For decades, the tiger mafia in India preferred the shortest routes to China’s demanding markets: through Nepal and Tibet. The longer northeastern route to Myanmar, meanwhile, was the mainstay of rhino horn traders who took consignments out of Assam. Since the 1990s, periodic seizures of pangolin scales in Meghalaya and Mizoram did point to the northeast route for wildlife contraband sourced from central India although tiger traders started significantly realigning their supply lines only just before the Covid pandemic. But even as the Myanmar route got busy with consignments of tiger bone and skins by 2022, the agencies tasked with busting them continued to operate in trenches. So much so, a string of arrests and seizures across India since mid-2023 failed to blow the lid off these new-age poaching syndicates — until this January. By then, as an investigating officer said, “the damage was done.” It is not difficult to see why. Story continues below this ad A tiger caught on camera (above) in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur forests showed up as a skin-and-bone consignment (top) in …