Red sanders: Violent forest policing

The recent massacre of 20 people in the Seshachalam forests by the Red-Sanders Anti-Smuggling Task Force (RSASTF) and the Andhra Pradesh Forest Department is reflective of the hegemonic control of natural resources by an increasingly militarised state. It is particularly shocking that such a massacre occurred just as calls are being made nationally for a democratic forest management approach that gives local people more rights and powers to manage forests.

The context of this tragedy revolves around the red sanders tree (Pterocarpus santalinus). This tree is endemic (present nowhere else in the world) to the forests of Kadapa, Chitoor, Anantapur, Kurnool, Prakasam and Nellore districts of Andhra Pradesh. Prized internationally for its heartwood, it is used to make luxury furniture, musical instruments and traditional medicine, mainly in Singapore, Japan, the UAE, Malaysia and China.

International legislation banned trade of this species in 1995, and black market rates for red sanders have escalated thereafter, as have allied activities governing its illegal harvest, processing and transportation from India. A tonne of red sanders fetches Rs 15 lakh to Rs 30 lakh in the Indian black market and two to three times this amount internationally.

The government estimates that up to 500 tonnes of red sanders are exported illegally from India annually. Lessons from recent work on demo-cratising forest governance continues to be rejected by a forest department hell bent on maintaining control over forests.

The numbers of the red sanders trade seem to be largely made up of people engaged aslabourers from districts in Tamil Nadu that border AP. Like in any other informal market deemed illegal, trade in red sanders is enabled by collusion between contractors, higher-order smugglers, politicians, the forest department, the police and the customs department.

This network remains largely untouched by government action to curb trade in red sanders, possibly due to perverse economic outcomes that assure windfall returns in exchange for little risk to life or limb for anyone in the trade who is not a labourer. While a severe clampdown has occurred on the labourers involved in the cutting and transportation of red sanders, the same cannot be said for those higher up in the pecking order.

The structure within which such violence against local people is perpetrated has a long history of hierarchical and state-controlled domination of both people and nature— a domination underscored by violent actions on a powerless people.

The Seshachalam massacre is but an instance of this overall pattern. Consider the illegal harvest of red sanders: the species is at risk, and has been deemed appropriate for conservation at the national and international level. Teasing apart the nuances of the red sanders trade, we see various relationships such as contractor-labourer, smuggler-politician, police-labourer, with each set of relationships being established and controlled by access to economic or political power. The entity with the least power in all these sets of relationships is clearly the labourer, and therefore, bears the brunt of state action.

Permission to sell

That the forest administration is less interested in conservation and more in exploitation is clear from their historic and contemporary interest in timber. In December 2014, the AP government auctioned almost 4,000 tonnes of red sanders, earning almost Rs 1000 crore.
The entire quantity was sourced from violent raids on smugglers of red sanders. Permission for the government to sell endangered red sanders was inexplicably provided by the centre and by CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), an international regulatory body.

More than 4000 tonnes of red sanders remains as ‘stock’ to be auctioned at a later date. The irony of this situation is astounding: the forest department cannot cut or sell red sanders on a regular basis by itself, since red sanders is a protected species. Farcically, the forest department can sell red sanders as long as it confiscates (and continues to confiscate) illegally collected trees, with several labourers and field-level forest department staff falling by the wayside as collateral damage.

Regulating the trade is unlikely to alter this overall perverse arithmetic and logic, and as we have seen currently, neither will banning its trade make any difference for labourers engaged in this operation. They will continue to be brutally persecuted as ‘law-breakers’ by a socially and ecologically indifferent state.

Forests, wildlife and natural resources have always been policed by the state in such violent ways with enormous human consequences. The ecological consequences of the increasing conflict is also high especially as the value of certain resources increase with globalisation.
Rethinking forest governance to include local people will reduce the conflict and provide more humane approaches to conserve and manage not only species such as red sanders but also the forests in which they occur.

(Sundaram is Assistant Professor of Development in Azim Premji University, Bengaluru; Rai is Fellow, Centre for Environment and Development, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru)