 I'm kicking us off today so just to say about three years ago a colleague of mine emailed me and said that there's an extremely bright and mature 25-year-old student that's interested in coming to serve us, it was you, by the way, that's me, this is Brendan I'm talking about. And one advice on how to apply to the anthropology department is to do with the ASAP. And I think when we got in touch, I found out we were inviting pieces for the economic and political weekly, which is a very important, very influential journal in India. So, you know, it was not this bit with the anthropology department, and I was very pleased when you did come here and also to find out the fact here as well. And we were able to meet and indeed took the course in political ecology development, which today's talk directly relates to a lot of the same areas that we look at on political ecology development. And, yeah, looking forward to hearing more about it, there is the excellent article in the economic and political weekly with a bit of a magic name on which I do recommend as well. But I think you're also going to talk about some new material. So, I'll hand it over to you. Thank you so much, Richard, for being here today and for that introduction, and thank you all for coming. It's really great to have you. And like Richard said, I'm presenting some of the materials that I wrote about in my paper and also sharing with you some new materials. So, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. My work is mostly around issues of identity and forest rights and indigeneity. So, I'll just begin by bringing you to these boards, which have been put up in a village in Goodalood, which is where I do my field work. So, Goodalood lies at the heart of an ecologically sensitive area. And so, it's right at the centre of six different national parks, wildlife centuries and tiger reserves. And because it's a region that's so central to conservation, communities have faced continued harassment at the hands of the forest department. And they've been resettled and relocated multiple times from sector areas. And in the village where these boards have been put up, there are at least three different ethnic communities who all live side by side. And because Goodalood is at the heart of the three South Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, it's sort of a melting pot of identities of sorts. So, you have tribal communities and you also have autoxymus settled agriculturalists who are not actually classified as tribal. But the landscapes of Goodalood have also been marked by the plantation economy ever since the colonial period. And colonial planters needed to bring labour for the plantations from other parts of South India. So, that was your first wave of migration into Goodalood. And then after independence, the Indian state wanted to create sort of economic self-sufficiency and autarchy for the independent state of India. And they started to grow more food movement, which encouraged not just labourers, but also small and marginalised farmers from neighbouring states to settle in Goodalood. And most recently, around the late 1960s and early 1970s, you have the Tamals from Sri Lanka who have been repatriated to India under this sort of bilateral agreement between the two governments. And these Tamals are originally Indian Tamals and they were sent in the colonial period from Tamil Nadu in India to work on the plantations of Sri Lanka. And now they've been resettled around tea plantations across South India and they've been given employment on these tea plantations. And in this particular settlement, where you find this board, you have a tribal colony that consists of these mud harts alongside these rivers. And in very close proximity to the colony, you find Tamil repatriates. And many of the Tamals are intermarried with the tribals and they also live in the colony now. And nearby there are also small farmers from the neighbouring state of Kerala and they now speak the tribal languages of the region fluently. There are also here Tamil plantation labourers who settled in the region from the colonial period. So that's just to give you a sense of how heterogeneous this settlement is in terms of identity. And I want to bring your attention to that because these conflations of identity are one of the main reasons that there's been a lot of debate and contestation around just a simple act of putting up this board itself. So the board declares in Tamil that this village has rights under the Forest Rights Act of 2006. And I'll refer to the Forest Rights Act in this talk from here on as the FRA. So the FRA marked a watershed moment for forest governance in India by recognising the rights of communities that have traditionally used and occupied India's forest lands. And the boards were put up by an organisation that represents the interests of small farmers and landless labourers and this organisation conceives of itself along the lines of a trade union or a mass organisation. And when the boards were put up, tribal NGOs in the region took great issue with the boards because they were arguing that these boards imply that all communities in the region can claim rights under the FRA. But the FRA itself provides for the rights only of tribal communities and also communities that can prove occupation on forest lands for three generations. And in addition to this sort of narrow legal concern, there was also a broader concern here about the erosion of tribal culture because of intermarriage and modernisation and so on. So the FRA is implemented mainly through village councils called the Gram Sabha and the Gram Sabha is the first level arbiter of rights claims. So the FRA itself prescribes that all adult members in any given village should be on the Gram Sabha. But what tribal NGOs in the region have done is they've constituted these village councils consisting of exclusively tribal members. So activists who drafted the FRA feel that what the tribal NGOs are doing is a violation of what the law prescribes. So to really understand these contestations, we need to understand the political climate in which negotiations around the FRA are sued. So what I'll do today is I'll begin by sort of opening up that black box of policy making and going into the history of drafting the FRA and sharing with you some of what were very heated and contentious debates that took place during the drafting of this act. And these debates were not only about who would be eligible for rights or how they would establish their eligibility and what the rights would entail. But they were also very interestingly about the language in which these new rights would be granted. So over what ideologies and histories words would call up, what visions of justice or injustice they represented. And also how these words were imagined to be picked up and used by forest dwelling communities in the future. I feel that looking at this history not only reveals something to us about the contestations around the boards, but also about the nature of policy itself. That's to say we usually tend to see policy as being prescriptive as sort of offering static templates that are then applied into local contexts. And so when we assess policy, it's usually based on whether the policy has been implemented or not or how successfully the policy has been implemented. But from a black letter law perspective alone, the FRA has not in any sense been implemented in Goodalood on the ground. So rights claims have not been processed by the state at all. But despite this, the FRA has been central to how communities in Goodalood sort of mobilise their own politics. And so in a Fouquodian sense then we can think of the law not just as a means of imposing power on subjects, but also a means within and through which subjectivities are framed. So the law is sort of prescribing who can be deemed a good for a subject and who can't. So I see the FRA as offering communities many different scripts, different narratives, which contain various and sometimes competing notions of what justice is. And so in that sense the FRA is a non-human actor that is opening up spaces of possibility to those who take up and use it. So what I'll do today is show you also how local actors in Goodalood take on the environmental subjectivities framed by the FRA and how these subjectivities lend validity to some forms