Deprived of their rights, India’s forest communities still suffer continuing injustices and often extreme state brutality

On April 7, 2005, a tribal woman named Shanta Bai, nine months pregnant, was going into labour. That af-
ternoon, staff of the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department attacked her village of Ambakhera. Human rights workers say that little was spared. Crops were destroyed, villagers beaten and more than 180 houses demolished – including Shanta Bai’s. The forest guards dragged her outside before knocking it down. She delivered her baby under the trees.

This is a true story. It is also not particularly surprising. For such brutality is nothing unusual in the lives of India’s forest communities, particularly tribals who have experienced decades of state violence. Indeed, in the last three years alone an estimated one to three lakh families have been thrown out of their homes; 40,000 families were evicted in Assam alone. The injustice to India’s forest communities is hardly a thing of the past.

The now fiercely debated Scheduled Tribes (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill, 2005, is aimed at ending this cycle of violence – though, as we shall see below, it has serious flaws. But no sooner was it drafted than it ran into a wall of opposition from the entrenched forest bureaucracy and a vocal minority of wildlife conservationists.

These groups would do well to take a closer look at what happened in Ambakhera. The official justification was that the villagers had illegally "encroached" on the forest for cultivation. Never mind that they had proof of cultivation since 1967 and were therefore, as per the central government’s guidelines, entitled to their lands. When the forest department declares that someone is an encroacher very little – not even documentary proof – can save them. No law recognises their rights, however long they have been there. Their homes or their lands are most often doomed.

Nor are such evictions purely "excesses" of zeal. In fact, the forest authorities have been zealously doing everything except protecting forests and wildlife. As per their own data, over the three decades between 1951-1979, the forest authorities felled 3.33 million hectares of natural forest for commercial plantations; this is three times the area supposedly under ‘encroachments’. Meanwhile, in Orissa alone, in the last five years the Ministry of Environment and Forests has retrospectively approved the illegal destruction of 1,225 hectares of forest by mining companies. In contrast, since 1980, they have accepted claims to only 29 hectares of entirely legal cultivation by communities.

And all this is only the aboveground side of things; the stories of corruption and connivance are legion. In Uttar Pradesh, a recent news report claimed, the poaching and timber mafias now control almost all the sanctuaries. According to a PUCL report, in the single taluka of Gudalur, Tamil Nadu, between 1996 and 2002 land grabbers destroyed 3,000 acres of forest in connivance with the forest authorities. As for the showcase conservation scheme, Project Tiger, its results are now available for all to see.

The roots of this combination of injustice and ecological destruction are historical. The British built India’s forest management structure in order to supply timber to their railways and shipbuilding industries. Naturally, they cared little for either democracy or ecology. They and their Indian successors declared huge areas to be ‘state forests’ without surveying existing rights, violating their own laws in the process. For instance, in 1893 all of Uttaranchal’s uncultivated common lands – including village forests, pastures and so on – were declared to be ‘state forests’. In Himachal Pradesh, the same was done to all so-called ‘waste lands’ (today 66.4 per cent of the state’s land area). A study found that 40 per cent of Orissa’s reserve forests were ‘deemed’ to be so and have never been surveyed. People of these areas face periodic eviction drives in the name of protecting ‘forests’ that were never there. Meanwhile, the law has made the forest authorities unaccountable to anyone except themselves. In control of 22 per cent of India’s land area, they are truly the largest and last of the zamindars.

Since the British seized their homes and forests a century ago, India’s forest dwellers have been waging a continuous struggle for their rights. Some of the first big uprisings of the freedom struggle, including the Bhil uprising, were triggered by the new forest laws. Today forest areas are seething with resistance and violence, in some areas under the banner of the Maoist organisations and in others under social movements.

The most recent phase in this struggle was a central government eviction order issued on May 5, 2002 that ordered state governments to evict all "encroachers" before September 30, 2002. Naturally, these governments did not focus on the real encroachers, including large industries, mines and land mafias, whose political power allowed them to escape. The target instead became the poorest of the poor – India’s forest communities.

No one knows how many people have since been evicted from their homes but estimates range from one lakh to five lakh families (or up to 2.5 million people). The evictions were brutal, with hundreds of villages burned in Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and elephants used to raze settlements in Maharashtra to the ground. In Assam, more than 40,000 families were evicted and eight people shot dead by the police.

