Tribals, Forests and Resource Conflicts in Kerala, India: The Status Quo of Policy Change

Abstract

One of the constraints in policy analysis of tribal issues in India has been the lack of analytical approaches that have looked at the existential problem of tribal communities in an integrated manner. While restrictive forest policies have played a major role in fomenting tribal unrest in India and other parts of the world, the part played by “poorly designed” development programmes in creating the impasse cannot be ignored. With reference to the District of Wayanad in north Kerala, India, it is argued that natural resource conflicts involving tribal communities have their roots in both restrictive forest policies and misplaced development strategies. While it is true that, in recent times, there has been a serious effort in India to open forests to tribal communities, this has not been accompanied by a change in basic development thinking. It is argued that, for a paradigm change in policy to occur, tribal communities need to be nurtured in forest settings. This is particularly relevant at this juncture, when the ideal of “biodiversity conservation” is considered to be the defining mark of sustainable development in the “natural resource-rich” countries of the South.

Notes

¹ Baviskar (2003, p 292) considered the State's refusal to allow tribal rights over forest lands in India as having subverted the project of tribal welfare from the start.

² The CPM's philosophy on the “nationality” issue has been centrally influenced by Stalin's approach to the “national question” (Karat, 1975). Stalin defined a nation as a “historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture”. All the same, Stalin (1942) recognized that “a nation, like every historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end”. In terms of this view, unstable communities such as tribes and smaller nationalities needed to be mainstreamed. Indeed, stable communities also undergo change over a period when all identities are standardized in the process of state construction. From this, it would only be a step forward for the modern nation to reach the stage of what Bhabha (1990, pp. 291–320) termed “cultural ambivalence”.

³ In the wake of the Wayanad tribal outburst, the All India Agricultural Workers Union, affiliated to the CPM, demanded governance of Wayanad through a “tribal autonomous council” and backed the demand of the tribals for access to forests. This was contrary to the thinking of the CPM that “tribals had to be an integral part of secular democratic India” (Ravivarman, 2003).

⁴ As Dove (2003, p. 116) appropriately observed, environmental transformation is not sociologically neutral, as it has the potential to disturb power and identity.

⁵ For instance, the local self-government, “Tirunelli” in Wayanad, initiated many welfare schemes for the tribal communities in the late 1990s under the decentralized planning programme. These included construction of dwellings, provision of drinking water and sanitation facilities, schools, roads and financial help for cultivation of vegetables (Anonymous, 2004b). However, the schemes did not provide for help or capacity building in any forest-based vocation.

⁶ The Act of 1865 had to be replaced as it made no provision for rights of traditional users of forest resources. The 1878 Act was replaced, as it did not effectively establish state rights over forests vis-à-vis private rights (Gordon, 1955, pp. 322–325). For a critique of the colonial forest legislation and the anti-community features of the scientific forestry regimes resulting from the legislations, see Guha (1989) and Peluso (1992).

⁷ As Menon (1994) noted, it has been the historical pattern in Malabar in the first five decades of the 20th Century for different patterns of communities to be projected, created and negotiated (though ultimately failing on account of social antagonisms). In many ways, the “Adivasi Gotra Sabha” of Wayanad also follows the historical pattern, as a community that has been created to represent a grand federation of the tribal communities of Wayanad. There is also an uncanny resemblance of the Gotra Sabha to Anderson's concept of “imagined communities”, which are driven by a sense of “deep horizontal comradeship” (Anderson, 1983). Interestingly, the 2003 outburst by the tribal federation of Wayanad also marked the end of what Scott (1997) termed the “disguised resistance of infrapolitics” in tribal Wayanad.

⁸ Tribal communities in Wayanad that participated in the agitation included the Adiyas, “Paniyas”, “Kurichias”, “Kurumbas” and “Kattunaykas”. These tribes are considered by anthropologists to be the oldest inhabitants of Wayanad forests (Mathur, 1977).

⁹ This idea is based on Savyasaachi's (1999) concept of “living space”. Savyasaachi's concept is based on the study of the Kuianka tribal community of Phulbani district of Orissa.

