with Hugh Whistler, an Indian Police Service officer. V1 Salim Ali had little interest in the dry study of bird taxonomy, and entered into a collaboration with S Dillon Ripley, head of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.Vll Although Salim Ali refused to acknowledge the possibility, now unclassified papers reveal that Ripley was heading the American spying effort in Southeast Asia during the Second World War. Even though Ripley claimed to have discontinued his association with the American intelligence agency after the War, I personally encountered clear evidence that Smithsonian Institution’s Research Station in Panama was engaged in biological warfare research in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam war. US was guilty of large- scale destruction of the biodiverse forests of Vietnam by employing biological and chemical warfare agents, apart from killing many innocent women and children in massacres like that at MyLai in this 20-year war, and Smithsonian’s research in the tropics must have contributed to such atrocities in the Vietnam war. I attended with interest a lecture Dillon Ripley delivered in Bengaluru around 1980. ] was quite startled by his openly expressed contempt for Indians and wondered how this aspect of his personality seemed not to bother Salim Ali in the least.
Maharajas
Salim Ali had undertaken bird surveys in a number of Indian states sponsored by their Maharajas and was on friendly terms with them. The reputation of the Maharajas was that they cared only to please their British
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