of contestation over others. So I'll just tell you a bit now about the drafting process of this act. It all began in 2002 when the Ministry of Environment and Forests in India ordered that all encroachments on forest lands needed to be evicted within five months. This was then followed by a spate of violent addictions all over the country in which communities sort of found their homes raised to the ground. They found their crops destroyed and in some places there was even violent confrontation with the Forest Department. Now the Forest Department's rationale for this was that in 1990 they had ordered that all forest settlements that existed before 1980 would be recognised. And so subsequent to that all forest settlements were now automatically encroachments that then needed to be removed. But the issue of course was that the 1990 orders had actually never been acted on and these settlements had not in fact been recognised. Actors all across the country also argued that simply by virtue of recognising these pre-1980 settlements that's not enough to then go ahead and deem forest dwellers as encroachers because simply because they don't have legal recognition doesn't account for the historical injustice that's been meted out to these communities via the principle of eminent domain in which the state is conceived of as automatically owning all lands that communities have actually traditionally used and occupied. And that this principle of eminent domain then makes these communities illegal on the lands that they themselves are traditional occupants have. So after this over the course of the next four years these two words historical injustice would be cited again and again by activists, environmentalists, government officials and political leaders in all of the contestations that ensued around the drafting of the act until these words historical injustice actually found their way into the preamble of the act itself when it was passed in 2006. So after the addiction started as a response to them civil society groups all across the country came together to form what was called the campaign for survival and dignity in 2002. And by the time the Congress party of India came into power in 2004 what had begun as a campaign to resist the evictions had now grown into a demand for a new law. And the Congress party was realising that forest dwelling communities of the country consisted a sort of a swing constituency and that in order to maintain that voting block they would need to meet the demand to address historic injustice. And because the campaign itself, the campaign for survival and dignity was so central to articulating this demand, members from the campaign were called upon to form half of the technical support group that would draft the act. The other half of the committee were representatives from the tribal affairs ministry of India. And the tribal affairs ministry was chosen as an old latency because the only other option within the government would be the forest department itself. And the forest department already had vested interest in seeing communities removed from forest lands. But what happened when they gave the tribal affairs ministry such a strong representation was that it already pitted the drafting process of the act with these polarising tensions. So what we had at this point in 2004 was you had activists on the one hand and the government on the other and they each had very different versions of justice that were being mobilised through this act. So on the one hand you had activists who were framing the issue very clearly as a response to evictions. So they were seeking a legal tool that could help communities combat the power of the forest department. But for the tribal affairs ministry, their interest was a much more identity-based politics and they were more concerned with representing their own constituency, which is tribals in the country. So when the first draft of the bill was passed, it granted rights to all communities who resided on forest lands in India before 2005. But what happened was that the tribal affairs ministry posed a very strong objection to this, citing that tribal communities have suffered again historic injustice at the hands of non-tribal communities who encroached on forest lands. So in this genealogy of justice, tribals are presented as being dispossessed from forest, while all other communities are complicit to this dispossession. So the compromise struck between these two competing demands at this stage was that the act would then automatically recognise rights for scheduled tribe communities. But then it would require that those communities who are not classified as tribal need to have resided on forest lands before 1990. And it appeared that a relatively stable compromise had been struck. And the act was said to be tabled in Parliament. But what quite unexpectedly happened at this point was that conservationists in the country got men that this act was being drafted. And the conservationists were never a part of the committee that was tasked with drafting the act or debating the act. But they then went on to play a very significant role in shaping the FRA as we know it today. Initially the conservationists needed to work through personal networks that they had with the Congress party of India because they had no official role. And at this point their concern was not articulated in opposition to the act itself. The conservationists were not contesting the narrative of historical injustice. They were only contesting the chronology. So according to this narrative there were legitimate occupants of forest lands who lacked rights. But they were all tribals and they all lived in their current habitations before 1980. So what they were suggesting was that the act excludes all non-tribal communities and that the date for recognising rights gets pushed back from 1990 to 1980. But what happened again after this was that the new Indian Express, which is one of the leading newspapers in the country, leaked a draft version of the act. And this then opened up the act to a whole new range of constituencies in India who contested the versions of history and the scripts of justice that were being written into the law. So you no longer had just activists, the tribal ministry, the environmental ministry and conservationists contesting the act. You now had a whole range of publics who were weighing in on it. And this happened in this very polarising terms of the public debate that was to ensue, which was tigers versus tribals. So as the name suggests, one faction of the debate was arguing that we need inviolate areas, that is areas with no human habitation whatsoever, in order to conserve India's already fragile ecosystems which host some of the last remaining tigers in the world. But you also had the other dwindling voice of activists that were reiterating that there has been historical injustice that forest dwelling communities had suffered. But at this point it was seeming unlikely that the act would get passed at all because there was such public outrage against it and especially India's middle class was squarely with the conservationists. And even if the act did get passed, there was no chance that non-tribal communities would find their way into it. So activists were directing their efforts, primarily at getting some version of the act passed before that current session of parliament ended. And the only remaining constituency that represented the needs of non-tribal communities was the left parties, that is the Communist Party of India Marxist. So members of the Communist Party rushed to intervene and they argued that the large majority of forest dwelling communities in India belonged to non-tribal communities. And again invoking the rhetoric of historical injustice, they argued that an act passed without including non-tribal communities would do fresh injustice to them and it wouldn't in fact redress historical injustice. So finally just two days before the act was passed in parliament, non-tribal communities were in fact given representation. But at this point this was done only on the condition that these non-tribal communities could prove that they've decided on forest lands for three generations. So finally you had an act that granted rights to all scheduled threat communities and created a category called other traditional forest