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Anand P. Vaidya, "Future of the Forest: Struggles over Land and Law in India" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Raghavi Vishwanath, and today I'm in conversation with Anant Baidya, who is an associate professor of anthropology at Reed College. And he's here to discuss his recent, very prolific book called Futures of the Struggles over Land and Law in India, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Futures of the Forest is an exceptional ethnographic study of the Forest Rights act of 2006, which was a law enacted to facilitate arguably the largest redistribution of property in independent India by recognizing the tenure and use rights of millions of landless forest dwellers. A story that begins with the destruction of a North Indian village called Ramnagar. Futures of the Forest takes us through multiple scales, spaces and temporalities, forest politics, and thinks about the law as a site of contesting legal potentialities. It speaks about how the law was at once a vehicle to support collective action by landless Dalits and Adivasis, who are the equivalent of indigenous peoples in India. But also the law provided conditions for the silencing of such collective action, which is what makes this study really interesting and insightful. Today, we have the very exciting chance to Vik Anand's brains about how this book came to life. So thank you, Anand, and welcome to.
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C
The show thank you so much, Yagavi. I'm delighted to be here.
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B
Thank you so much. To start off, cliche question, but could you perhaps tell us what sparked your interest in studying the Forest Rights Act?
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C
Right, no, that's a great question. Actually. My undergraduate background was, was in biology and I was sort of an unhappy biology major when I was studying as an undergraduate. And I started taking some anthropology classes on the side and got interested in anthropology and its possibility to sort of critique biology and to critique specifically questions around conservation biology. So I ended up writing my undergraduate senior thesis on conservation politics in India. I became interested in the ways in which ideas of the natural were sort of mobilized politically. I became interested in the sort of the politics of walling off certain spaces within India or in any country as natural and therefore not belonging to any humans at all, unless they were the right sorts of humans, unless they were forest guards or the right sorts of conservationists or the right sorts of tourists. And so I began my PhD in anthropology with some of these questions in mind. I knew that I was interested in the politics of conservation and the environment in India and was actually in conversation with some friends after I started the PhD. A friend named Ashiya Bose, I'll shout her out. Who was working with Kalpavich in Pune. She was excited about the Force Rights act. And Kalpavich has been doing very important work with, around the FRA for a long time. She told me, anand, you have to look at this, you have to see what's going on. And I looked and sure enough, this law, which sort of promises a resolution to the problem of forest landlessness in India, in some sense, right. The forest department from the 19th century through the latter half of the 20th century claimed nearly a quarter of India's land area. And the people whose rights, whose rights were supposed to be surveyed and settled under the various laws through which the land was acquired, in many cases, in most cases we can say they weren't surveyed. There's something like, there's never been a proper survey done, of course, of these people, but there's on the order of 100 million people who have lived without rights in India's forests. So it would finally provide a resolution to this. But in attempting to find a resolution to this, it was running right into those contradictions around the politics of conservation in India. And it was trying to kind of resolve them through a text, through, you know, a nine page long text in the Forest Rights Act. So I became interested in. It was the law that kind of sparked all of this. And I was trying to think, how can I study a law? You know, this doesn't seem like a good anthropological object. It seems kind of inert. But of course, the law is never inert. The law I was inspired by, I was taking a lot of linguistic anthropology classes as a graduate student and thinking about these approaches to language in practice. And the linguistic anthropologists, Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban have this nice framework for thinking about texts in their social life. They sort of divide up the life of a text into three stages. One is the. The entextualization of a text. The process which is necessarily social. It involves people through which a text is kind of brought into being. And then you have the text itself, which is this kind of. It's this artifact that it could be a piece of paper with words written on it. It can be a digital file, it can be an sms, it can be an email. It kind of circulates on its own. And then as it's read and cited and talked about and gossiped about and, and so on, then this is the contextualization for them. So it's kind of the text is bookended on either end by these very social processes. And that seemed to be a useful way to think about a law, to think about the social and political practices that go into making it. That in the case of a law like the Force Rights act, that tries to recognize the rights of hundreds of millions or something like a hundred million. I'm saying this number, knowing that it's probably wildly inaccurate just because there's never been a good count, but because it tens of millions of people across a quarter of India's land area, how those different struggles over this land, over these forests, over these people, over their rights, what should be the right relationship between people and the forests they live in? Who should have what rights, what should those entail, how those go into a text, how those contradictions sit together in a text, and then how that text kind of circulates and gets read in ways that may or may not reflect the intentions of the people who are involved in writing it.
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B
Thank you so much. That was really interesting to hear and sparked a couple of questions in my mind, perhaps one which, as I was reading the book, I was thinking to myself, it's. It's so lucid, but it's also so rooted in the everyday of doing fieldwork, of meeting people. I remember these references to you and Uma in the library and speaking softly so that people don't hear you. And when I was reading this bit, so I was just like, it resonates really, really explicitly to other people who do field work. The moving, using different modes of transport, relying on people's hospitality and will, and having a house to stay. These are all the everyday challenges of fieldwork. And I was wondering if you could speak to us a little bit about the behind the scenes, how you organize this fieldwork and whether you went through a kind of methodological trial and error process to get to deciding that this is how you want to do this study.
