Forest: Ultimate Conflict Zones of India
India’s forest land, rich in natural resources like forest derivatives and minerals, is undoubtedly the cauldron of various degrees of conflict. From civil wars in Chhattisgarh to armed conflict in the East, it has created internal security more volatile than ever before in India. The Union Ministry of Home Affairs has a special wing to neutralise this ‘internal security’ with solid policing. The growing number of conflicts in the forest area have threatened the forest resources and the livelihood of inhabitants. At least a million mutinies’ in and around the forest area are ticking to explode. However, who triggers these conflicts or social unrest is a serious concern that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.
Recently, in its affidavit to the country’s apex court, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forest (MOEF) requested to wrap up the Green Bench appointed by the Supreme Court, which contributed to the flaring of the civil unrest and a burst in Maoist activities in major states by risking forest resources. While forgetting its own forest laws, rules and guidelines, the government squarely blamed the Supreme Court for the excess of anti-state activities. Do we need either Green Bench or Forest Laws? Forest laws and the Green Bench under the Supreme Court have delayed justice for tribal people and failed to manage forest resources.
Since filing the writ petition in 1995 in the Supreme Court, the MOEF feels that the process has resulted in ‘judiciary usurping the executive’s powers’ and ‘eroding of separation of powers’. The major apprehension of MOEF is that scientific forestry has not been administered due to the Supreme Court’s hearings for the last 12 years. It is believed that since 1995, the Supreme Court has been managing the forest resources in India! Therefore, the government wants to use scientific forestry in forest areas without any intervention. It should be noted that the Maoists' activities did not start in 1996 when the Supreme Court first pronounced its forest-related hearings. The Indian forest laws, like the Indian Forest Act (IFA) 1927, are much older than the Maoist movement of the late 1960s. There are still places in India where campaigns against the IFA have been going on for the last 75 years or so. Similarly, the 1980 Forest Conservation Acts (FCA), at best, has alienated tribal people, which provided a new support base for the Maoist movement. These policies have failed in their primary objective to conserve and manage the forest, and they have also created social unrest, people’s movements and so on.
The objectives of transforming 33 per cent of India’s geographical land into forest areas do not arrest the spreading of conflicts side by side. The conflict arises not only between Mogli (human) and Sher Khan (animal), as in the famous Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, but within people, as in the case in Salwa Judum, people and forest laws (IFA, Indian Wildlife Protection Act, FCA, Joint Forest Management, Forest Development Projects and so on) and people and private companies (Jindal, Tata, Vendanta, Utkal Alumina). The Country’s most predominantly tribal districts with natural forests, like in Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, are prone to conflicts due to poverty, dispossession of people over forest resources, ecological degradation and, above all, the government’s forest policies and developmental plans like dams and mining activities. The exercise of control and legitimacy has been the signature of India’s forest area. As always, the losers in this battle are the tribal. An estimated 40 million people (of whom nearly 40 per cent are tribal) have lost their land since 1950 on account of displacement due to large development projects.
The biggest landlord in the country is facing the apparent threat, i.e., its relevance! The official logo of the Forest Department (FD) in India is diagonally divided into red and green. But interestingly, the FD now has more red (read conflict) than green (forest). The intensity of conflict between the tribal and the forest officials is increasing for the wrong reasons. Not a single forest-administered unit in the country is free from conflict. Most forest inhabitants feel that the FD, which is regarded as the single largest landlord in the country, possessing nearly 23 per cent of the geographical land, has become an instrument of oppression. While the resource conflicts evolve as the competition over-extraction and exploitation of lootable or commercially viable resources between two parties, in India, the only competitors are the state government and its agencies and private companies. The reign of terror used by the state government, coupled with defunct basic administration and flaws in forest laws, has given birth to the ‘red corridor’ in India. The evil axis of government-business-legislatures-brokers has created more avenues for potential providers to conflict situations.
After the 2002 Indo-Pak stand-off at the LOC, the maximum number of national security meetings was commenced on the issue of Maoist violence in forest areas rather than securing India’s international border. As usual, India’s ministries involved in this conflict zones are the Prime Minister's Office, Ministry of Environment and Forest, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Rural Development, Ministry of Water Resources, Ministry of Mines, and, of course, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and joining of Ministry of Defense won’t be a surprise by seeing the increased violence. When India’s powerful cabinet portfolios are engaged in conflict resolution, they are bound to create cacophony. After a discussion with tribal and more than 100 forest officials in Central and East India, I believe that resolving this increasing potential conflict is not feasible, at least in the coming decades. As long as people are kept out of resource management or forest development, the explosion of millions of ticking mutinies is not a distant hypothesis.