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Before Bahraich 2024, there was Pratapgarh, Sultanpur and Jaunpur 1996. Almost 30 years ago, children began to mysteriously die in the villages of three districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh, creating terror and hysteria across the entire region, similar to what is happening now.
The attacks, almost a generation ago, can best be described in the account of those who investigated it: Veteran wildlife scientist, YV Jhala, who was then with the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun (still a part of united Uttar Pradesh) conducted a thorough probe in the area with his colleague, Dinesh Kumar Sharma.
Their 1997 paper, Child-lifting by wolves in eastern Uttar Pradesh, came to a sobering conclusion: The attacks had been carried out by a single wolf and not a pack.
The attacks started in March 1996 and lasted till October. Children were lifted with terrifying regularity—There was one attack every third day. And one child was killed every fifth day. The killer became so bold that children were taken from the centre of villages and even those that had dogs in them.
The attacks took place at a time when there was no artificial intelligence or social media. The internet age had only just dawned. But as Jhala’s paper shows, the reaction to the attacks was no less sensational and hysterical than it is now.
It all quickly became a theatre of the absurd. The three districts were some of the poorest in India. The superstitious villagers and many officials began to ascribe the attacks to a Manai, something similar to a shape shifting lycanthrope or werewolf. Irresponsible coverage (as the paper notes) only fanned the flames further.
“It had become virtually impossible for locals to travel within the region lest they be lynched by the residents on the belief that they were the “Manai”. All strangers including officials and ourselves were looked upon with suspicion. Several people were injured and some killed on this pretext. Old enmities were also settled and blame put on the “Manai”,” the authors note.
There are echoes of medieval and early modern Europe here, when men like Peter Stumpp of Germany, Giles Garnier of France and Thiess of Livonia were tried during the famous ‘Werewolf trials’ across the continent.
Jhala and Sharma camped in the region to investigate what actually happened. They started by calculating the area where the attacks took place. It came to 1,392 square kilometres.
They studied the landscape where the attacks took place. “Data were recorded on village hutment dispersion, proximity of crop fields or other cover, small domestic livestock and dogs seen in the villages, and number of vulnerable aged children encountered,” the paper notes.
The researchers conducted interviews with the parents of victims, eyewitnesses, survivors of attacks, forest officials and the medical officials that had conducted autopsies.
The remains of children were also studied by the researchers for forensic clues.
Slowly, the investigators began to piece together what had seemed like a jigsaw puzzle.
They found tracks at two different attack and body recovery sites. “Both sets resembled wolf tracks and were likely to be of the same individual,” as per the paper. The shape of the tracks made it clear to the researchers that it was not a feral dog or a striped hyena but an Indian wolf.
Hair found on the victims were examined and analysed scientifically. They turned out to lupine hair. The scientists themselves sighted a wolf in the vicinity of a site where an attack took place the next night. No hyenas or leopards had been spotted by anyone in these sites. The researchers also could not find any evidence of their presence.
The descriptions of the attacker shared during the interviews confirmed that it was a wolf.
Another clinching evidence was the analysis of the injury marks on the bodies of victims. The puncture wounds showed that the attacker was neither hyena, leopard or jackal since the distance between them was similar to the canines of a wolf.
Moreover, victims’ remains were found in the open, something which is typical of wolves. Had it been a leopard, the bodies would have been found in thick cover.
The remains were mostly intact and not strewn about, which meant a pack was not at work but a single animal.
Jhala and Sharma also found that some of the deaths may not have been wolf attacks. Like that of a girl who was thought to have been killed by a wolf but had instead drowned. The mother had made up the story to claim compensation.
The researchers also found that the attacks were usually clustered in an area of 100-400 sq km for several days to months. When the authorities shot wolves in one cluster, the attacker usually shifted to another and began operations there.
Since wolves make a kill every 3-4 days and the average distance between two consecutive attack sites was 13.28 km, the authors concluded that it was a single wolf, most likely the alpha of a pack.
The area provided plenty of cover in the form of tall grasses along waterbodies, as well as maize, sorghum and sugarcane fields.
The region was extremely poor and most children were raised by their mothers, with the fathers either dead, divorced or working in distant cities. There was no prey in the region, with the researchers spotting only a nilgai and two hares.
All this led Jhala and Sharma to conclude that the alpha wolf was hunting children to feed his pups who had just been weaned. Since there were very young children raised by single parents in the area and most of them were not attended to, they made easy pickings for a wolf.
Another theory they posited was that it could have been a wolf in search of territory.
However, the authors concluded that this individual’s behaviour was an exception and not the norm. They also called for a thorough study of the ecology of the wolf and the socio-economics of the region to bring more clarity.