It is a question of human rights, of human and animal coexistence, and of the conservation of nature. And legislation is only a beginning for achieving such a difficult and delicate balance. The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill has been unanimously passed by the Lok Sabha after being disputed for more than two years. This is the first proper attempt to implement a complicated issue of natural justice – the conferring or restitution of land and produce rights for forest dwellers, tribal or otherwise. There are two major aspects of the passing of this legislation: the political and the ecological. Politically, the party that would feel most triumphant about this achievement would be the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which had been lobbying most prominently for this bill and its various amendments, all of which have been accepted. In the tribal world of Jharkhand, for instance, the sangh parivar and the left have been competing for a long time for the soul, or perhaps the votes, of the tribal population. The tribal politics of the Hindu right obviously took the path of religious conversion, opposing the bogey of the Christian missionaries. The passing of this bill, and on terms formulated and pushed through by the left, marks a different kind of political mobilization of forest-dwelling tribals, Madhya Pradesh being another state in which such a transition has been significantly initiated.
Another kind of divisiveness has been part of the forest rights bills — that among the Indian forest service (administering a little more than 20 per cent of the nation’s land area), the urban conservationists lobbying for forest cover and wild life (especially tigers and elephants) and the advocates of adivasi rights. This had resulted in the perception of forest-dwellers and animals as mutually antagonistic claimants of the resources of the forest. Such a view also refused to see the former as anything but exploiters of resources that deserve to be protected from human depredation, which includes traditional inhabitants of the forests. This flies in the face of more traditional, organic models of ecological coexistence, that seek to work with, and not against, the rural and tribal communities who are part of India’s rich biodiversity.