Millions of pilgrims enter India’s protected forests, including many high security national parks and tiger reserves, to visit temples. Human waste, plastic waste and speeding vehicles are big threats to the delicate ecology of forests.

Millions of pilgrims enter India’s protected forests, including many high security national parks and tiger reserves, to visit temples. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, the crowd swells to thousands. Mega annual events attract lakhs of devotees.

It is impossible to monitor such crowds when they fan out inside forests, camp, lop firewood, cook, bathe and litter. Human waste causes contamination and plastic waste chokes herbivores. Too many speeding vehicles threaten wild animals and blaring loudspeakers scare them away. It’s anybody’s guess what poachers make of the open season.

No administration stops pilgrims from entering protected forests. But this month, lakhs of pilgrims taking over Ranthambhore tiger reserve for the annual Ganesh mela has made news. Frustrated with the now-two-month-long interim ban slapped by the SC on tourism in core tiger forests, many are accusing the authorities of double standards for allowing rowdy pilgrims while shutting the door on law-abiding tourists.

A religious congregation cannot be challenged in India without grave consequences. Understandably, the Sawai Madhopur district administration and the Ranthambhore management pleaded helplessness. To be fair, the administration worked admirably to remove tonnes of garbage as soon as the fair got over. But the educated, liberal, tiger-loving tourist cannot quite stomach the rural pilgrim’s wanton disregard for wildlife and forest laws and the state’s helplessness compounded by vote bank politics.

But is any of it surprising? For the politician, allowing people access to their forest temples is far easier than ensuring food, shelter and jobs. The state, we know, is secular and the state knows the convenience of absence. The average Indian pilgrim is not known for public hygiene. Those familiar with the hinterland will know how every household keeps the indoors clean by dumping every bit of garbage outside the door and how an open sewage is nobody’s problem. The forests, remember, are the outdoors.

Not all pilgrims entering forests are poor or rural or uneducated. But none of India’s billion salt-of-the-earth villagers believes that a little lopping can harm a forest or taking an oily dip in a stream contaminates it. Forests naturally have a liberating effect on millions used to squatting by village bushes. Also, they are either blissfully fatalistic about animal encounters or aware of their strength in numbers and the resulting dispensability of a few for earning a little compensation from the government.

The welfare state, of course, is never totally absent. During the Ganesh festival in 2010, the Ranthambhore management regularly baited a wayward tiger that had earlier killed a man, to keep it from the pilgrims. The priorities are readily switched during such unusual times because no reserve manager wants to face a local politician leading the funeral procession of a wildlife attack victim, with a devout mob in tow.

However harmful to the wilderness and unacceptable to many of us, these are Indian realities. To feel outraged by these is to proclaim a complete lack of understanding of or an arrogant disregard for how our societies function far away from feel-good urban activism and debates. Sadly, nestled in this mock outrage, the tiger-loving tourist’s real argument – why deny us our little indulgences when they get away with doing so much – does not hold water.

Laws require social resonance to be effective. Murder, for example, is both legally punishable and socially unacceptable. But certain laws – barring child marriage, for example – took many decades to gain social acceptability. Conservation laws that make certain areas out of bounds for people are barely three to four decades old.

Unlike collecting firewood or poaching which are issues of material rights and have always been determined by the ruler, religious rights have almost always been a given. So when they enter the forests in thousands, the rural pilgrims do not reckon they are breaking any law. They are simply following a tradition as most of these temples were in place much before the green legislations or even the state of India came to be.

Increasing use of loudspeakers, plastic and cooking gas is evident. Gangs of young mischief makers can at times get innovative. Otherwise, the pilgrims still follow the same routine they did, say, 50 years ago. Much of it is callous but if they camp outdoors, they must also cook, bathe, eat and defecate. It is simply beyond their comprehension how any of it can possibly harm the forest or wildlife.

Nature and the elements are worshipped in all oriental religions. Trees and animals are revered as powerful symbols. Religion has been the reason why most Indian societies are remarkably tolerant towards the wild. The result is no less than a miracle and all carnivore species, except one, survive in the world’s most densely populated country. Yet, no forest temple trust or pilgrims I met ever claimed to be conservationists.

The rural devout does not know the science of conservation. For long, it has been a way of Indian life. Growing population and shrinking wilderness have changed that equilibrium in recent times when even traditional lopping and grazing leads to deforestation because of the sheer scale involved. But killing wild animals is still a taboo in most parts. In fact, the biggest threat from pilgrims is their feeding of wild animals. They have no idea why it is not good for the wild; just like they cannot fathom how bathing, cooking or defecating inside forests can possibly damage the environment.

On the other hand, most tourists and hoteliers assert that the tiger would not be secure but for tourism. The majority of these tiger-lovers knowingly flout the rules when it suits them. Some of these violations, such as blocking animal corridors or baiting big cats, are criminal offences. But even seemingly inconsequential acts, such as crowding or getting too close to wild animals for better viewing, are far more condemnable than the pilgrim’s excesses because these are carried out with full knowledge of potential consequences.

If the conservationist indeed feels outraged by the rowdy pilgrim, that outrage better be directed inward. The biggest failure of modern conservation practised by the urban elite is its inability to go beyond convenient symbolism. Instead of taking the message to the masses living around and affecting the forests, it is happy to create urban constituencies of glorified tourists (experts, activists, media et al), affluent tiger lovers and tourism service providers who seek to monopolise the country’s best forests for their intellectual and business pursuits.

It is already beyond the financial, even social, means of the average Indian villager to enter the tiger reserve next door as a tourist. When they run amok inside the same forests on certain auspicious days of the year, it is a blatant reminder from the grassroots of our exclusionist conservation. It does not demand outrage but introspection.