dwellers, which was communities who can prove residents on forest lands for three generations. And when the act was passed as such, activists all across the country protested it because they were saying that many communities in India that are tribal are not actually classified as tribal and it's also often impossible for non-tribals to prove legally the duration that they've lived on forest lands. Many of these contestations are actually echoed also in the way that political actors in Guruleau have used the FRA. So until early 2016, the implementation of the FRA in Guruleau was completely suspended by a high court order. So as soon as the FRA was passed, what also happened is retired forest department officials all across the country filed constitutional challenges against the act in the various high courts of the country. And so the court in Tamil Nadu ordered that all rights claims would have to be vetted by a court committee. And this effectively stalled the implementation of the FRA completely in Tamil Nadu. But regardless of this complete non-implementation, the FRA has still been central to shaping the way political actors in Guruleau articulate their politics. As I mentioned previously, tribal organisations across the district have set up exclusively tribal grounds of us, that is the village councils which are responsible for arbitrating claims. And the way they've done this is by forming coalitions that include also a number of conservation organisations. So this included even the world famous WWF. And this coalition of tribal NGOs and conservation organisations then got the district administration to pass the special order, sanctioning these exclusively tribal grounds by the exclusively tribal village councils. And these NGOs have also been mainly responsible for processing the act through things like GPS mapping and mapping out community forests, setting up ventures for ecotourism on land owned by the tribal NGOs. The question here is really whether the tribal NGOs first of all represent all tribal communities. And whether non-tribals are therefore being excluded from ecotourism and community forestry ventures. So like I also mentioned, there are other organisations who work as trade unions or mass organisations that are working towards very different political goals, which is land rights for the tunnels, who I mentioned earlier will be repatriated from Sri Lanka to India after a ringman sent there in the colonial period. And the other issue is of course conservation. And so they've been opposing the declaration of a tiger reserve that came up in 2007. And although these tunnels were brought to India under a bilateral agreement between the two governments, little has actually been done to ensure their land or labour rights. So the large majority of them are still landless and they work as very precarious labour on tea plantations. And so they're valuable to the infringement of their labour rights as well. And so what these trade unions have done is that sort of in an effort to secure land rights, they've filed claims with the Ministry of Environment and Forests, which if you recall agreed to recognise all pre-1980 settlements on forest lands. What they've also done is formed these village councils, the Gramsubals, and their Gramsubals consist of all adult members in any given village, so not just tribals but both tribals as well as non-tribals. But only eligible members in these village councils have filed claims. So when I say eligible here, I'm referring to the provision that you have to be either a scheduled tribe or have decided on forest lands for three generations in order to file claims. And the sort of the long argument and the reason that activists believe that this kind of claim making process is still relevant to the fight for Tamil land rights, despite knowing that technically Tamers don't qualify for rights under the Forest Rights Act is that what they say is the FRA is primarily a process driven law. So what this means is that nearly by processing claims, they open up new possibilities for political action. So simply filing a claim, even if the claim will be rejected, generates proof of residence. And proof of residence itself is very hard to come by for these Tamers who have no other means of legal recognition. And so what this does is it adds weight to their fight for land rights under ongoing settlement processes. So this is sort of like a very expansive political project that conceives different laws together and reads different laws together to mobilize politics for land rights and sort of more class based politics. And with protected area conservation also becoming more and more important in Guadalupe. In 2007, just before the rules of the FRA came out, so just before the FRA was actually going to be implemented, the government very hurriedly made amendments to the Wildlife Protection Act. So the Wildlife Protection Act is the act under which protected areas are declared in India. And what this very hasty amendment allowed for was the declaration of tiger reserves without actually settling rats. And this is how the Mudumulai Tiger Reserve in Guadalupe was declared in 2007. And after this tiger reserve was declared in 2007, in 2009 the court also ordered a fresh set of evictions in this area by proposing an elephant corridor. What was also done is used the FRA as a tool of resistance against these large conservation projects that are now coming up in their backyards. So when the tiger reserve was to be declared, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Guadalupe in massive protest because they felt that if their lands were to be part of the tiger reserve, they wouldn't be able to practice agriculture, collect firewoods, or even access basic development facilities like electricity or roads. And many of them were also likely to be relocated from their land. So they formed grounds of house village councils in this area which consisted of all adult members in that village. Both tribal as well as non-tribal. And these village councils then passed resolutions against the declaration of the tiger reserve and the elephant corridor. And they then used the resolutions to file a case that is now pending with the Supreme Court of India. And the case primarily argued that rights had not been settled under the Forest Rights Act before declaring the tiger reserve and the elephant corridor. And now although the final decision on this case is still pending with the Supreme Court, it has at least led to the potential evictions being cancelled and the buffer zone for the tiger reserve has been cut in. So that was just a bit of an overview of how the FRA has been used in Guadalupe. But I'd also like to tell you now a little bit about how these different actors relate to each other given the differences in how they've gone about implementing the act. You might imagine there's been quite a lot of contestation between them because some of the NGOs contend that this sort of conflation between land rights for tumours on the one hand with Forest Rights for trials on the other is a very dangerous one because they argue that tumours don't actually meet the criteria for eligibility under the FRA. And so this use of the FRA by the trade unions is a violation of the law. And in addition to this legal objection, they raise a further ethical objection which is that if you use the act in this way, it could leave room for other non-tribers that is not just the tumours to sort of usurp this rights claim process. And with regards to the tiger reserve, they argue that it's anyhow only local resort owners and jeep drivers who feed protests against the reserve. And they also say that our tribal communities have traditionally been completely excluded from the process of conservation. So when a protected area is declared, all communities are sort of wholesale relocated from the protected area, whether they're tribals or non-tribals. But in this instance, by 2007 with the Mudamulet Tiger Reserve, we were sort of beginning to see some potential for the Forest Department to actually work with tribal communities. So the NGOs were seeing this as a step to a more inclusive conservation agenda. And so they didn't see any reason to oppose the creation of the tiger reserve itself. But then on the other hand, you have activists who in turn question the authority that the NGOs have