KILLING TRIBAL AND TIGER TOGETHER
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 5 Apr 2010
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service
Tribal and Tiger killed out of Sight
Like their Forests burnt down at Night…
[with apologies to William Blake]
The world is witnessing the last great act of a global tragedy that will end not in victory for any one side, but in the defeat of all. And today, all of us are guilty. The world’s indigenous peoples and their rich cultural history and their intimate knowledge of medicinal plants and the workings of nature are being gradually exterminated as if it were a war. It is a war, of us against our ancestors, against peoples who have only helped us with their knowledge and their spirituality.
One such war is being fought out in India.
The Government of India does not recognize its 80 million adivasis [meaning ‘original inhabitants’] as indigenous, to avoid international pressure, but terms them as ‘scheduled tribes,’ a term used during the British occupation of the sovereign forest lands on India. Those peoples who opposed British exploitation of their own forest wealth were also termed ‘criminal tribes.’ Even the pious Buddhist Emperor Ashoka threatened only one class of peoples, the atavikas or forest dwellers, for resisting centralized government. The wise and humane Moghul Emperor Akbar who cemented equalizing bonds of rights and culture between Muslim and Hindu, fought a war against a great tribal queen in the heartlands of India. However, indigenous tribal societies retained their rights over their own forest lands, and these were sanctioned by custom and law over the millennia. The deep forest areas were termed ‘elephant lands’ by successive Hindu or Muslim king, and neither the government of the day nor nearby peasants were permitted to enter these. They remained in the possession of tribal communities till the British by superior fire-power and many scattered wars gained control. In this process they were aided by the land hunger of those dispossessed peasants who were driven out of their holdings by the British establishing a new class of Zamindars, or landlords.
This long and little-known sordid story of colonization got a legal framework in 1865 by the passing of a British Forest Act which took possession of over 20,000 sq. km of forests, reserved for the exploitation and export of timber. [Even long before this the Royal Navy had started building its ships with Malabar teak, for as Admiral Collingwood had feared oak was disappearing in England.] D. Brandis, the first Inspector-General of Forests in India noted in his Memorandum of Forest Legislation proposed for India,1875, that it was ‘not improbable that, as the development of the country progresses, there will be in India the same great classes of forest property which are found on the Continent of Europe, – that is forests belonging to the Crown, village communities, and private owners. In that case, he hoped there could be legislation on the lines of the Code Forestier of France. No mention of the age-old inalienable rights of the forest-dwelling tribal communities finds mention in this or any other document.
Independence brought no relief to these tribal peoples, but only more exploitation of forest wealth, and not only from timber contractors but also from the mining industry. When great steel works were established in their areas, employment was given to outsiders, and not to the tribals. When forests had disappeared at an alarming rate, and the government turned from ‘production’ to ‘protection’ forestry practices, the insatiable urban demand from the rich led to wide-scale illegal felling of trees aided by corrupt officials. Along with its destructive impact on Indian agriculture, forest degeneration led to the disappearance of wildlife. By international agreement, Project Tiger was launched decades ago to protect India’s tiger population, today no more than the ‘official’ figure of 1,411. The number of tigers alive is also an indication of the extent of good forestland left, for a tiger needs anywhere from 10 to 40 sq. kms to hunt and live in.
Under great enlightened pressure from the Ministry of Tribal Welfare [different from the antagonistic Forest Department] the draft Scheduled Tribes [Recognition of Forest Rights] Bill, 2005 was to be placed before parliament. It is worth quoting the first two clauses of its preamble in full, for it recognizes the illegality of the government seizure of forest lands from their original inhabitants.
‘It is well known that the forest dwelling scheduled tribes are residing on their ancestral lands and their habitat for generations and from times immemorial and there exists a spatial relationship between the forest dwelling scheduled tribes and the biological resources of India. They are integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest eco systems, including wildlife. In fact, the tribal people are inseparable with the ecosystem, including wildlife, and cannot survive in isolation.
The rights of forest dwelling scheduled tribes who are inhabiting the forests for generations and are in occupation of forest lands have, however, not been adequately recognized so far resulting in historical injustice to these forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes.’
