The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau of India has launched a crackdown on traders selling dried penises of Indian monitor lizard online and passing them off as the rare hatha jodi plant.
Hatha jodi is a root that is found in some remote regions of Nepal and India. The name comes from its shape, which can be imagined as a pair of hands held in supplication. Many believe hatha jodi to be a good luck charm and it is also used in occult practices.
The fraud was exposed by a group of Indian and British researchers associated with the London-based non-profit World Animal Protection. They tipped off the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau, which launched a crack down in early May.
So far, the bureau’s sleuths, along with state police and forest officials, have raided traders in Telangana, Odisha, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, said a senior official in the bureau who asked not be identified because he was involved in the ongoing operation. “Our teams are now trying to nab a supplier based in North India,” he said.
The first raid was conducted in Hyderabad and three samples were seized there. They were then tested at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in the city. “Once we were sure about what we were dealing with, we planned other raids based on inputs,” the official said. “So far, the largest stock, of 210 dried Indian monitor lizard penises, has been seized in Bhubaneswar. Forty two samples were seized in Gujarat and 20 in Madhya Pradesh.”
India is home to four species of monitor lizard – Bengal monitor, water monitor, yellow monitor and desert monitor. Their possession and trade is prohibited under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. The Bengal and yellow monitor lizards are also protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna.
Although wildlife officials and police have detained some traders and interrogated them, they are yet to track down the poachers who have entered the trade chain of hathi jodi. “All the traders who have been detained are suspected to have knowledge of what they were actually selling,” the officer said. “They had created their own portals on the lines of popular retail websites and published declarations about the items offered for sale on those portals. Efforts are now being made to track down the poachers.”
The bureau is also trying to ascertain the scale of the fraud and for how long it has been operating, the official said.
Under threat
In a statement issued on June 20, World Animal Protection mentioned several online retailers through which lizard penises were being sold as hatha jodi. “Monitor Lizard Hemipenis is being passed off as tantric plant roots also known as Hatha Jodi to unwitting customers via major online retailers including Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Snapdeal and Etsy, among others,” the statement said.
“We were shocked at the sheer audacity and scale of this illegal wildlife trade,” said Gajender K Sharma, India Country Director, World Animal Protection. “Deceitful dealers claiming to sell holy plant root labelled as hatha jodi, are in fact peddling dried lizard penis to their unwitting customers. These illegal items are readily available in the UK and the US with potential street value of £50,000.”
It is not only for their genitals that monitor lizards are poached in India, Kartick Satyanarayan, co-founder of Wildlife SOS, pointed out. The skin of these lizards is used as a source of leather and for making percussion instruments, their meat and body parts are believed to have aphrodisiac properties and are used in traditional medicine. “All of this is a big part of wildlife crime that needs to be cracked down,” he said.
Several animals apart from lizards, including tigers, bears and snakes, are also poached for their genitals, which are sold in the international market mostly as aphrodisiacs.