to redefine the grounds of our village council. And they argue that by forming these special tribal grounds of ours consisting of only tribal members, the tribal NGOs are violating the law. And that a sort of a state NGO nexus has captured the process of implementation of the appareil. And they contend that this act of forming grounds of ours of exclusively tribal members is also now creating sort of localised divisions and exacerbating conflict. And now it's sort of creating new mechanisms of local level governance that are then modifying the relationship between different stakeholders on the ground. And so it's solidifying boundaries between communities along the lines of identity. And what happens when these lines of identity are solidified is that it militates against sort of collective solidarity and political mobilisation against the state and against the forest department. So for them that's very sort of class-based political imaginary in which large landowners and the state are conceived of as hegemonic forces that dominate the underclass. And they assert that it's not local communities but the forest department that should be seen as the biggest enclosure. So despite not actually having been implemented again the FRA has been of immense consequence in good law both materially in terms of opposing the tigerism as well as discursively in terms of creating these new environmental subjectivities. So in that sense the law is a terrain of struggle. It's not an immutable category but it's a political instrument. A sort of a non-human actor that's mediating negotiations between political actors in good law. So the way that the FRA itself is framed makes it a law in which multiple and sometimes conflicting ideologies are represented. So it's simultaneously an instrument of law with the purpose of recognising rights an act guided by the policy imperative of decentralising forest governance and an attempt at undoing historical injustice. And these often quoted words undoing historical injustice are now written into the text of the law itself. And it's the very embeddedness of history and of justice that calls upon us to attend to the ways in which the law too is derived from socio-political context. And it's in this that lies its capacity to invoke specific histories and arbitrate these ever-contested versions of justice. But what we should remember is that even in achieving these purposes whether of recognising rights, democratising governance or undoing injustice, the law also exercises a capacity to govern. So I'd like to just quickly show you a small video clip at this point and this video clip is one of the tribal members who led a protest that happened in December 2014. And they were protesting the lack of implementation of the Forest Rights Act. As you saw in the video, the law says that tribals are the original inhabitants. So I wanted to show you this just to show you how the law also exists in the mind of the tribal leader that this is a very self-aware process that these tribals know the kind of social capital and legal capital that their cultural identity affords them and they're using it. So regarding this question about the tribal in the law, through both the drafting process of the FRA as well as its implementation, the FRA has engendered fears debate about the role and position of the tribal. And while activists contend that the stringent restrictions based upon non-tribals is a parochial and self-interested move by the tribal affairs ministry, others also argue that the implementation of the Act too has been skewed in favour of the tribal constituency. And I found these words sort of reflected in what a Tamil plantation labourer told me one day. He asked me, do you know how much more the Forest Department harasses us now that they know that tribals have rights? They're afraid to do anything because then some big NGO will have words with their eye officials. But we don't have anyone like that. Everyday they're putting cases against us and our people now have thousands of cases against them. So who will help us fight this? Or in the words of a tribal who practices informal gold mining on the lands of a local tea estate who said that it's okay for us tribals to practice illegal mining because the estate owner allows us but not others. So when we take our Tamil friends and go, we pretend that they are also tribals. And by presenting these examples, I'm not attempting to erase the very real harassment that tribals are subjected to. I'm not suggesting that they're not exploited. In fact, discrimination in all forms is still an immediate and tangible reality for tribals. So just to cite my recent example. In November 2014, a group of tribal men were digging for gold in abandoned gold mines and they were actually caught fire patrolling for a stranger. And when they were caught, they were severely beaten up and they suffered grievous injuries. So what I'm attempting to demonstrate instead is how the meanings attach to identity. The meanings which are codified and embedded within law influence the ways in which estate owners or forest department officials come to either recognize or curtail rights. Or more importantly, the ways in which tribals or thumbnails come to experience their own identities as either being constricting or enabling. So in that sense, the sphere of legislation is not limited to law books and courtrooms alone. The law is exercising a performative capacity of sorts. It's acting as an agent that goes forth into the world. And in doing so gets translated and mediated through these local actors. And when identities are embedded within the law, these identities are then also mediated by this very performative power of legislation. So when we are citing the emancipatory potential of landmark laws such as the FDA, we must not forget that even in achieving that emancipatory potential, the law is modifying relationships and governing populations. I want to just bring you back for a moment to the notice boards that I showed you at the beginning of this talk. So these notice boards were also actually put up as a response to an already existing notice board from the forest department that declared that this land had been converted to forest land. And so this practice of putting up notice boards is a very common political tactic in Goethe. So for example, I'll show you another board, which as you can see says the Supreme Court of Libya has prohibited any non-forestry activities, including clearing, cultivation, construction, etc. in what are called Janmum lands in the entire O Valley village. And any violation will end in severe action as per law. So these Janmum lands are sort of an oddity of land classification in Goethe. So they belong to a pre-colonial system of land tenure. So in the pre-colonial period, you'd have ruling kings who would lease out large tracts of lands to landlords. And then these land landlords would then create sub-leases and sub-leases further to cultivators. And what happened in Goethe Llood is this essentially created a sort of a forest lease regime. And after India gained independence, we wanted to abolish all of these pre-colonial systems of land tenure. And so as a part of that attempt, the Janmum Abolition Act was passed in 1969. So what that act was trying to do was remove the many layers of landowners and landlords that exist between the state, which is now the proprietary owner of land and cultivators. But when the act was passed, plantation owners in Goethe Llood took great issue with it because this meant that they would lose their lands and they challenged the constitutional validity of this act itself. And they filed a case that is now still pending with the Supreme Court of India. And as a consequence of this legal limbo, land classification in Goethe Llood has been in a complete state of contestation for decades now. And the entire details of that is beyond what I have scope for right now. But the point that I'm trying to make here is that as a consequence of this legal limbo, what happened in Goethe Llood is that plantations and forests became very permeable categories in terms of classification. And this was only then complicated further when the Supreme Court then extended the definition of forests in India to mean any lands that conform to the dictionary definition of forests. So forest classification in Goethe