However, the Bill is not yet passed into law because of the determined opposition of the environmentalists. They point to the dwindling number of tigers and want all tribals to be cleared out of their villages to leave the ‘core areas’ free of human beings and only for wildlife. They follow the American practice of guarding national parks with fences and armed guards. It must not be forgotten the creation of such recreational wildernesses ‘untouched by man’ was only made possible in the first place by the whites decimating the American First Nations and penning human communities into Reservations. Today, 11.5 percent of the world’s landmass, or over 17,000 sq. kms., are fenced in such ‘protected parks.’ However, as Marcus Colchester, director of the U.K. Forest Peoples’ Programme has observed: “Historically the impact of protected areas has been very negative because the rights of the local communities of indigenous peoples haven’t been taken into account. The establishment of parks and reserves has often required their forced removal and placed severe limits on their rights of access and use of natural resources. Hence, there has been a lot of conflict, impoverishment, suffering and cultural loss.”
As the well-known writer, Arundati Roy, recently observed the Indian tribal communities are fighting a war of survival with their own government. Since the late 1960s, a low-intensity guerilla war between the police forces and the jungle-based armed Marxist-Leninist Naxalite movement has been bloodily going on. The Prime Minster has termed this conflict as dangerous for national unity, and the Home Minister has launched a ‘Green Hunt’ led by special armed forces into tribal areas, though a leader of his own party, Mr. Ajit Jogi, himself a tribal and the former Chief Minister of Chattisgarh, a tribal state, has remonstrated that this is nothing less than the murder of hundreds of innocent tribals, who require social assistance rather than being hunted down in their own homelands.
The sombre background to such bloody conflict is formed by the enormous wealth lying under forested tribal lands. A part of this was recently exposed by the international opposition to the Vedanta mining interests in Orissa. This business interest lies behind the surface dispute between the environmentalists and those who favour tribal welfare. And in support of national environmentalists are the international WWFs who understand even less about people. Driving out the tribal peoples will neither protect the forests nor the tigers. It will mean the doom of all.
Not all environmentalists fail to see the connection between real conservation and forest peoples’ rights. India’s best-known conservationist, Ashish Kothari observes: “Some community-based initiatives reconciling livelihood security and biodiversity conservation in rich biodiversity sites can also be alternative scenarios to relocation.” He sees them as powerful tools “to conserve wildlife and biodiversity, reduce poverty, and secure livelihoods of local communities.”
What is happening now in India is being played out in parallel processes of decimation elsewhere. Ostensibly for the protection of the mountain gorilla of central Africa, the Batwa pygmies have been driven from their cool forests to die begging in the hot plains. In the name of economic development wide roads have cut to ribbons the homelands of the peoples of the Amazon. Amerindians are raddled with disease and drugs. The Australian government has very late in the day begun to think of their aborigines as human beings. The Chinese despite their avowed regard for their minorities have failed to involve the Miao or other indigenous people in the protection of the pandas. The Sami and the Ainu are still considered second-class citizens despite living under the most enlightened governments of the day.
If wisdom and not greed is to prevail, governments should secure the rights of the tribals over their own lands, secure their cooperation in forest and wildlife conservation, and provide them adequate economic, cultural, and community support. This is not too far-fetched an ideal. In my childhood there were elderly tribals who taught me that despite the danger of the occasional man-eating animal, tigers were essential for the welfare of tribal communities for the carnivores kept the deer and bison populations in check, and thus safeguarded the small plots of forest-village crops. It is desperation that makes a tribal help a poacher today, though as one man told me “I know there may be nothing left for my son tomorrow, but he must eat today!” Forests and wildlife are the tribals’ patrimony and if we acknowledge that fact honestly all may yet be saved, forest, tiger, and our own honour.
______________________
Vithal Rajan, B.A. Hons [McGill], Ph.D.[L.S.E.], worked as a mediator for the church in Belfast in the 1970s, and was founder-faculty member at The School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, U.K; Chair of World Studies, International School, Geneva; Executive Director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, Sweden; and Director, WWF-International, Switzerland. He has worked in an honorary capacity with civil society for 30 years and was founder-chair of the Deccan Development Society, the Confederation of Voluntary Associations and SKS Microfinance in India. In 2006, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for high merit and lifetime achievement in the service of humanity.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 5 Apr 2010.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: KILLING TRIBAL AND TIGER TOGETHER, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.