So it's official. What was once referred to as “The Tribal Bill” is now “The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006.”
Brinda Karat of the CPI(M) can take a bow for applying her technical expertise with communism, vote bank politics and equality to both humans and animals in forest-India. Organisations such as Kalpavriksh can write another 1,000 e-mails and editorials about how tribal communities will finally be able to protect forests and use them in a sustainable manner, and how peoples' power will effectively prevent chief ministers such as Naveen Patnaik of Orissa from laying sticky fingers on the minerals in the Simlipal Tiger Reserve.
Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment can peacefully join the last few pending dots in the Tiger Task Force Report, now that meddling wildlife activists - who apparently know so little about forests - have finally been put in their place. Prof Madhav Gadgil can deliver yet another lecture in Washington to the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility about how India’s newly-castrated Forest (Conservation) Act will now more effectively sequester carbon in an era of climate change.
Dr Rajesh Gopal, Member Secretary, National Tiger Conservation Authority, can take time out from his arduous responsibilities to stonewall critics who accuse him of facilitating the ‘Mandalisation’ of forests by conspiring to weaken the Wildlife (Protection) Act. And Sonia Gandhi, de facto leader of India, can address rally after public rally in India’s tribal belts to correct the galloping (but false) notion that it was the CPI(M) and not the Congress that gifted billions of dollars worth of forest real estate to “the poor”.
Meanwhile, urban social activists who prematurely celebrated the passage of the Forest Rights Act, without realising how much harm will actually now rain down on true forest communities, will probably contest observations by anthropologists and ethnographers that outside India’s now threatened Protected Area (PA) network, adivasi communities have largely been irreparably distanced from their cultures because the ecosystems that mid-wifed their cultures were destroyed by industry and agriculture.
Shalina Mehta, anthropologist, (Continuity and Change in Tribal Society), graphically pointed out how anganwadis have been forced upon adivasi communities whose elders traditionally looked after the young; how funds from the Indira Vikas Scheme were used to build toilet blocks near the living quarters of adivasis who considered defecation next to where they slept “obnoxious”; and how sewing machines were distributed to women in Madhya Pradesh who never in their lives wore stitched clothing.
These are the least of the traumas that will be inflicted on forest people across the length and breadth of India as tribe fights tribe over individual land rights, where earlier only communities owned land.
Moreover, with wildlife laws now seriously compromised by the Forest Rights Act, a juggernaut of mines, dams, roads, thermal plants, copper smelters, and forestry schemes that were once prevented from displacing tribal communities who lived cheek by jowl with PAs, will use legal loopholes to grab forest lands.
For all their bluff and bluster, not one human rights or social activist group was able to prevent such human tragedies from unfolding on revenue lands unprotected by wildlife and forest laws. Outside of the Andaman archipelago, they are still not able to show us even one contiguous parcel of 1,000 sq km of revenue land in peninsular India that has been kept intact for the exclusive use of adivasi communities, where ecological processes and the traditional tribal customs that evolved therein are still intact.
Which brings us to the sloth bears you see padding their way over hot tar roads, and the two tribal men leading them by their noses. With every forest that now succumbs at the hands of the ill-advised Forest Rights Act, such atrocities on wildlife will be more frequent and pronounced, as well conflict between tigers, elephants and other wild species with humans. And, in an age of climate change, just when we need the carbon-sequestering role of forests most, we will see forests being tattered by land sharks operating behind forest-dweller masks.
The credit for India’s continuing slide towards ecological misery must be laid at the door of a slew of Indian Prime Ministers, present incumbent included, and their retinue of sleight-of-hand economists aided and abetted by gullible social activists who conspired with politicians to do away with the only legislation that actually protected forests, enabling Korkus, Baigas, Bhils, Gonds and Chenchus to retain a modicum of their ancient traditions.
My quarrel is not with tribal India, whose ancient wisdom I deeply respect. It is with perhaps well intentioned, but ill-informed and ecologically illiterate urban power brokers who know not what they do.
Sanctuary Features