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ON THE NIGHT of 16 March, a nine-year-old boy was playing in the courtyard of his home in Umarikala village, in Madhya Pradesh. His mother, Suraksha Dhakad, was feeding the cattle nearby and completing last-minute chores. Suddenly, she heard her son shrieking. She rushed to the courtyard to witness a horrific sight: a wild animal was mauling her son. In a panic, she lunged forward, grabbed her son’s hand, and tried to pull him away. But the animal’s jaws were locked. “It felt as if fifty men were pulling him from the other side,” she would later recount to journalists. “I used all my strength.” The child survived, but with deep wounds on his face, head and shoulder.
Suraksha and her husband, Hakim, identified the animal as a cheetah, describing its distinct black facial markings. The authorities refused to acknowledge this. Uttam Sharma, the chief conservator of forests at Kuno National Park, dismissed their claim, insisting it was a leopard. Just four kilometres from the village, Kuno is one of the sites of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s grand vanity project: Project Cheetah. The scheme, announced to great fanfare in 2022, involved introducing African cheetahs to India.
“There has never been a recorded cheetah attack on a human anywhere in the world,” Sharma told the media, asserting that “India’s cheetahs are no different.” But Hakim and other villagers in the area had never heard of a leopard attack in the area. Cheetahs, Hakim told me, “have been spotted at least fifteen–twenty times.” Gus Mills, a South African carnivore expert, agreed that a cheetah was the more likely culprit, explaining that while cheetahs are not known to attack humans in the wild, those raised in captivity—such as the ones in Kuno—exhibit different behaviours, particularly towards small children. “There are a few cases of them doing so in the captive situation and small children are often the subject of much interest to captive cheetahs,” Mills told me. When I asked Sharma if there was video footage or other proof to back the official claim that the big cat was not a cheetah, he simply stated, “when I say it is not cheetah, it is not cheetah.”