The Making of Human-Animal Conflicts Through Conservation Projects in India

By Shymal Chakma & Suraj Gogoi

22 December, 2015
Countercurrents.org

In the age of anthropocene and lack of human security, policies that are directed at the ‘well being’ of human society have to be brought under rigorous study and scrutiny. One such initiative is the policy of conservation which is to address the problems of climate change, imbalances of ecological system, biodiversity and the increasing rates of violences over animals/wildlife. However, in practice and at the level of policy, conservation is neither noble nor devoid of any contradictions. It is never eudaimonic. It has pushed many societies to change their life-world and rendered many homeless. In India we have many examples such as the Dampa Tiger Reserve in Mizoram, Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, Tiger Reserve in Karbi Anglong in Assam, Panna Tiger Reserve and so on. The recent of such issues is the Pakhui Tiger Reserve in the East Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh. Like a Dostoyevskyian character, the reduced circumstances of the people have ceased to become the burden of the state and more so of conservation.

The politics of conservation

Raymond Bonner in his book At the Hand of Man on African conservation writes that in the nineteenth century it was three C’s--Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. Conservation is the new member of the club in the decades that followed. Even in the recent Paris Climate Talk the Indigenous Environmental Network (of the Indigenous peoples) strongly voiced against fracking, carbon trading and REDD’s1 as a solution to deal with the problems of climate change and considered them to be false solutions. There is no denial that there is a need for conservation where there is an unprecedented growth of people and exploitation of natural resources for economic growth. Such becoming exerts enormous pressure and disturbances on land, its resources, the ecological system and hence the wildlife/animals and their habitat. At the same time, there is an undeniable relationship that humans share with nature. It is argued that the idea of nature contains an extraordinary amount of human history which often goes unnoticed. The social, cultural and natural histories of any society have a very close relationship with each other; they co-exist and co-produce each other. Gregory Bateson viewed that the individual, society and the ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernatic system that controls everything instead of just interacting system. He also argued that our ways of perceiving fails to see the delicate interdependencies in the ecological system; as we don’t see them therefore we break them.

The very idea of conservation is in a way an exterior intervention in determining how nature and culture should function. It is occidental epistemology that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic rule over the systems. It is a scientific arrogance as a solution which comes down as a superior form of knowledge in the form of policy such as Project Tiger which tell us how we should keep peace with nature. The propounders of such policies and the administrators who execute such policy will also inform us about the need for such initiatives and how any violation of the boundaries of such a policy comes under the preview of law. In the stroke of a declaration of a project, livelihood meets the crossroad of legality, and most activities in life becomes illegal henceforth—grazing a cattle inside the park, practicing jhum cultivation, growing any crop and vegetables, even an evening stroll! So conservation as a policy has the potential to perform violence and displacement--all in the name of conservation.

Conservation Projects and Ecology: The Functioning of Conservation

The democratic means are often subverted in the conservation practice and consent is often manufactured. People are gifted with legal notices for eviction with no mention whatsoever of rehabilitation and compensation. The basic concerns of livelihood alternatives are absent from its logic. Even if compensation is given in a few cases it is far from just. People who undergo such hardship ask for their basic human rights--to live where they have been living for ages. It is the ‘minimum’ they ask for, which is far away from act of justice-the ‘maximum’. Whether it is a Kuki from Assam, a Chakma from Mizoram, a Gond from Madhya Pradesh or a Nyishi from Arunachal Pradesh, the experiences with conservation have a linearity. Why are the experiences similar across geographies?

A villager from Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) in Mumbai informed us about the hardships that his mother had to face once the Park came into being. Cultivating crops were directed at survival and fruits and vegetables were obtained from the park itself. After the area in present day Borivili where SGNP is located was declared as a national park the people residing inside the park were not allowed to cultivate grains and vegetables. Such an act became illegal at the stroke of a conservation project. He narrated how his mother and his family survived only on bamboo shoots for many months.

Similar tales are from Mizoram where the already marginalized community like the Chakmas is being further subjected to displacement and uprooting from their habitat. The Dampa Tiger Reserve in Mizoram has been a conscious act of the Mizos—the state of Mizoram which is largely dominated by the Mizos in all spheres of politics and administration, the Church (all churches) and Young Mizo Association (YMA) – to make many Chakma families homeless and cut off from their traditional set up. The Thailand based organization Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), which is a collective of indigenous people in Asia, have expressed their discontent against the forceful eviction of the Gonds in Madhya Pradesh living in the Panna Tiger Reserve. They are being offered cash to evict their land and upon denial they are being harassed by police and other officials. Forceful transfer of money is being made to their accounts. In most cases the compensation and rehabilitation does not carry any clear understanding nor is stated in a piece of paper.

Is it that Forest Right Act (FRA) is a blatant lie or is it a cover to carry out such violent and undemocratic acts? Is it not a negation of FRA by the apparatus of state institutions and their representatives? Why does conservation become a slave to Capital and is blind towards a community such as Gonds who are known to live with nature and protect them?

The most recent of conflicts that has come to light in the state of Arunachal Pradesh is of the Seba Village in East Kameng district. They are unwilling to give away their ancestral land to the Pakhui Tiger Reserve. Many have already lost their land to the Tiger Reserve and are demanding that some portions of the Reserve be unreserved. Such contradiction can happen only in one situation--when one bypasses the ‘owner’ of the land.

Conservation as a policy in India has a salient feature of making livelihoods and survival unsecure for the people who have been living in areas where such projects have been undertaken. Sadly, it is also a fact that no participation is sought in almost all cases of the local people in demarcating boundaries of reserves that have come into being. In the process it has left many hundreds of people homeless, foodless and landless. Compensation is a buzzword that only gets communicated in legal documents and written complaints mostly initiated by the sufferers and its life (compensation and rehabilitation) is rather short. The beauty of the park thrives on the sufferings of the displaced.

1 stands for countries' efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and foster conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

Shymal Chakma is a independent researcher on conservation practices in India and Chakmas.

Suraj Gogoi is a Research Scholar at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics.