Indigenous people’s future in peril

BRP Bhaskar

@brpbhaskar

Gulf Today

he Forest Rights Act, enacted by Parliament in 2006, presents a classic example of giving with the right hand and taking away with the left hand.

The shrinking forests are where most of the country’s indigenous people, officially labelled as Scheduled Tribes as the names of their communities figured first in a schedule of a colonial-era Act, live.

In popular parlance, the communities are referred to as Adivasis, which term means original inhabitants. 

Unwilling to concede their antiquity, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva ideology, refers to them as Vanvasis, meaning forest dwellers. It conveniently overlooks the fact that they ended up on the hills and in the forests under pressure from later migrants.

The 2011 census put the number of tribes at 705 and the tribal population at 104.3 million, 8.6 per cent of the national total. Under the Constitution, the STs, along with the Dalits, officially termed Scheduled Castes, are entitled to reservation in Parliament, State Assemblies, the services and educational institutions.

Denudation of forests began in the colonial period. Early on it yielded some good results like re-discovery of the long-forgotten Buddhist stupa at Sanchi, near Bhopal, while cutting down trees to make railway sleepers.

Realising the damage caused to the environment, the British later embarked upon a scheme to protect the forests. They made laws which, while permitting Adivasis to remain in reserved forests and gather resources for their livelihood, denied access to outsiders. 

After Independence, people from the plains grabbed forest lands in many states, often with the connivance of politicians and officials.

In the 1970s, the Centre advised the states concerned to enact legislation to restore forest lands to the Adivasis. Accordingly laws were passed, but most governments failed to implement them.

In the wake of globalisation of the economy, national and international corporations started grabbing land for industries. In many states,  Adivasis mobilised themselves to defend their homelands. 

It was an unequal struggle, and the Adivasis often lost. However, in some instances, they were able to pack off the corporates. A notable case is that of the South Korean steel major POSCO which was forced to drop the plan to set up the world’s largest steel plant in Odisha state. 

Responding to the pleas of non-government organisations working among tribal communities, the first Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)  government, headed by Manmohan Singh, enacted the Forest Rights Act. It aimed at reversal of the erosion of the forest dwellers’ traditional rights as a result of forestry policies, encroachments and takeover of forests.   

In keeping with the spirit of the law, the government issued an order in 2009 making it obligatory to take the consent of the village council of the forest dwellers to set up any project in their area. When an Adivasi community of Odisha refused consent to an industrial group’s project in their area, the Supreme Court upheld their right to do so.  

In its second avatar, the UPA itself started whittling down the provisions of the Act to make it easy for corporates to undertake mining in the forests. Since Prime Minister Narenda Modi pulled all plugs to make it easy to do business the Act has been observed more in breach than in practice in the last five years. 

A set of petitions challenging the Forest Rights Act is now before the Supreme Court. On being told that 16 states had rejected the claims of a total of 1,127,446 forest dwellers, a three-judge bench directed the state governments in February to evict them. 

It asked the states to explain why there were no evictions so far and said it would take a serious view of the matter if they were not evicted before July 27, the next date of hearing. It is not clear why the court peremptorily issued an eviction order without hearing the Centre, waiting for the state governments’ explanations and giving the affected people an opportunity to make representations against the proposed action.

The Centre appears to have played a collusive role in the matter.  Congress President Rahul Gandhi accused the Modi government of remaining a silent spectator when the Act was challenged and attempts were being made to drive out Adivasis and small farmers from forest areas. 

Following a storm of protests across the country, the apex court stayed its order within a few days. But the peril to which the Adivasis are exposed remains.

Social justice has primacy among the objectives of the Constitution. It is the responsibility of the Supreme Court to ensure justice to the forest dwellers, one of the most vulnerable sections of Indian society.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, April 9, 2019.

Unending wait for justice

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The vast majority of India’s population suffers from various kinds of disabilities on account of birth. In extreme cases, disabilities take the form of condemnation to eke out a measly living doing the dirtiest of jobs.

The Constitution that India adopted on emerging as a free nation proclaimed that no citizen shall be subjected to any disability, restriction or condition with regard to access to basic amenities and other facilities on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth. It also empowered the state to make special provisions considered necessary to enable the disadvantaged sections to overcome their disabilities and become full and equal citizens.

Accordingly, the Centre and the states have enacted a plethora of laws. However, justice eludes hapless citizens as the authorities are often lax in implementing them.

In 1993, in the fifth decade of Independence, the Centre passed a law prohibiting construction of dry latrines and employment of manual scavengers. It prescribed a year’s imprisonment or a fine of Rs 2,000 or both for breach of its provisions. But no one was convicted under this law in any state.

The Comptroller and Auditor-General in a report in 2003 said Rs6 billion had been spent on the scheme for rehabilitation of scavengers under the law but it had failed to achieve its objectives. Later in the year Safai Karmachari Andolan, an organisation of the community, moved the Supreme Court for a declaration that continuance of manual scavenging was a violation of constitutional rights and a directive to the Central and state governments to implement the law.

While the matter was before the court, the Centre superseded the 2003 law with another one which spelt out measures for rehabilitation of manual scavengers. The Supreme Court closed the case after issuing certain directives to the Centre and the states in the light of the new law.

On October 2, 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched with fanfare an ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) with the objective of making India clean in five years as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on his 150th birth anniversary. It envisages large-scale construction of community toilets, grant of financial aid to build household toilets and making towns and villages free of open defaecation. 

Successful completion of the mission would eliminate manual scavenging. The Urban Development Ministry, which recently undertook a sample survey in three selected districts each in the large states of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, found that all three had failed miserably in achieving the targets for building household latrines in the first two years.

