Kerala cops seize ivory of ‘40 tuskers’ from Delhi smuggler

Umesh Aggarwal, dubbed the Sansar Chand of the ivory trade, was arrested on October 2 after a raid on his Laxmi Nagar home in east Delhi following the interception of call records of his middlemen arrested in Kerala in June.

Updated on: Oct 13, 2015, 01:37:06 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A raid on a Delhi artifact salesman-turned-ivory trader’s safe-house on Sunday led to the seizure of 487kg of ivory worth around Rs 12 crore, the largest in recent years, for which over 40 elephants could have been poached in three southern states over the last one year.

Carvings of ivory seized in a raid on an east Delhi house. (Jose L & Tenjin Norsang/IFAW/WTI . Photo by special arrangement)

Umesh Aggarwal, dubbed the Sansar Chand of the ivory trade, was arrested on October 2 after a raid on his Laxmi Nagar home in east Delhi following the interception of call records of his middlemen arrested in Kerala in June.

“His fortified house where every corner was under CCTV surveillance had a number of artifacts made of resins that resembled ivory. There was also an artifact-carving unit in the basement but no real ivory,” said Jose Louies of the Wildlife Trust of India, who assisted Kerala Police in the three-month long operation.

Aggarwal was then taken to Kerala and made to meet his two middle-men, Preston Silva and Aji Bright, who were arrested two months ago with about 50kg of ivory and ivory products meant for the Delhi trader.

Aggarwal denied his involvement in the trade, but investigators were able to nail him after the return of Aggarwal’s key aide, Eagle Rajan, from Sharjah where he had fled after the arrest of Silva and Bright.

It was then that Aggarwal allegedly confessed to shifting a large amount of ivory from his Laxmi Nagar home to a safe-house in congested Jaffarabad in north-east Delhi. He was brought back to Delhi last weekend and he led the joint Kerala and Delhi Police team to the hide-out where the ivory was recovered.

The illegal ivory haul would not have surfaced if the chief wildlife warden of Kerala, H Harikumar, had ignored the statement of a 62-year-old state forest department cook, Kunjumon. Harikumar ordered an inquiry into Kunjumon’s claim that over 20 elephants had been killed by poachers in the last 10 months in Kerala even though his subordinates dismissed him as “mentally unstable”. They said all ivory seized in Kerala was coming from outside the state.

Kunjumon, allegedly part of a poacher’s gang in Kerala, provided the telephone numbers of seven poachers, leading to the recovery of 18 elephant carcasses and the arrest of several poachers.

Getting to Aggarwal wasn’t easy. Louies said he had removed all ivory and any evidence linking him to Kerala from his home.

Aggarwal reportedly first told his interrogators he ran a company called Art of India selling artifacts and handicrafts to rich buyers and had nothing to do with the illegal ivory trade. After the ivory haul,

police discovered he used to send ivory bangles to Gujarat and Rajasthan, where they are considered high value ornaments.

Aggarwal was a salesman in a Delhi-based handicraft shop in the early 1980s when he came in contact with Rajan. The two became friends and Aggarwal decided to start his own business in artifacts made of ivory procured from poachers in Kerala.

Poacher got just Rs 10,000 for a kilogram of ivory which Aggarwal sold for between Rs 4-5 lakh in the form of artifacts. The finished ivory products were sent to Aggarwal on trains and through couriers marked as plastic items.

“Raw ivory has no value, finished one gets huge money. Umesh realised that early in his business days,” Louies said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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