These evictions triggered a new wave of resistance from mass organisations and affected communities. Protests were also organised by the Left parties and other groups. Mass organisations from ten states, meanwhile, came together to form the Campaign for Survival and Dignity, a national platform to fight this latest eviction drive. It was finally the pressure of the Left parties and the mass movements that drove the new UPA government to commit, in the CMP (common minimum programme), that evictions will be halted and legal recognition given to the rights of forest communities.

One of the lessons of these decades of struggle is that one of the most basic needs is for sound legal and statutory recognition to forest rights. This has to be based on three basic principles. The first principle is the recognition of existing, and only currently existing, rights of forest communities, namely their lands, uses of minor forest produce, access to water and food resources within the forest and so on. There is no question of distributing new lands to anyone – only guaranteeing their right to whatever they are cultivating already. The second principle is that communities must have the right, the responsibility and the authority to conserve ecosystems and forests so as to democratise India’s forest management system. The third is that the mechanism for both recognition of rights and conservation should be based on the gram sabha of each village, the only democratic, transparent and open forum available for such processes.

Legal recognition on these lines does two things simultaneously – it ensures security of community rights and it creates a democratic structure where both forest users and forest protectors can be held accountable. This only means that forest conflicts will be settled in local open public forums rather than behind closed doors in Delhi, the state capital or the range office. It is internationally recognised that this is a much better conservation model; in India, where villages manage forests – as in Uttaranchal’s 7,000 Van Panchayats – ecologists agree that the forests are far better protected than in official ‘state forests’.

This brings us to the new Bill. After it was drafted in February this year, the Bill was to be introduced in the budget session of Parliament. The hue and cry around it, however, gave the government a pretext to push it out of both the budget and monsoon sessions of Parliament. It is now expected to come up in the winter session.

Unfortunately, though, the new Bill only partially reflects the principles that were outlined above. With respect to the first principle – namely the recognition of forest rights – the Bill contains a string of arbitrary restrictions on such rights. Two are extremely serious. First, the Bill blocks recognition of land rights acquired after 1980. This arbitrary and unjust date will mean that the rights of people displaced after 1980 (most of whom never received rehabilitation) will not be recognised; that there is great scope for the forest department to abuse its powers in areas where the community is not strong; and, in essence, that large-scale evictions may continue even with this law. A far more reasonable date would be the last few years such as, for instance, the agricultural season prior to the passage of the Act.

A second serious restriction is the exclusion of non-ST forest dwellers. In several states, Dalit and small farmer communities have been living in and near forests for generations and have lost their rights as a result of the same brutality that Scheduled Tribes have suffered. Moreover, a number of tribal communities themselves are not STs.

Other arbitrary restrictions are also present in the Bill but these are the two most major ones. These flaws in the Bill are compounded by its failure to institute a democratic process of verification and recognition of rights. Instead, the local gram sabha can only initiate the process; the final decision is left to a district level committee composed of officials from the forest, revenue and tribal welfare departments. In practice, experience has shown that giving such sweeping powers to official agencies will only ensure that rights are never recognised. The failure to give the gram sabha clear and primary authority will nullify the entire impact of this Act.

Finally, though the Bill currently speaks of community conservation, it gives no authority to the community to engage in conservation. Instead, sweeping penalty powers are given back to the forest department. This will in turn ensure that the department will continue to abuse its powers over forest communities.

In this situation, where the law has been endlessly delayed and has serious problems, India’s forest dwellers have returned to the streets to demand their rights. In March this year a rotating 15-day dharna in Delhi was organised by the Campaign for Survival and Dignity. More than 5,000 people from ten states participated, while simultaneous protests in the states drew more than 1,00,000 people. On August 15, more than 1,60,000 people marched in nine states in response to another protest call from the Campaign. On November 18 and 19, the CPI(M) organised protests that drew almost 2,00,000 people. Finally, even as this article is being written, Campaign member organisations are courting arrest in a nationwide jail bharo andolan. From Tamil Nadu to Rajasthan, from Gujarat to West Bengal, across the length and breadth of the country, protest marches and rasta rokos are taking place. More than 50,000 people have courted arrest as part of the jail bharo so far and it is expected that another 40,000 will do so this week.

Now, at last, the government has grudgingly agreed to introduce the Bill in Parliament. After this, the process will continue for another six months, as the Bill goes before a standing committee and is debated in Parliament. The fight will go on to ensure that, finally, a just, fair and effective Bill is passed, a Bill that can truly address a century of historical injustice. We will need your support and the support of all democratic and progressive people – for without it, the brutal repression of forest communities will continue. n