On the tenth anniversary of the historic passage of the
Forest Rights Act, tribal resistance to defend their rights is growing even as
government after government tries to dilute its provisions
On this day 10 years ago the historic Scheduled Tribes and
Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act was passed
in the Lok Sabha. Its conception and passage was the result of the decades of
struggles and sacrifices of millions of tribals across India, of their
organisations, of numerous activists and intellectuals working on tribal
issues, and because of the commitment and efforts of the Left parties.
Attempts at dilution
A century ago colonial chicanery had turned tribal owners of
the forests and its resources into encroachers. A decade ago, the Indian
inheritors of this legacy of fraud were working against the Bill till literally
the last moment. The real encroachers and plunderers of the forests, the mining
companies, the private power sector companies, those involved in irrigation
projects, the timber and paper industries, the forest resort tourist industry
had high stakes in preventing the passage of the Bill. They were in the company
of fundamentalist wildlife and environmentalist groups with their close links
with the powerful forest bureaucracy. They made a motley though influential
crowd and had the ear of very important people in the United Progressive
Alliance (UPA) government hierarchy.
They succeeded in diluting some important recommendations of
the Parliamentary Select Committee on community forest rights, access to minor
forest produce and so on. The clause that Non-tribal Traditional Forest
Dwellers would have to show evidence of their occupation of the land for 75
years virtually negated the inclusion of these largely poorer sections, many of
them Dalits, in the law. The Left had proposed that for these sections the
Supreme Court-proposed cut-off year of 1980 would be appropriate, while for
tribal communities the cut-off year should be 2005. But at the last moment the
government surreptitiously brought in the three generation or 75-year clause.
The Bill with these obnoxious clauses was circulated and
listed for immediate discussion and passage. As soon as we saw it, the Chairman
of the Select Committee, Kishore Chandra Deo, and I rushed to the chamber of
Pranab Mukherjee, then External Affairs Minister, who was the point person for
the Bill on behalf of the government in the negotiations with the Left. There
was a mini-drama and heated discussion which finally ended with the arrival of
the Tribal Affairs Minister, P.R. Kyndiah, who had been summoned by his senior.
In the discussions he assured us that he would move amendments to the Bill. At
that time there was no choice but to accept the assurance at face value. It had
taken more than a year of struggle to finally get the Bill included in the
business agenda of Parliament and listed. The powerful lobbies against the Bill
would have used our opposition to once again shelve it. The Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) was playing a duplicitous role — its Adivasi MPs supported the Bill
while others were dead against it. They ran a campaign among MPs from the
Northeast that if passed, the law would legalise encroachment by “illegal
Bangladeshis”. This was utterly misleading, but anything was fair in the war
against tribal rights.
The missing amendments
The Bill became law, but without the amendments promised.
After much discussion and pressure, some of them were included in the Rules.
This also was a big struggle and there was a strong group of activists who
along with the Left representatives could work out a fairly good set of Rules.
It included giving prime importance to the role of the gram sabhas.
In spite of its inadequacies, there can be little doubt that
the Forest Rights Act (FRA) stands as a powerful instrument to protect the
rights of tribal communities. It is a hindrance to corporate interests to their
free loot and plunder of India’s mineral resources, its forests, its water. But
the Narendra Modi government is systematically implementing its plan to weaken
and dilute the Act in several ways.
New attempts at dilution
First, it has brought a series of legislation that undermine
the rights and protections given to tribals in the FRA, including the condition
of “free informed consent” from gram sabhas for any government plans to remove
tribals from the forests and for the resettlement or rehabilitation package.
The laws were pushed through by the Modi government without any consultation
with tribal communities. They include the amendments to the Mines and Minerals
(Development and Regulation) Act, the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act and a
host of amendments to the Rules to the FRA which undermine the FRA. The
requirement of public hearings and gram sabha consent has been done away with
for mid-sized coal mines. BJP State governments and partners in the National
Democratic Alliance such as the Telugu Desam Party government in Andhra Pradesh
have introduced government orders to subvert the FRA. In Telangana, in total
violation of the FRA, the government has illegalised traditional methods of
forest land cultivation. The Jharkhand government has brought amendments to the
Chotanagpur and also the Santhal Pargana Tenancy Acts which eliminate rights of
gram sabhas and permit tribal land to be taken over by corporates, real estate
players, private educational and medical institutions in the name of
development, without tribal consent. In Maharashtra the government has issued a
notification of “Village Rules” which gives all rights of forest management to
government-promoted committees as opposed to the gram sabha. This is the
law-based offensive.
Second, there is the policy-based war. The Modi government
has declared its commitment to ensuring “ease of business”, which translates
into clearing all private sector-sponsored projects in tribal-inhabited forest
areas. The National Board for Wildlife, with the Prime Minister as Chairperson,
was reconstituted, slashing the number of independent experts from 15 members
to three, packing it with subservient officials. In the first three months of
assuming office, the Modi government cleared 33 out of 41 proposals diverting
over 7,000 hectares of forest land. Of this the major share was for Gujarat
companies. In two years the clearances for projects have included “diversion” —
or more appropriately land grab — to the extent of 1.34 lakh hectares of forest
land. In many areas this will lead to massive displacement of tribal
communities. In the multipurpose Polavaram project in Andhra Pradesh alone, now
given a national status by the Central government, 2 lakh hectares of forest
land will be submerged affecting around 85,000 families, more than half
tribals, including 100 habitations of particularly vulnerable tribal
communities. In almost all these projects, the affected tribal families have
not yet received their pattas (land ownership documents), one of the conditions
set by the FRA. This wilful disregard and blatant violation of the legal
protections given to tribals has become the cornerstone of the policy.
Third, there is the deliberate freeze of the actual
implementation of the FRA. Neither individual pattas nor pattas for community
forest resources are being given. During the UPA-II government the
implementation of the Act was virtually hijacked by the Ministry of Environment
and Forests and rejections of claims increased. However, now the situation has
worsened, and the rate of rejections has gone up during the Modi regime.
According to one analysis, between May 2015 and April 2016, eight out of every
10 claims were rejected. This is the ‘Gujarat model’ in operation. The State
has one of the worst records in implementation of the FRA. Although 98 per cent
of the approximately 1.9 lakh tribal claims had been approved by the gram
sabhas, the bureaucrats in the sub-divisional committee and above brought the
acceptance down to just 38 per cent. This is in sharp contrast to a Left-led
State such as Tripura, where 98 per cent of tribal claims have been recorded
and titles given.
Mixed signals from the judiciary
The judiciary has also had a role to play. The same
institution, which gave tribals hope through the Samata judgment, the historic
Niyamgiri judgment, has also clubbed together a number of hostile petitions to
the FRA and is giving them a sympathetic hearing. In January last year the
court in an ominous intervention in a writ petition filed by Wildlife Trust of
India and others issued notice to all State governments to “file an affidavit
giving data regarding the number of claims rejected within the territory of the
State and the extent of land over which such claims were made and rejected and
the consequent action taken up by the State after rejection of the claims”.
This has rightly been taken by tribal communities and their
organisations as a prelude to mass evictions. Maharashtra issued a notification
dated April 23, 2015, directing the police to take action against “identified
encroachers”, namely those whose claims have been rejected. Till 1985, the
department of “Tribal Affairs” was under the Home Ministry. Tribal rights and
struggles for justice were viewed as a “law and order issue, always a problem”.
Under the present dispensation this retrograde approach seems to have been
resurrected.
On the tenth anniversary of the historic passage of the FRA,
tribal resistance is growing all over the country to defend their rights under
FRA and other related issues
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