¹⁰ The point is that “shears” are not productive tea-harvesting instruments for the tribals. These instruments are, as Levi-Strauss (1984, p. 203) noted in the case of fishing by the Caingang tribes of Parana, a “clumsy imitation” of a technique developed in “labour short” tea production areas of Central America.

¹¹ In 1995, a high-level committee appointed by the Government of India for extension of the provisions of the constitution to scheduled areas recommended that tribal areas in other parts of the country could also be declared as scheduled areas. The Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) was born as a result of this recommendation. In the newly constituted province of Jharkhand, the PESA was introduced to give primacy to tribal customary laws in the running of forests. This was in many ways an effort to introduce endexogenous management regimes for forests. However, recent studies indicate that, despite the effort, the forest and police bureaucracies have hampered the functioning of the legislation (Sundar, 2004).

¹² For instance, the management plan of the Wayanad Sanctuary states the importance of restricting access to non-timber forest produce by tribal communities. The plan also calls for relocation of tribal communities from the “core areas” of the reserve, in the larger interests of “facilitating movements of elephants”. All the same, the plan allows private (non-tribal) cultivators in the sanctuary to erect electric fences to protect their crops from marauding elephants. More interestingly, while relocation of tribals was to be done in areas predetermined by the forest establishment, non-tribal settlers inside forests were to be paid compensation for lands surrendered to the forest establishment. This was to enable the latter to relocate to areas of their choice outside the core area of the sanctuary. This was not really a poor strategy, given the possible failure of compensation packages in luring tribals out of forests. Indeed, studies from Botswana indicate that, in the absence of opportunities for alternative livelihoods, tribals show reluctance to leave forests even when tempted with attractive compensation packages (Nkambwe, 2003).

¹³ In a set of detailed guidelines issued by the Government of India to provincial governments in 1990, it was clearly laid down that wherever forest land rights were conferred on tribal communities in terms of the FCA, care had to be taken to de-notify or de-list the lands from the category of forests (Anonymous, 1990b). The issue assumed greater priority after the Supreme Court of India, in 2001, restrained the government from regularizing encroachments in forests, through one of the Court's rulings in the landmark “forest case” coded W.P. 202/95. In 2004, a year after the Wayanad crisis, the Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a detailed set of instructions to all provincial government lands, including Kerala, adverting to the Supreme Court orders of 2001. The instructions called upon all provincial governments to treat demands for forest lands by tribal communities as “diversion of continuously occupied forest land” under the FCA. The instructions also called upon provincial governments to forward “forest land” diversion proposals with “integrated tribal rehabilitation schemes” and financial commitments, “so that the tribal population are retained on the particular land, and the problem is solved once and for all”. These instructions, interestingly, laud the rehabilitation programme of the Kerala government in the post-agitation phase (Anonymous, 2004b).

¹⁴ A case in point is that of Tata Tea Limited, located in Munnar, in the Idukki District of Kerala, which handed over their undertaking to their workers in early 2005 (Punnathara, 2005). The new set-up, though corporate in nature, virtually works as a co-operative venture, with workers doubling up as owners and labourers. The “well-wooded” land (over which the venture was established) was originally granted on a “concession” rent basis (in the pre-independence period) by the then local ruler of the area to a British coffee planter in 1877, a year before the Indian Forest Act 1878 came into existence (Narayanan, 1990, pp. 256–257). It was a tract of land that would have been constituted as forests under the IFA, had the grant not taken place. In the 19th Century, plantation enterprises set up by the British in places such as Munnar were considered to be “development assuring”. Indeed, the princely state of Travancore (one of the predecessor governments of the present-day Government of Kerala), under whose jurisdiction Munnar fell, considered plantation enterprises as having ensured “circulation of European capital” in the province (Aiya, 1906, pp. 71–72). In the post-independence phase, the model of development in Kerala shifted to projects run on socialist principles. Interestingly, the socialist approach adopted to run tribal rehabilitation ventures in Wayanad has gone the opposite way of the Tata Tea venture, with the break-up and virtual privatization of the Sugandhagiri Cardamom project.

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Notes on contributors

A. Damodaran

The author thanks the anonymous referee for comments on an earlier draft.