The inside story: How diplomacy and grit brought cheetahs back to India

The cheetah is a stunningly beautiful animal. A feline supermodel, it can reach a speed of 105 kmph, accelerating from 0 to 95 in three seconds—performance that would make a Tesla take notice. India lost its last cheetahs at the dawn of independence, but the animal’s image stayed etched in the minds of generations of Indians, particularly Indian diplomats. In the main meeting room of Hyderabad House, where India receives world leaders, the dominant painting is of a cheetah by the English painter George Stubbs, commissioned by an 18th-century Madras governor. The cheetahs that were translocated to India came from near Otjiwarongo in Namibia, home of Dr Laurie Marker’s Cheetah Conservation Fund.

Before leaving for Indonesia in 2023 as ambassador, I had the privilege of calling on Prime Minister Modi. Among the leads he asked me to pursue was relocating some orangutans to an uninhabited island in the Andamans. As a diplomat with a forestry background, I understood the logic at once: dispersal improves a species’s survival chances. Only later, while reading a page-turner by my IFS colleague Prashant Agrawal, did I wonder whether the cheetahs had been on his mind when he mentioned them. My etymological mind was delighted, too. Cheetah comes from chitraka, Sanskrit for “the spotted one”. Orangutan joins two Bahasa (a Malay and Indonesian language) words, orang (person) and hutan (forest)—literally, “people of the forest”.

Agrawal’s Bringing the Cheetah Back to India is, in many ways, a thriller. The title gives away the ending, yet the journey is suspenseful enough to keep you reading. I have a collection of half-read books. This was not one of them. It is also a masterclass in persistent diplomacy. One fundamental problem: bringing cheetahs to India was India’s priority, not Namibia’s. The request had initially been denied. Agrawal turned it into a bilateral agenda item and stayed with it through Covid, delay and complacency, knocking on every door, including the Namibian president’s. He built a coalition of the willing—and the unwilling—to bring a coalition of cheetahs to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh.

Then came a deeper obstacle. Namibia’s conservation model permits the sustainable consumption of wildlife; India is fundamentally opposed to it. The MoU stalled on what looked like an unbridgeable divide. Agrawal proposed “sustainable utilisation” instead. The Namibians could accept it. India could live with it. Sometimes diplomacy turns on grand principles. Sometimes on a single word.

There are few conventional villains here. One cannot blame the oil company for grounding the “Queen of the Skies” over unpaid fuel, nor Namibia’s veterinarian for withholding the No Objection Certificate (NOC) until quarantine ended. Each was doing what made sense for them. Agrawal is different. He sees the whole picture and assembles the jigsaw. Once the cheetahs left Otjiwarongo, it was a race against time. Open trucks to Windhoek, the Namibian capital. Waiting under the blazing sun for formalities to be completed. A last-minute switch of the arrival airport from Jaipur to Gwalior. Then a standoff with the fuel supplier, solved by a little jugaad and a manager Agrawal knew from Mauritius. Planning helped. But so did thinking on one’s feet.

Every decision came back to a single question: what was best for the cheetahs? Sedation, food, even crate size (large enough for comfort, not so large the cheetahs could move about). It is science and art together, and Agrawal mastered both. The cheetahs came from a beautiful place to a beautiful country that had waited 75 years for them. For nature lovers, this is a must read. For diplomats, even more so.

The author is India’s ambassador to Indonesia

BRINGING THE CHEETAH BACK TO INDIA: HOW DIPLOMACY MADE CONSERVATION’S BIG MISSION POSSIBLE

By Prashant Agrawal

Published by Hachette India

Price Rs599; pages 224