Democratic Assertions: The Making of India's Recognition of Forest Rights Act

Abstract

Inclusion of marginalized sections and minorities remains one of the most vexing problems for democratic politics. This article discusses the enactment of a recent Indian law, ‘The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act, 2006’, as exemplifying the possibilities of inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic processes. The law was enacted in response to a nationwide mobilization of marginalized forest dwellers and their advocates demanding rights over forests. Grassroots‐level formations representing forest dwellers came together across scales and spaces to form a network that successfully negotiated India's democratic politics to achieve the passage of the law. The case illustrates the role of grassroots mobilizations in creating alternate discourses of legitimacy, networking across scales and locations, and using spaces provided by representative democracy to include the voices and demands of the marginalized in democracies.

Understanding India’s forest bureaucracy: a review

“…Priority is given to meeting centrally planned targets for tree planting or other activities (Sundar et al 2001;Verma 2004;Lélé 2005;Reddy et al 2007;Bandi 2009;Fleischman 2014) or to distributing benefits in ways that enhance the patronage that foresters deliver to local political allies (Kashwan 2015). Similarly, there are frequent reports that foresters misrepresent the nature of rights available to villagers under the FRA in ways that enhance forest departments' power (Bose 2010;Saxena et al 2010;Kashwan 2013;Kumar and Kerr 2012). Villagers are frequently hesitant to challenge foresters both because foresters are powerful across multiple political arenas and because they effectively build patronage relationships with powerful local leaders (Baviskar 1995;Robbins et al 2009;Kashwan 2011Kashwan , 2013Kashwan , 2015.…”

“…Forestdependent people in India are among the nation's poorest (Gundimeda and Shyamsundar 2012), and the forest departments run many programs that affect them. Since the 1970s, national governments have imposed on state forest departments a series of laws and programs aimed at ameliorating conflict, including social forestry in the 1970s and 1980s (Saxena 1994;Saxena and Ballabh 1995) (Kumar and Kerr 2012). These in turn have led forest departments to adopt state-level formal procedures, as well as tacit institutions, discussed below, which restructured the relations between local people and forest departments.…”

Indonesia's contested domains. Deforestation, rehabilitation and conservation-with-development in Central Kalimantan's tropical peatlands

“…A key difficulty is that many local communities lack formal land rights or rights of access to forests and Indonesia lacks the tradition of civil society protest that has characterized recent efforts in India to correct 'historic injustices' (Kumar andKar 2012, Springate-Baginski 2009) to forest-based populations. Without rights or broader support from civil society organisations, peatland-based communities are more likely to suffer from environmental injustices, especially when the resources that they lack formal rights to are valuable.…”

Territorialisation and marginalisation in the forested landscapes of Orissa, India

“…Media reports estimated that evictions would eventually affect almost 10 million forest dwellers, mainly tribal (Kaur, 2002). The evictions and associated human rights violation led to the emergence of a national campaign for forest rights, representing a coalition of forest dwellers, grassroots organisations activists and academics (Kumar and Kerr, 2012). The campaign was able to push the Indian Parliament to enact the Recognition of Forest Rights Act (2006), which acknowledged the historical injustices of the territorialisation process and aimed to restore certain rights over forest use to forest-dwelling people (Kumar and Kerr, 2012).…”