Llood then does not correspond with underground realities. What on paper might conform to the dictionary definition of forests is often in practice a plantation, a small farm, a settlement or in some cases even a small town. And more importantly, these kinds of bureaucratic processes that underlie these land classifications remain completely invisible to people in villages. At least until they announce themselves with the unwelcome presence of these notice boards. Even just last month, new notice boards were erected. And this time they wrote the colonial era legislation, the Tamil Nadu Land Encoachment Act from 1905. So people are invidual in Goethe Llood live with a looming set of eviction because what is constantly happening is that the state and the forest department more particularly is attempting to convert land into forests. And so people are always afraid that they could wake up to find these notice boards in their village or they could return home after a day's work to find that their houses have been demolished in extreme circumstances or that their crops have been destroyed. And so for these villages the problem then is not so much that the law is inaccessible. So it's not a question of access to justice. The law, in fact, enters and invades their everyday life in a number of ways. These villagers are only too familiar with negotiating bureaucratic processes both within the state machinery as well as with civil society groups from whom they live support. Perhaps to file a case against the forest department official who's been harassing them or to fight one of the numerous cases that have been filed against them. The problem they're facing instead is one of legal indeterminacy. That is, you have competing and often contradictory forest legislations in Goethe Llood and what this does is it makes forests themselves spaces of legal ambiguity and this legal ambiguity makes these spaces available for contestation to be claimed by whichever stakeholder employs the most successful tactics. What I also want to point out here is that these contestations are playing out across multiple scales. While the actors in my narrative have so far been portrayed as distinct entities. So I've had the state, the NGO, the activists and so on. This provides only a partial analysis of the ways in which power functions in practice and how different people negotiate and respond to this. These actors are not in fact distinct. They're all equally embedded in a localised context. So what I'm referring to for example is a forest watcher who is himself from a local village or a tribal who is also a senior member in an NGO or an activist who is himself a re-patrioted tum. And it's really here at this level that we begin to see how categories become nebulous and boundaries begin to bluff. The question really is what do these words mean for the tribal who lives in the village and possibly doesn't know what it means when he hears the words for his rights act or grants above, right? He might not know who put the boards there or why. But perhaps what he does know is that the local traditional tribal leader who now has a house with electricity and a good salary doesn't care for his problems any longer. What he does know is that he's been trying to get electricity and good roads for his village. But he's repeatedly told that he lives on forest land and so these facilities can't be provided. What he does know is that every evening when he works home from the nearby forest where he works as an informal gold miner, he may run into a rogue elephant. And these are concerns that he then has to articulate through these often competing voices and the politics of various political actors. So he has to maintain, for example, friendly relations with the forest watcher so that the next time a forest guard comes on a raid in his village he will receive the news in advance. He volunteers and participates in NGO meetings so that maybe he can secure an agricultural loan or two. Or he talks to the researcher who visits always with 100 questions in the hope that she could help them apply for and finally receive the pension that he's been promised from the government. So the various political actors in my narrative are constantly constructing these binaries of oppression and resistance. For example, the founder of the trade union constructs this binary of the forest department and the state as a singular hegemonic force against which the working class must unite in solidarity. But perhaps power is not located quite as simply and quite in that binary. Here we see a range of places and situations in which relations of power are played out. Namely that you have the FRA as a sort of non-human actor influencing relations of power at two levels. Firstly, when it's adopted by various political actors in the region it mediates the relations between these actors and between these actors in the state and with the common man. And as a result, at another level, it's altering the life-war institution of the subaltern who I've spoken about who now has to articulate his concerns within and through whatever agency and these multiple scripts that are afforded to him by the political actors. It's extremely interesting. I'm sure there's quite a few questions. Can I start by asking it myself? The first is just a very quick one, which was about plantations and laying on plantations. So, presumably, there were tamils, but they were also diamonds. And brought to this area 120 years ago, something like that, 150 years ago. The Sri Lankan tamils who'd also presumably moved at the same time to Sri Lanka now being repatriated, not repatriated, and then we've gone back through this bilateral exchange scheme. But neither of them have a claim on the plantation at all. So the second part of the question was about the idea of rights and what people have right to it. There's more to it, which is an SC group, which had your cast. That had been a claim residence for over 100 years. But those sorts of rights to land are never going to be granted. Rights in the forest. And you sort of mentioned about an equal definition of a dictionary definition of forest, but actually what we're talking about is not forest. We're talking about land owned by the Forest Department. What's the nature of the, can you just say a little bit more about the nature of the rights that are given to people under the Crossright Act of 2006? Is it the right to reside? And what sorts of rights do they have to use, or even to extract resources commercially from the forest? Right, so I'm sort of hearing a number of questions in there. Let me just sort of... There's so many ways of looking at this. Absolutely. They're all very interesting questions that you raise. And so I'm not sure... First, are you asking how long and what are the different groups of Dalit schedule cast communities that reside in this area? Secondly, what is the distinction between the plantation, the forest, who has rights to plantations, who has rights to forests? And thirdly, again, did the definition of what a forest is? And sorry, the fourth question, what rights do the forest have? So I'll try to sort of go about it. These issues are sort of all conflated, like I said. So when you think about one thing, you have to think about all the other things, which is what makes it so immensely complex and so immensely interesting, which is why you have all of these contestations in the first place. So I'll begin with the question of Dalit. So Dalits are scheduled cast in India, and so in India's caste system, they sort of occupy the lowest ground of the caste system. And so, like I mentioned, there are possibly two sets of thermals who occupy these lands in Guadelud. Although I must also add here that groups are not quite as distinct. You also have plantation labourers from Karnataka who are not thermals, or from Kerala who settled in the colonial period. So, yes, a large majority of thermals who were brought in the colonial period to work on the colonial plantations are Dalits. And then you did the thermals from Sri Lanka, originally thermals, who are Indian thermals, they are not Sri Lankan thermals, and they were in fact repatriated officially by both governments. So they were granted Indian citizenship once again. Does that answer your first question? The second one was about the nature of the virus. So first of all, the