave a Reply