Valmik Thapar, One-Man Army which secured Tiger-with love and amazement (1952-2025). Bharat News

One truth one-person army, he wrote more than two dozen books on most big cats, presented several wildlife documentaries, including the seminal BBC series Land of the Tiger (1997), and remained the most vigorous articulate for conservation in India since the 1990s.

Due to no formal training in wildlife biology or protection, Thapar developed a deep understanding of tiger behavior, as he kept it, looking at wild tigers in Ranthambore in five decades. In 1976, it was an opportunity with Fateh Singh Rathore, the then director of the Ranthmbore Tiger Reserve, which tilted him for life.

Both vocal and often contradictory, Rathore and Thapar formed an uncertain partnership – until the death of Rathore in 2011 – which was affected and, often, shaped India’s protection efforts and policies for decades.

Thapar served in several top bodies of the government, including the National Board for Wildlife and the Central Strong Committee of the Supreme Court. He was also a member of the Tiger Task Force established to determine the reforms after the disappearance of tigers from Sariska in Rajasthan in 2005.

It was also the year when I started learning the mercury methods of India’s Tigerman.

Thapar had warmly supported my work in the Bharatiya Express from the day when I first reported the total loss of tigers in the Sariska Tiger Reserve of Rajasthan in January 2005. They offered me encouragement, insight and contacts, as the investigative series took me to parks across the country: Ranthambor (Rajasthan), Panna, Panna, Panna, Kanna, Kanna, Kanna) (Bihar) and Palamu (Jharkhand) in the next three months.

In May 2005, I described how Ranthambore was in dilapidated despite attracting more money than all other tiger stores. A large part of those funds, including Thapar’s NGO Ranthambor Foundation, was received. The report appeared in the morning and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Ranthambor. Thapar said that his last phone call will be on what he said.

This was a couple for a couple of young conservationists, who had given the green signal to how many times Thapar had used Bamon, how he failed to save his “tigers”. “Valmik is in love with his ego,” his critics will carp.

Two months later, it was Thapar himself, which he preferred to do, back to him, which will alert me to the Tiger Task Force report as “prohibition of supporters”, which saw that the tiger “is not about the tiger … but about the rebuilding of forest economies.”

The famous stubbornness of Thapar – a major shield for their activism – did not come in the way of changing her mind. Illegal areas are often impractical, he eventually accepts, and “protection is impossible without community support.”

Thapar established its Ranthambor Foundation in 1987 to work towards integrating local communities to integrate efforts, and participated with another non-profit, diarrhea to make livelihood for displaced villagers.

But the battle of Thapar, as he wrote his 2012 book Tiger My Life, Ranthambor and beyond, “Always was for the involvement space – where the tiger can be free, away from noise, away from humans.” However, after Sariska, the improvement was in the air and motivated him to look beyond the model of exclusion protection.

Around 2006, Thapar’s “Tiger Guru” Fateh Singh Rathore was also heating up for “soft strategies”-educating the children of traditional hunter communities-was pushed by the livingist Dharmendra Khadal, who recently joined the non-profit tiger of Rathore. From most-sticks, the Rathore-Thapar protection scale began decisively bending over the years in a case of years.

What has not changed, the government system had an inbuilt mistrust of Thapar, even though he remained in most parts of his life. Perhaps that intimate knowledge inspired him to see that “the bureaucracy killed more tigers than the bullets.”

Nevertheless, even Rajesh Gopal, who took a heavy flake as head of Project Tiger from Thapar during the years of Sariska, is in a hurry to claim that his opposing volunteer was not serving. “Everyone said and did, Valmik really helped the cause of the tiger,” Gopal told The Indian Express.

By his last days, Thapar was involved in conservation work, guiding Khandha on various tigerwatch projects, and curing a defined collection of Ranthambore’s photographs.

Thapar was born in 1952 in Mumbai and was the co-founder of Raj Thapar, journalists and political journal seminars. He is alive by his wife, actor and director Sanjana Kapoor, and son Hamir Thapar.

A few days before his death, I called Thapar to comment about a story that I was related to the use of live fodder to woo tigers. He never mentioned that he was admitted to a hospital, but easily “stupid talk they are doing, easily agreed to weigh to feed tigers and to risk life.”

Promised quote reached WhatsApp within minutes. Later, I came to know that he was quite inconvenienced and “an irritable mood made a fuss throughout the day.”

After seeing his first tiger, Thapar once wrote: “It was like shedding one layer of skin and putting it on the other … change.”

By its last days, the mere mention of tigers will have a similar effect on the man. William Blake’s tiger not always with “fearful symmetry”, but some soft, more magical.

There is no doubt that Thapar, such as many people who become the face of their cause, love carefully, adorable, even themselves. He loved tigers more.