resource really is not the virus itself, because in some definitions you can do plantation with that, but it's landed on by the virus department. And the nature of the virus, it's not ownership of it, it's rights to resolve it. So it's a number of different rights, it's a number of different land classifications. And the reason that I didn't entirely go into that history is that because of the general act that I mentioned, this land is essentially large tracts of the land are disputed, and there's no certainty of what the classification is. So the land is constantly caught in a tassel between the revenue department and the forest department. So what will happen in practice is that, sure, if you were to dig into the records which the forest department will never give you, you might find that, okay, the land is intact, classified under the forest department or not. But in practice, you have the revenue department which will go put up a board and say, this land is for a local land, or this land is a village. Then you have the forest department which will come and put up a board and say this land is classified as a forest under section 53 of the act. So basically all of these general lands, when the general act was passed, are classified under what is called section 17. So if you go to someone in Goodlure and you say, what land is this? This section 17 is something that you give up all the time. And section 17 essentially means that this land could be, at any point, used by the government, or converted by the government to a forest. So in practice, there's really no certainty about whether that land is. So you could be living on a plantation and the forest department will put up a board and they'll say, no, no, no, it's not section 17. Didn't you know that for the last five years, it's been section 53, and you're all illegal? And don't you remember that those people who lived here before you, their crops were raised? And it was because they don't have any legal right to cut off these lands. That's the sort of thing that would happen. So in that sense, you could also have land that is completely forested and you have natural vegetation, is what all the conservationists are going after, right? The indigenous species and conservationists are extremely concerned about invasive species, right? That's your plantana, for example, which has really invaded the forests of Kudaluw. Where do you find the most amount of plantana is within the tiger reserve, within the protected area, and where you find the most natural vegetation that is untouched by human vegetation is in the middle of the village on the border of the village. And that land is not classified as forest land or not under the protected area at all. So I hope that gives some sense of the uncertainty and therefore the way those uncertainties are constantly contested in practice. And in terms of the kinds of rights the FRA is giving, what the FRA did legally is quite radical in India's legal system. So the FRA was not just saying that we are granting rights to communities. The FRA was saying that we are recognising already existing rights and we are correcting the historical injustice. So in addition to providing a series of rights, the FRA is also invoking in its preamble this overarching vision of justice, right? And in terms of the rights itself, you have three categories of rights. You have individual rights, which means that individuals have the right to land title for up to four acres of land. You have community rights, which means access to Polish products, that is timber, gooseberry that might grow in the forest, any kind of plant, medicinal plants, that sort of thing. Access to development facilities in Polish villages. So a lot of these Polish villages don't have any kind of facilities. They don't have solar panels, they don't have street lights, of course electricity within the home is inconceivable. They don't have roads, they don't have Angan bodies, which are sort of like crashes. So the act provides for those access to those development facilities under these community rights. And the act also provides for these concomitant obligations and responsibilities that go under rights when you declare what is called a community policy. So there's a process of mapping that happens, where communities get together and map what are the lands that they traditionally use, and then that becomes community policy that the village council is responsible also for conserving. Does that give you a sense of sort of the diverse and exhaustive nature of rights to reside, own, use, access, not just for its produce, but also development facilities that they are providing? There were many more questions I could ask, but I'm sorry about that. No, that was a very interesting question. Anything else after that that has given you this overwhelming, large of information? I think it is one of the two conditions between two government departments. I don't have much, I don't have a great question to ours, that is yet the same number. How do you find community responses? Some of us generally in action, you know, communities get ready to agree, but they say that the government needs to take charge of this, and they take on that they're still testing within departments, and how do you find the responses? Is that really asking you up? It's still a real action. Are you asking how communities respond to this sort of tassel between government departments? Yes. Well, communities are really quite confused, I think, because there's, like I mentioned, this sort of constant uncertainty as to what are the kinds of rights that they have on their lands. Is the village that they live in even like on paper a village? There's a big issue to do with the classification of villages itself, because the FRA provides that all villages inside forests need to be converted from what's called a revenue village to a forest village. Now whether you're a revenue village or a forest village, entitles you to different kinds of rights. So now communities are asking why they haven't been converted to forest villages despite the fact that they're within forest lands. So the issue really is that all of the uncertainty in contestation provides a very convenient out for the government to then completely erase rights claims in all the ambiguity. The nature of a revenue village is slightly different because a revenue village cannot technically exist on forest lands, so the revenue village will then be relocated depending on the kind of classification that the forest is. So if it's a reserve forest or anything beyond that, a protected area, the revenue village will be relocated. But what the FRA says is, no, first convert the revenue village to a forest village, let communities decide if they want to stay within the forest or not, and then let the process of relocation be something that is consensual. So revenue villages give automatic rights to development facilities, but they don't give similar rights to accessing forest produce. Whereas forest villages under the FRA sort of account for boats together. They account for the fact that communities dwelling on forest lands need to access development facilities on the one hand, and they also need to access forest produce on the other. So the same land keeps changing from forest to village to revenue? Not necessarily from forest to village to revenue village. It changes from section 15 under section 17 under the general map to section 53 of the general map, which then has different implications for what a village on that kind of land can be. Does that make sense? So what does that factor do with just so a canopy at the moment? It's increasingly aggressive. It's increasingly what is happening is that lands are being converted to forest because forests are so important in this region and conservation is so important to the region. So once though there is a change from revenue to forest, how will the locals react to that? Like I said, when there is a change Are there detectives? Are they given other areas for this day? No, in fact even from within the Tiger Reserve there are some communities within the Tiger Reserve who have been simply fed up for years now because they feel that there's no hope inside for them to realise the rights that they have within the protected area to access development facilities and they went to the court and