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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Who's right for the forest anyway? - Vasudha Nagaraj, R Srivatsan and A Suneetha

Who's right for the forest anyway? - Vasudha Nagaraj, R Srivatsan and A Suneetha

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published Published on May 23, 2019   modified Modified on May 23, 2019
-Down to Earth

Reflections on Supreme Court order to evict ‘illegitimate’ tribals from the forests

There is an ominous significance to the February 13, 2019 order of the Supreme Court on “illegitimate” forest-dwellers. When we first heard of it, we felt a rising dismay and shock at this judicial legitimation of unparalleled atrocity against the tribals. The order is nothing less than the final legitimised expropriation of the tribal communities (poor landless) under the pressure of rising capitalist industries.

Evidence, history and culture

The order stated that those tribals whose claims for forest pattas were rejected (i.e., whose proof of possession failed to meet the standards of evidence) should be thrown out of the forests. It is assumed implicitly here that a legitimate tribal will have proof. But there is a flaw in this argument.

The question that arises is: what does proof or evidence mean in these circumstances? Is it possible for an individual of a family or community, which had chosen to live outside the boundaries of our modern rural and urban structures, to have what we call proof?

It is precisely a distrust and suspicion of such proofs of possession of property that was the reason for their deciding to find their means of survival outside ‘civilisation’, becoming what we call ‘tribals’.

A colonial Revenue Commissioner in the 1920s understood the uneasiness about the issue of property ownership among tribals very well. He saw that the tribal eschewed property and lived a life on the move simply because he did not know what the sahukar wrote as a debt against his (the tribal’s) name.

The mobility meant that the moneylender could take only what the ‘landless’ tribal offered him each time the instalment was repaid at harvest (perhaps in perpetuity). There was an honesty in the tribal’s engagement: “I don’t trust you, but I will honor your account of my debt”.

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Down to Earth, 22 May, 2019, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/forests/who-has-right-on-the-forest-anyway--64666


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