Karnataka had achieved a paltry 2.1 per cent, UP four per cent and Maharashtra 14.4 per cent. In many instances the state governments had not even transferred the funds allotted by the Centre to the urban local bodies. The Ministry concluded that the mission was unlikely to achieve the goal of Clean India by 2019.

The SBM websites claim that more than 38 million household toilets have been built in the villages and more than 3 million in urban areas. The Urban Development Ministry’s survey yielded information that casts doubts on these claims. 

For instance, it pointed out that at Akola town in Maharashtra only 85 households sought assistance to build toilets but the website displayed photographs of 2,978 completed units. It also put up photographs of more than 600 toilets said to have been constructed at Bhadohi, Jahanabad and Mathura in UP although not even one application from these towns was verified and approved.

The Socio-Economic Caste Census data released in 2015 put the number of families engaged in manual scavenging at 180,657. The Centre is supposed to provide funds to the states for their rehabilitation. In the 2015-16 budget it made an allocation of Rs 4.7 billion for the purpose but not a rupee was spent.

One reason for the failure of the rehabilitation scheme is the systematic falsification of data by the states. Most of them deliberately fudge the number of manual scavengers to convey the false impression that they had complied with the legal ban. Sometimes this is done in a very crude manner. For instance, the government of Telangana state, which had more than 150,000 dry latrines at the end of 2015/ claimed there were no manual scavengers in the state.

The Central and state governments owe it to themselves and to the people to address the problem of manual scavenging boldly and honestly and put an end to the misery of those who have been waiting endlessly for justice. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, April 4, 2017.

Elusive social justice

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

A high court judgement acquitting 26 men, whom a lower court had sentenced to either death or life imprisonment for the murder of 58 Dalits, including 27 women and 16 children, has brought to the fore the question of social justice.

The case arose out of a massacre, allegedly by members of Ranvir Sena, a militia set up by Bhumihar Brahmin landlords to terrorise farmhands into submission, at Lakshmanpur Bathe, 100 kilometres from Patna, capital of Bihar state, in 1997. The victims included pregnant women and infants.

The Patna High Court freed the accused, saying they are entitled to the benefit of the doubt as the prosecution witnesses, most of them local Dalits, are not reliable. The state government has said it will go in appeal to the Supreme Court. The Dalits are afraid the killers will strike again.

Voicing the Dalits’ despair, a man who lost seven members of his family told a reporter: “After 58 murders, no one is guilty. The courts are theirs, the government is theirs, the lathi (police baton) is theirs. The poor have nothing. This is injustice.”

The Ranvir Sena, set up in 1994, was banned the following year but has continued to operate with the patronage of influential people.

The 2011 Census put the number of Dalits — members of erstwhile untouchable communities — at 201.4 million, or 16.6 per cent of the total population. Four states account for nearly half of the Dalits: Uttar Pradesh (20.5%), West Bengal (10.7%), Bihar (8.2%) and Tamil Nadu (7.2%). In UP, the Bahujan Samaj Party, which draws its support primarily from the Dalit community, is a major political player and its leader, Mayawati, has been its chief minister more than once. Dalits form 31.9% of Punjab’s population but the BSP has not been able to make much headway there.

Congress Vice-president Rahul Gandhi recently said Mayawati was preventing the emergence of other Dalit leaders. She hit back saying the Congress was anti-Dalit. However, she continues to support the Congress-led government at the Centre from outside.

Gandhi said the Congress would build up hundreds of thousands of Dalit leaders to carry forward the process of empowering the community. He gave no inkling of awareness of the flaw in his party’s efforts in this regard. It has helped to elevate individual Dalits to the high offices of the president, the chief justice, chief ministers and Speakers of legislative bodies. However, in the absence of determined efforts to ensure social justice, a primary objective of the Constitution, of which BR Ambedkar, a Dalit, was the chief architect, its contributions do not rise above the level of tokenism. 

Police often refuse to register complaints of atrocities against Dalits. Slackness of investigators and prosecutors results in extremely low rates of conviction.

Ambedkar had embarked upon his mission of emancipating the Dalits by burning the Code of Manu, a treatise dating back to the first or second century BCE, which provided ideological underpinning and religious sanction for the highly iniquitous caste system. The state apparatus, dominated by beneficiaries of the system, has been slack in translating the constitutional guarantee of equality and equal opportunity into reality. Manu figures, in approving terms, in more than 300 Supreme Court judgements of the past six decades.

Statistical data provides an appalling picture. Every 18 minutes a crime is committed against a Dalit. Every day at least two Dalits are murdered, 11 beaten up and two Dalit houses destroyed. More than 54% of the Dalit children are undernourished. As many as 83 out of 1,000 live-birth Dalit children die before their first birthday. Men belonging to so-called upper castes systematically subject Dalit women to sexual violence as a means of punishment, control and dominance.

Although manual scavenging is banned by law, about 1.3 million Dalits, mostly women, are still engaged in the demeaning activity. More than 10,000 of them are in the national capital. 

Untouchability, prohibited by the Constitution, is still practised in many villages. In an extension of the practice of this evil, cooperatives in Gujarat’s Mehsana district do not accept milk from cows owned by Dalits.

Recent migrants have carried the caste baggage with them to the West.  Last year the UN Human Rights Council, acting on representations by NGOs and findings of its own Rapporteurs, directed India and the United Kingdom to take certain specific steps against caste discrimination.

Significantly, the older Indian communities in the West Indies and Fiji were able to develop untroubled by caste and religious differences due to virtual absence of Brahminical elements among them. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 15, 2013.