said relocate as for your own procedures under the Tiger Reserve but what's also happening in India in terms of the ways that funds are being allocated for Tiger Reserves is that it's becoming what I would contend is increasingly neoliberal where before you had the National Tiger Conservation Authority which had the funds to relocate communities now you have the compensatory forestation fund which is the fund into which money from corporate social responsibility programmes goes and that fund is now needs to be directed to the Tiger Conservation Authority and by the time all of that bureaucratic hassle happens communities are living within the Tiger Reserve for years and years with access to no facilities whatsoever and they're now facing increasing number of wildlife that's being killed by tigers so so you know a few years ago it was simply that the forest department would come and destroy their crops when an area would be converted to forest but for communities that are now also find themselves stuck on the other hand within Tiger Reserves these are the very different kinds of issues that they face So is it more political or do you look at it like does the change of government that we find also has a good role on how the Tiger Plan is doing? I'm not entirely sure about this that the bureaucracy is political it's not so much about which party is in power I feel like it's more about the larger vested interests of large landowners and conservation and the forest department really that is a force in the state that has increasing amounts of power vested in it with these forest lands and the interest there of course is that it's much easier to have the forest department work with large plantation owners and work with the timber mafia to find loopholes for them and continue to extract timber and so on That's a very interesting question I guess I would say that in this situation economic growth and conservation are not entirely at odds with each other when you have the forest department being granted so much power So in terms of how the forest department has so much power I mentioned the supreme court and this dictionary definition and that was one of the sort of it's been argued as a case of judicial overreach where the judiciary does not actually have the discretion to define forests in this way because what it's also done is it's required that a committee like a separate forest bench then legislates on all issues on forest lands So even if you have issues as minor as who is allowed to pick up a dead tree from a forest in good loot you have a forest bench in the supreme court of India that has forest officials sitting on it that is deciding on that very minor issue and the reason that I don't see the sort of economic growth and conservation is being so hypothetical to each other is that what is essentially happening here is that when you grant local communities access to forest rights that stalls development and that's the effort here that when you conserve but you maintain the power of the forest department then the state still has the capacity to allow for timber markers and allow for large plantation orders which is what is happening in good loot and allow for even protected areas to be directed to non forest purposes So even though you have a tiger reserve there the state still has the right under these kind of tiger reserves to convert that land for non forest purposes but if you declare a protected area under the forest rights act you would need to go through forest value communities first and settle their rights and only then can that forest land be diverted for industry or infrastructure whatever it might be So essentially it's much easier this way for infrastructure and industry to take over Does that make sense? It's quite complicated But there are a few comments and there will be a lot of questions They are probably very very interesting for all kinds of reasons partly for sort of doubly to discuss that world electricity around constricting ideas of policy are supposed to process and seeing how this is a perfect example of how a policy emerged through a very complex process of contestation between different actors and all that And interestingly in this case it's also one of the cases students will be looking at as an example of the transformative action here So I think it's really interesting for the perspective I also find it really interesting that it's about a force that I'm hearing that the forest law grants new rights for development rights to our roads which is really interesting which makes the law a little bit radical compared to what you would expect of forestry departments who are always on the defense when it comes to development projects In fact in Nigeria and the cases that I have studied in the past you have the World Bank and all this other donor agencies insisting that no development project of this kind should happen in natural forests so that people went to the states because they say road construction in certain forest areas these agencies would not fund those particular projects they would fund the ones outside of them So to now see forestry departments that is in fact proposing this is really interesting it's an interesting case to look at but a flip side of this law is also the ways in which this law might be disciplining foresters themselves and you didn't talk about that quite much which is understandable one of the ways in which foresters themselves are trying to grapple with the sort of some of the rights that I think has been sort of exceased away from them to these sacred tribes who probably now cover more plans in terms of their claim over forest areas and other activities that are going on So another way of looking at this particular issue is to think of where the forestry department granted the same sort of rights to those people on its own without the other contestations and from NGOs here the tribal committee mentioned people who sort of ensure that this law might be unjust protected in the forest granted significant rights So with foresters on their own with a concept of this kind of law that sort of gives more rights of people being unjust protected in the forest So an ISIS law sort of disciplining foresters themselves are this sort of also submitting to the big kids of this law even when it doesn't look colourful Well absolutely not to answer the first part of your question and in fact the forest department was not involved in the drafting of this law I imagine that like I mentioned it was initially the activists on the one hand and the tribal affairs ministry on the other and that was a very strategic move by the prime minister's office because if the forest department and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry was brought in at that stage there would have been much more opposition to that for a law like this However what that political interest has done is within the parameters that this law allows allows for it's pushed for a very very small constituency to be allowed the rights so it's pushed for just changing tribes to be allowed rights and all other communities to essentially be excluded by creating this provision that says you must prove that you've decided on forest lands for three generations that is effectively excluding that because you cannot prove that you've decided on forest lands for three generations and in that sense that is how the suppression is happening because sure if the forest department were to grant rights for shadow track communities there would be such a small fraction of those communities that fell on those forests that it would not affect the power and the total amount of land that the forest department has under its control which is really what the forest department is ultimately interested in which is staking claims on more and more land and it would sort of aid projects of the forest department such as ecotourism or just in terms of you know they have these what are called anti-poaching watchers because they need people who can work in the forest department and sort of work on issues of poaching and it's really only the tribal members of tribal communities that can do that they need people who can work with the elephants to tame elephants and they keep elephants who are around to keep and check other elephants that might go wrong so for all these purposes or even just for tourism