This is the hour of pride and power, Talon and tush and claw. Oh, hear the call! - Good hunting all That keep the Jungle Law. —Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Books

The old laws of hunting are dead and gone. As night spreads a malevolent silence in the forests of Rajaji National Park, Uttar Pradesh, a new kind of hunt is on. One that takes place in the dark, is surreptitious and clandestine - giving no chance to the animal. An open, camouflaged Gypsy, on four-wheel drive, powers along twisty jungle trails driving deeper into the bowels of the jungle.

One of the hunters has night-vision glasses - that help him pick out silent herds in a sea of darkness. Another wields a spotlight (powerful enough to blind a tiger) like a gun, switching it on occasionally, the sharp beam bouncing about in the foliage. Behind him stands a third man, face scrunched up in concentration, the barrel of his sports rifle intently following the spotlight's beam. Suddenly, the night-vision glasses pick up something. Everything happens all at once - the brakes are slammed, the spotlight swivels and there in the beam cutting through the darkness are two pairs of luminous eyes.

Two shots shatter the October night stillness and in a clearing lie two dead sambhars - both female. The men backslap each other. "We've got enough meat to gorge on for a week," says one. "Yeah," drawls the man with the gun, "but that's not going to stop me from coming back tomorrow for more."

Poor Salman Khan. He was just the wrong man, wielding a gun, at the wrong place.

The jungles today are teeming with a new breed of rich, influential hunters, men who casually take the lives of beautiful animals and think nothing of it. The list includes top industrialists, politicians, bureaucrats, foreign diplomats, senior defence officials, wealthy farmers and the odd bored Bollywood actor. Yes, it is against the law of the land, but for all of them the Wildlife (Protection) Act is merely an aberration. And because of their position in society, cases aren't registered and most forest officials look the other way. Many forest rest houses are booked for them where the staff bends over backwards to prepare their hunted meat. Tips are even shared: "Have you heard, the cook in Chilla makes great masala venison." It took a Salman Khan to bring the savage harvest of India's wildlife to light.

States started banning hunting in the '80s, but wildlife experts point out, it's just as common today as it was in the '60s, when it was legal. This isn't simple poaching: of villagers using traps or muzzle loaders. This is a brash breed that uses latest gizmos like souped-up four-wheel-drive jeeps with special seats for shooting, racks to ferry dead animals, night-vision telescopes, Italian sports rifles costing over Rs 2 lakh, jamming devices that leave forest guards incommunicado and cell phones that warn of approaching authorities.

In areas around large national parks there are even hints of a fledgling tourism industry that revolves around game hunting - all very hush hush. Around Corbett National Park in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, a well known hotel is said to organise deer shoots. In Rajasthan, after the Salman Khan case, Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat hinted that local guides organise hunting safaris. In Delhi, an embassy circuit of ambassadors and counsellors are regularly taken out by the city's elite for hunting expeditions. Most hunts take place in areas adjoining protected forests where the wildlife spills over, but the more brazen even venture into protected parks. As Union Minister for Environment and Forests Suresh Prabhu admits: "Yes, we know that a lot of hunting, most of it in unprotected areas, is still going on."

The reasons for this are simple: for one, hunting has changed hands. The age of the old-world shikari is gone. "Gentlemen hunters", as they preferred to be called, came from elite families. They were like an old boys' club, a sporting tribe that followed a strict set of hunting rules. They shot only what their hunting licence specified. They never shot female animals or their young ones. For these men, hunting had an ethic. Placing bait in the forest and sitting on a machan (perch) was dishonourable. Stalking an animal on foot, outwitting it on its territory and then killing it fetched far more glory. Says Vijay Soni, a former hunter who now preaches conservation: "It was the thrill, the sport, the fact that you were outdoors that made one hunt. We were totally different from these punks of today."

