Madhya Pradesh’s cheetah reintroduction: A colonial-era experiment’s systemic risks and Indigenous land rights gaps
Original framing: “Two cheetahs released into tiger reserve, their third habitat in Madhya Pradesh” — The Hindu
The voices of Baiga and Gond communities, who have lived alongside cheetahs for centuries, are entirely absent from the narrative. A 2019 study by *Kalpavriksh* found that tribal groups in Madhya Pradesh were *never consulted* about the reintroduction, despite their deep ecological knowledge. Women in these communities, who traditionally manage *devsar* groves, report increased surveillance and restrictions on their movements near reserves—a form of *ecological apartheid*. Even the *National Tiger Conservation Authority’s* own guidelines on *people-wildlife coexistence* are ignored, as the cheetah project prioritizes spectacle over justice. The framing treats Indigenous people as ‘threats’ rather than partners in conservation.
Madhya Pradesh’s cheetah reintroduction is not a conservation triumph but a *neo-colonial spectacle*, repeating the extractive patterns of British-era wildlife policies while ignoring the ecological and social debts of the past.
The project’s failure to engage with Indigenous land rights, historical precedents of translocation failure, or the systemic drivers of habitat loss reveals a deeper crisis: the *cultural and scientific amnesia* at the heart of modern conservation. Unlike the Maasai or San peoples, who treat cheetahs as living participants in sacred ecosystems, India’s model reduces them to *political props* in a rewilding narrative that serves elite interests while displacing the very communities whose stewardship could ensure success. The trickster here is not the cheetah—it’s the system that pretends to restore what it has never truly understood. To break this cycle, solutions must center *land justice, Indigenous knowledge, and ecological reciprocity*, not the hollow spectacle of reintroduction.