Gwalior: Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrated his 72nd birthday by releasing cheetahs into an enclosure at Kuno National Park in Sheopur district of Madhya Pradesh on Saturday. Modi’s birthday falls on September 17. The Prime minister with Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan stood on a small tower and turned the wheel of a lever of the cages in which the Cheetahs were kept. They entered the enclosure one after another. They will stay in the 450-foot-long enclosure for one month.
The royal guests will have the tang of a baby blue bull (nilgai), four horned antelope and spotted deer. There are a few trees and an adequate amount of grass for the herbivores inside the enclosure.
There are eight cheetahs – five females between two and five and three males between 4.5 and 5.5 years of age. It was decided that the plane carrying the cheetahs would arrive from the capital of Namibia Windhoek at Jaipur airport, but the plan had been changed, and they were brought to Gwalior, from where they were taken to the Kuno National Park by a helicopter.
The Prime Minister said that the cheetahs can be found in India again after more than 70 years, as the last cheetah was killed in 1947 and, in 1952, cheetahs were declared extinct in the country.
Nevertheless, releasing cheetahs has turned into a political slugfest between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress. When the BJP leaders went gaga over Project Cheetah, the Congress said that the proposal for bringing African Cheetah was put up in 2009. The next year, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government approved the proposal.
In the same year, the then Union Minister Jairam Ramesh visited Africa and saw the cheetahs. The next year, the government of India gave Rs 50 crore to the African government for translocating cheetahs to India. The Supreme Court stopped the Project Cheetah in 2012, but the ban was lifted in 2019.
Ramesh tweeted on Saturday: “PM hardly ever acknowledges continuity in governance. The Cheetah project going back to my visit to Capetown on 25.4.2010 is the latest example. The tamasha orchestrated by PM is unwarranted and is another diversion from pressing national issues and #bharatjodoyatra1/2.”