One reason why the old shikari is going the way of the dodo is the Wildlife Act. An entire way of life was suddenly banned. Some of the old shikaris continued to hunt but fines and threat of imprisonment meant they couldn't do it with the same flamboyance - it was illegal so it had to be covert. So, many of these gentlemen shikaris hung up their rifles. Their place has been taken by today's trigger-happy city-slickers for whom the code of hunting seems as puzzling as particle physics. Says Ashok Kumar, a former hunter who runs the Wildlife Protection Society of India: "These guys just enter the forest and shoot as they please." He recalls a particular incident where one such neo-hunter couldn't fathom the old shikari maxim: "Sun down means gun down." Bewildered, he told Kumar: "Arre bhai, I do not understand this. Shikar has to be done at night."

This new breed of hunters has power and enjoys misusing it. In Punjab, the Wildlife Department identifies police officials and bureaucrats as the new shikaris. Says Gurmeet Singh, chief wildlife warden of the state: "They (the VIP hunters) don't consider it an offence." Nobody in the staff dare try to arrest them. A few who did attempt recently were instead implicated by the police in a dacoity case. In Uttar Pradesh, Wildlife Department officials are alarmed at how farmhouses and "specialty hotels" have sprung up around the Corbett National Park. Says R.L. Singh, chief wildlife conservator of Uttar Pradesh: "We are helpless since there is no law to restrict sale of land around the park." What is worse is that some hotels conduct night safaris, which forest officials contend are often merely a disguise for hunting expeditions.

Corbett, despite being considered one of the best guarded parks in the country, has had its share of violations. A few years ago, members of the Thapar family, a well-known industrialist group, were caught red-handed when they landed a helicopter in the sanctuary. Before this, a team of IAS and IPS officers had been nabbed for hunting cheetal inside the park. They would have got away but for the fact that a Union minister was present in the park at that time. He mounted enough pressure and the officials were booked. But as usual the case lies pending somewhere in the labyrinth of the judicial system. In Bengal, wildlife officials tell horrifying tales of how hunters with the right connections managed to wangle permits to shoot rogue elephants. Being bad shots, most of them ended up shooting and wounding the wrong elephants.

The defence forces are culpable too. When she was prime minister, Indira Gandhi, the political force behind the Wildlife Act, had even convinced the three defence chiefs to issue a statement declaring that anyone from the forces caught hunting would be court martialled. The reason: everyone knew the defence forces loved hunting. Says a wildlife expert: "You have to understand the psyche. Here are a bunch of men at far-flung posts with guns in their hands and nothing to do. Hunting suddenly becomes as glorious as war." The North-east is ridden with such examples. In fact, one such officer told INDIA TODAY how his non-commissioned officer would turn up every week saying the men wanted meat. "I would shoot animals, then make the men pick up the empty shells so I could file a report of exchanging fire with a group of insurgents."

But what makes this new breed take to hunting? One reason is that hunting in India has always been a way of life - an ethos, even (more so today) a status symbol. In the good old days, when hunting was the prerogative of the nobility, a maharaja's worthiness could be determined by the number of tiger skins he had collected - a booty of 100 tigers was a fair benchmark. Indeed, the number of kills, in a sense, was a measure of their masculinity. It is no coincidence that Salman Khan, so macho that he can't keep his shirt on in his films, was caught hunting black bucks - shooting them down and then slitting their throats. Similarly, the other filmstar who has a history of hunting offences also happens to be the muscle-flexing son of a former MP. This machismo is addictive. In Rajasthan, for instance, Rajput boys eagerly prowl the desert sands for game, young studs in their open jeeps with the scent of a kill in their nostrils.

Besides this strange mix of status and machismo, the other reason for hunting today is meat. In the capital, the staff of certain embassies hold regular barbecues of delicacy meats in their swish south Delhi bungalows. Most of the venison (blue bull, cheetal or hog deer) and wild boar is available in Nagaland markets. Similarly, in Chandigarh the upper-end social circuit exchanges wild meat pickle as gifts. In western Uttar Pradesh, a Central minister during Chandra Shekhar's administration was caught red-handed serving cheetal meat at a New Year's party. To date, wildlife officials point out, family members living in his farm just on the periphery of Rajaji National Park go on regular shooting orgies. In Uttar Pradesh, rich farmers along the Sathiana belt near Dudhwa National Park are known to feast on swamp deer. In the '70s, wildlife figures put the population of swamp deer in the area at 1,600. Today, no more than 50 survive. Similarly, in the Karera Wildlife Sanctuary of Madhya Pradesh, hunters have wiped out more than 3,000 black bucks, pushing down their population to 500.

