THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The residents in the West Fort area felt something was not right about the ‘arattu’ procession on April 1 even before the elephant Puthupalli Mahadevan got scared and ran wild. There were considerably more elephants that the locals had ever seen during Painkuni festival. “We had never seen nine elephants during Painkuni,” said Vasudevan Namboodiri, a West Fort resident. This was a violation of rules. An official circular issued in 2013, in the wake of a surge in elephant-related violence that year, said that temple authorities, if they cannot reduce or avoid the use of elephants, should at least not parade more elephants in a festival than they had paraded in the previous year.
“It was this legal freeze on elephant numbers that has been violated,” said animal activist M.N. Jayachandran. Local residents were also taken aback by the percussion that accompanied the procession. “It had never been so loud,” Mr Namboodiri said. In fact, it was an earth-shattering sound that is said to have eventually provoked Mahadevan to run scared. Just when the procession of deities, escorted by erstwhile royal family members and elephants, left the western gate of the temple, 1,001 ‘kathinas’ went off in a ritual explosion. This scared the elephants at the back. A witness said that the elephant at the rear end slapped the back of Mahadevan with its trunk, causing the shocked Mahadevan to run helter-skelter. The Captive Elephant Management Rules specify that when elephants move in file, one after the other, there should be a distance of at least three metres between the trunk of one elephant and the tail of the one moving in front.
Leave alone rules, even the mandatory meeting of the District Elephant Monitoring Committee was not held before the festival. It is this committee that certifies whether an elephant is fit for parade. “No one seems to have assessed the sound tolerance of the elephant,” said Hindu Aikya Vedi’s Bhargava Ram who had also accompanied the procession. “It was also very hot. Elephants, with their soft soles, would have found it difficult to walk on tar though it was evening,” he added. Mr Ram also said that early in the day the elephant was made to walk under the hot sun along the Kaithamukku area. According to Heritage Animal Task Force secretary V.K. Venkitachalam, there is a crack on one of the tusks of Puthuppally Mahadevan. “The bone marrow has been infected and through the crack blood and pus were found to be oozing. People have told me that there was a stink of pus around Mahadevan,” he said.
