There are no zero sum games on the edge of this forest

• After cutting down all the trees in your cities, now you want to deny the tribal their rights so that you, the urban elite, can come here for a break and click the tigers?

• Don’t miss the ethical confusion between eating farm-bred poultry and bush meat. The tribals never killed tigers — they don’t eat tiger meat — till they were instigated by commercial interests and their pimps who take away the skins for a pittance.

• In any case, more tigers have been shot by the royalty and the so-called civilised, educated hunters than the tribal can ever manage to.

The arguments would flow on. And on. And, frankly, at face value, they all have a point. Of course, the tribal hunter is no evil force at work. I have met quite a few of them. They are much like you and me, and they aspire to be even more like you and me. But that is precisely the point our tribal activists — urban elites themselves — miss while trading in simplifications similar to those that drove me away from the fireside.

If sniggering at the tribal poacher as evil involves some hypocrisy, imagining them as “the innocent sons of the forests” is akin to synthetic romanticism.

Devi Singh, the hunter-in-chief at Ranthambhore, is a well-to-do Moghiya sarpanch who was lured by promises of easy bucks. Even Kesra, who looks quite miserable in his torn baniyan, ran a small-time mafia and is hated by his neighbours and villagers in the adjoining area.

They are not content with their jungle life. No more. Money matters to them and they aspire to the good things of life. It is in this context — not the loss of one or two dozen tigers — that we must address the issue of tribal-tiger co-existence.

The activists seem to believe that the tribal would be happy if he/she is allowed to lead a forest life based on forest rights. But the tribal today wants his jeans and film music, her cosmetics and mobikes. Activists acknowledge it in a roundabout way by lamenting the tribal’s pathetic existence and demanding electricity, health centres, schools, etc, inside forests.

In a nutshell, they want the tribal to have traditional forest rights assuming they can’t do without it, and then seek to bring civilisation into the forest to make their life modern. The duality is so naive it smacks of a dubious agenda. The tribal activists are hawking a brazen prescription for destruction of our remaining green patches.

Killing tigers and other rare animals will just be an offshoot of this change in the mindset that the tribal communities have undergone in last decades. Earlier, they traditionally hunted to eat. As they become more and more acculturated towards the mainstream, they get increasingly corruptible. Now they also hunt for money. Just like you and I take bribes, or fudge tax returns.

So just like you and me, the “civilised” types, have no place inside the forests, the tribals have no future in the forests. No one has the right to make them guinea pigs to establish pet theories about how tribals are children of the wilderness. If they want to be part of the so-called mainstream, so be it.

The issue is far simpler than it appears in the cacophony of egoistic polemics. First, we have to agree that we want to save our remaining pockets of old growth forests. To do that, the tribal must be brought out with dignity, not thrown out. That is possible only if and when we accept that the tribal can’t be made to pay the price of our late realisation of the importance of conservation.

We have already destroyed our share of the green in the name of development. Now if we must stop tribals from exploiting their forests, we have to share the profits we have already made by exploiting our forests, with them. Precisely for this reason, we can’t crib about the huge cost of a proper rehabilitation programme.