tribals have a very large representation within the forest department but like you mentioned there is a sort of disciplining force in which a very certain kind of identity is offered privileges and rights and only in a very narrow constricted sense so even though there are tribals there they occupy them with the lowest realm of the forest department and you know even when they are encouraged to take up their own projects they should do so along with and use who will work with the forest department so this law sort of favors the forest department more or doesn't track from their own path the law itself attempts not to favor the forest department by sort of writing about historical injustice but the law has been co-opted and there has been a lot of pushback in the way that the law has been led that you created I'm not sure about the link between I mean it seems like the forest department has very specific objectives so I'm wondering what's the link between the local actors of the forest department what's their interests and how the forest department as a big department makes these objectives seek down to the two people who are actually on the land and putting up local sports and moving people around I'm not sure if everybody in here has got the same interests or not You're not sure that everybody within the forest department has the same interests? Yeah and also I was wondering maybe if this kind of situation happens in other areas or if it's just in in Damanadu on the border Right No you're absolutely right in saying that the forest department is not the sort of moralistic entity that there are forest department officials at many levels and like I mentioned there are also forest guards and forest rangers who are sort of occupying more of the lower ground of the forest department and I guess that speaks a little bit to questions of structure and agency in that when for example a tribal in a village is practicing legal gold mining what is technically supposed to happen is a forest department is supposed to crack down on it but because the forest watcher is also a tribal member from the same village and knows the people possibly has familiar relations however distant with the people who are practicing legal mining they can either carry a favour or pay a bribe to this forest watcher to simply overlook and also perform the function of warning the members who are practicing illegal mining when higher officials are going to come and inspect these illegal gold mines so there are a lot of fractures within the the sort of overarching structure and people use the affordances allowed by these fractures in order to continue to take advantage of the nebulous limanum space that a forest of plantation of mine is so can you tell me if I'm wrong I'm not sure if I understood correctly that the interests of the forest department in expanding the forest are displacing people in that way like all these castles of mine of course is he said from ecotourism that they have developed that and we talked about anti-rouching structure am I missing out on something else I'm just not sure what the I think I'm not used to this because I come from Italy so like it's generally the other way around so like she was saying it's more about development and growth conservation is much less aggressive it's more like on the side and it's more like a resistance kind of thing so I'm not really sure what the the the quality of the forest department is displacing people in making the forest establishing part in it well like I mentioned conservation is very important to this region because it's been declared by the UNESCO as a world edited site it's been declared as a biosphere reserve it hosts some of the last remaining populations of tigers in the world and it's you know has one of the highest population of tigers in India and it hosts the world's largest population of Asiatic elephants so at many levels of state, national and international the agenda of conservation has a very strong growth but it's a very particular kind of conservation it is the sort of the fortress mode of conservation which sees communities more or less as being completely antithetical to the project of conservation and so simply Ryan's rough short over Ryan's and the implications of that mode of conservation also is that it's not a very effective mode of conservation for the purposes of preserving ecosystems themselves because legally it sexualizes power with the forest department and allows for infrastructure projects and allows for industry and allows for large plantations so you still have large areas of this region that are overtaken by tea and coffee plantations you still have infrastructure projects like hydroelectric projects that are going on so this allows for development, it allows for some sort of nominal conservation that allows for the rights of communities and the rights of the most marginalized people is active I think it's also important to reflect on the history of forest conservation especially in India India used to be the the powerhouse for British colonial conservation it was from India that all the other that forest was sent out to all the other colonies all the other British colonies so that forest free India has been a big thing historically it's been a very prestigious department also of the states and so some of its power also derives from the forest department the forest department the ability to attract resources systematically rationally so it's more forest conservation not conservation kind of conservation I mean one of the interesting things about this particular case is it's the way not just the idea that the identity of the gases changes this idea of increasing the idea of inter-GNAC to make a claim through rights but also how the resources change over time but if it wasn't considered a resource when the tea plantations were opened up it was considered jungle in a very provocative sense the tigers would burn people would pay for exterminating tigers and then over time you know you have this idea the real adibasi land that the historical injustice was when they were thrown off the land where the tea plantations are because they were cleared and not much of a decision was made and then you go through this process where a timber is valuable and so the forest department takes over and now there's other ways of extracting benefit from a resource like a forest beam through eco tourism or wildlife or presumably as a sort of carbon sink which is a net soil you know phase that maybe we haven't seen yet but you know it's going to be interesting then you know how people will make claims on these areas and I think that'll be another story so resources are dynamic they're not static and in the same way as identity these claims changes so resource changes Yeah absolutely resources are dynamic and like you said that the next thing that we're seeing instead of carbon offsets in forests seen in the light of that and you already have so in early last year they changed the definition of forests again and looking at this new definition of forests with all of this technical jargon it has crown density and continuity and the percentage of natural vegetation and so on and so forth and if you sort of look closely at the jargon what the definition is doing is sort of making legible what can be used for the purpose of carbon offsets Right, yeah and will that include certain types of plantations as in say Malaysia where carbon plantations are not that classic values and which will be meant by schemes I think you'll feel a lot of debate on the eligibility of plantations I know countries that have massive plantations are fighting for the inclusion of plantations of course on the international level I'm not sure if there is some agreement that hasn't happened as yet but I imagine that that exacting is going to happen that plantations are going to be seen as eligible because the way the definition is phrased is so complex that I imagine that you could read in any version of okay there's crown density if plants have been settled before 1980 all of those very very technical permutations and combinations can likely be very easily manipulated to suit the purpose of what we want to offset carbon I'm sure we can go on but it's getting late Just again, thanks for that it's a really interesting speech and an interesting discussion on the other side