Such large-scale hunting can only be done if forest guards are looking the other way. Problem is, these rich, influential hunters can easily wave off the forest staff, most of the time even ensuring their covert help in the hunts. Sometimes, the forest officials themselves develop itchy trigger fingers. In Arunachal Pradesh's East Kameng district, a forest ranger along with his contractor friends shot a hog deer from atop an elephant right inside the Pakhui Wildlife Sanctuary.

Trouble is the underpaid and overworked forest guards in this country are a motley group of disillusioned men whose beats sometimes cover as much as 50 sq km of forest that they patrol on rickety bicycles. For instance, the forest tract in Uttar Pradesh that stretches over 400 km from Kanpur to Saharanpur has only 14 guards. Right now, the whole of Punjab has only 40 forest guards when even the sanctioned strength is 62. Says Additional Inspector General of Forests S.C. Sharma: "What can you expect? There are no funds." According to him, the Environment and Forest Ministry gets less than 1 per cent of the GDP, out of which less than 4 per cent goes towards forests. The Salman Khan incident has spurred the ministry into some serious introspection: it plans to have crack commando teams in all states to protect wildlife, an organisation set up on the lines of the Narcotics Control Bureau to go after the big-time hunters and special award schemes for forest guards who show exemplary courage. But as of now, these are half-baked, knee-jerk ideas that will take a while to implement.

An interesting fallout of the entire controversy is that it has once again raised the debate of whether hunting should be legalised. Old-time shikaris believe that legalising hunting in a small way would bring in the bucks. During the days of legalised hunting a company, say Allwyn Cooper (run by the Shukla brothers of Madhya Pradesh), would charge $2,500 for a 15-day tiger hunt. Today, they say foreigners would be willing to pay $30,000 for a crack at the tiger. At the expense of a few, their reasoning goes, you can save the rest. Besides, it would also ensure less poaching. The logic: licences should be given to hunters of repute who look upon the sport as a disciplined activity and once in the jungle would ensure that poachers are kept out.

The old shikaris point out that the Indian Wildlife Act is a list of don'ts that in any case is ineffective since every huntable species has slipped into a fast track towards extinction. A classic case is the tiger: there is enough habitation in the country right now to sustain 10,000 tigers but their current population only hovers around 3,000. This is because poaching is rampant. Says K.K. Singh, a former shikari: "Bring back the educated shikari and you might even save the tiger."

But there are many detractors of this suggestion. First, implicit in the legalised hunting theory is the fact that, unlike the rest, the gentleman shikari is capable of self-restraint. But history disagrees. The ornithologist Salim Ali wrote about a conversation that took place in 1953 with an old man with palsy who braced his rifle on a stick. "I'm happy today because I've shot my 1,100th tiger," he told Ali. The man was Ramanuj Saransingh Deo, the maharaja of Surguja, who ended up with 1,157 tigers.

There are several others like him. Points out Mahesh Rangarajan, a conservation expert currently researching a book on shikar: "Records show that 20,000 tigers were shot for sport alone between 1860 and 1970." Many experts feel that hunting, especially after World War II and with the advent of express rifles, killed large populations of wildlife. Later, many of them, like repentant butchers (Jim Corbett is one example) too up -the cause of conservation. "Besides", argues M.K. Ranjit Singh, former forest secretary and the architect of the Wildlife Act: "In today's world, letting a few hunt while others watch isn't feasible."

But perhaps in the end the Salman Khan incident itself brings hope of a solution. Ranjit Singh believes that to save the fauna one must create and adhere to the doctrine that animals are divine and that killing them is wrong. Just like the Bishnois. Involvement of the local communities, after all most of them aren't happy about senseless killing, could be the real answer. To somehow give them a stake, make them monitor the jungles, encourage them to rise against poaching - that is the only hope left for conservation. Otherwise, there is no way to stop wildlife from falling prey to the insensitivity of humankind.

—with Ramesh Vinayak, Roshan Tamang, Avirook Sen, Uday Mahurkar, Subhash Mishra, Stephen David and N.K. Singh

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