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C
Right? Yeah. And this is. It was a little bit of a struggle. I had gone to high school in South India. I wasn't really familiar with North India prior to doing this field work. I. And I was trying to figure out how exactly should I study this law. I had this framework that I mentioned that I'd been inspired by Silverstein and Urban. But how do you go about doing this? And I'll say it was a specific conversation with Keshav Ramakrishnan at Yale, the anthropologist who told me. I mean, I was confused. I was pre field work. He said, no, just go to Delhi, find the people who are involved in writing the law and who are involved in kind of debating over it, and. And then see which forests, villages, and which communities they've been involved with. And that'll allow you to kind of track the law on either end the way you're trying to do. So that's what I did. I showed up in Delhi and I started meeting with the various. Various bureaucrats, various lawyers, politicians who were involved, and some of the activists who were associated with this umbrella organization called the Campaign for Survival and Dignity that it formed after. In 2002, there was a wave of evictions across the forests, and they formed in response to this wave of evictions. First to HAL evictions, and because the evictions were kind of led by then the Ministry of Environmental, Forest and Climate Change, along with the Supreme Court's Forest Bench, they were sort of seeking a legislative solution to forest landlessness, to kind of reassert the authority of Parliament over India's forests rather than the courts. And so I went there, and there were many people who were very welcoming, very happy to talk with me. But there was a piece of advice that I'd received from a mentor of mine who was a legal anthropologist herself, Sally Falk Moore. She said, go with the people who you're comfortable with. If you feel comfortable with a group of people, that sort of means something more than perhaps you can say. So there was an organization, there are a few activists from a Group that I call the Sangatan. And they were happy to work with me. They kind of saw what I was trying to do and they saw how it could fit into their larger project to have an anthropologist tagging around and tracking the ways that people were thinking about and using the law. So they actually took me to a number of different villages where they were working because they themselves, it's kind of a confederation of more local groups. So I went to one that was on the UP Nepal border, which is very interesting. It was a situation where the people claiming forest rights were actually bania merchants who had been in this sort of British established trading outpost right on the border where I think officially this market had been shut down at some point when the area was declared a reserve. But these people had persisted in maintaining their kind of unofficial market that only. It sort of only catered to cross border trade. So there were people who'd come across the border to buy goods that were cheaper in India than they were in Nepal. And then this group of Banigyas, of course being traders, they had very good records of their, I think like 80 year habitation of, of this forest market. And I said, you know, it was fascinating. I didn't think it was perhaps the best case to think about the Forest Rights Act. It seemed like an oddity a little bit that there were merchants involved in claiming rights as other traditional forest dwellers. So I kind of passed on that village and then we sort of went around to a few places. In this one there was a kind of the particular village that I call Ramnagar, where the villagers had come from a neighboring village that I call Govindagar. I saw what was going on. There was a sort of a history of mobilization in the area. There was an interesting. It was kind of explicitly framed as a women's movement for sort of women's, a sort of women led movement for rights to the forest and rights as kind of workers in the forest. And I found the kind of. The ideological project very interesting. I found the kind of politics of caste in the area very interesting. And I got along with the people there. And so, I mean for a while I can speak to some of the challenges I faced. So I started doing fieldwork there and then it was difficult. This is in eastern, up in the district of Solan Bhadra. It's the poorest district in I guess the second poorest state I believe. Up second poor state at least. And this, this village that I called Ramnagar, they didn't have any, any, you know, access to, to clean water. At the time there was no electricity. The, the, the villagers themselves didn't have enough food to eat. All of their children you could sort of see were, were visibly malnourished. And it, it felt like, you know, a terrible imposition for me as an anthropologist to be, to be staying with them and taking the kind of meager food that they had. And so there was an organization nearby called the Banvasi Seva Ashram, not to be confused with the Banvasi Kalyana Ashram. It's a different organization which is a kind of a Gandhian socialist organization that had been around in this part of up since the 1950s. And they took me in and they were also involved in the Forest Rights act in the area. And they had a kind of a hostile situation where I could stay. They were happy to talk with me about their work in the area on kind of agri, you know, agricultural improvement things they'd done and to give me a room and talk with me about the ways that they were approaching the Forest Rights Act. The difficulty is that they were sort of closely associated. They were associated with a different political project. They were, they were closely associated with a different reading of the Forest Rights Act, a somewhat more conservationist oriented reading of the Forest Rights Act. And politically they were associated with the dominant caste in the area who owned most of the good land, which were the Yados. So at a certain point in my fieldwork, and sorry, I should say they had been involved in establishing a joint forest management program in Govindagar and around the area which is the village that the people in Ramnagar, who I'd worked with, where they'd come from. So this Joint Forest Management Committee, this is a program that goes back to the early 80s. The government of India has the Joint Forest Management. It sort of signs on to the Joint Forest Management Project, I think, is it 1989, you might know better than I do. And it's funded by different agencies at this point. It's being funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency or Jaika. So everyone started to call these people the Jaika people. The Forest Rights act also contains a provision for community forest management. And these sort of dominant caste, the ADAV residents of Govindagar who had been part of the Joint Forest Management Committee sort of constitute themselves also as a community forest management group under the Forest Rights Act. And they said, you know, under the provisions of the Forest Rights Act. And this gets back to sort of the contradictions in the law itself, where you have contradictions around what the law should be and they make their way into the legal text which then is kind of open to these contradictory readings. So the residents of Ramnagar had cited the Forest Rights act and particularly its preamble where it says it's reversing the historical injustice of forest fellow dispossession to claim their own village. These dominant castes, men from Govindagar, cite the community forest management provisions of the Forest Rights act to say that Ramnagar itself constitutes an encroachment on their, on the forest around their village. And so halfway through my fieldwork, they, they went ahead and, and destroyed. They, they brought sticks, they brought their buffaloes. They destroyed Ramnagar. They leveled it. There were about a hundred huts and they, they brought it to the ground. They burned the, the roofs of the, of the, of the huts. They, the buffaloes ate the crops. It was this, this huge disaster. And it's a disaster that I begin the book with that it kind of sets the stage for the sort of personal drama of the people, the sort of everyday drama of the people in Ramnagar. But it also kind of opens up this question about how this law could be used to both build a village and then cite it to destroy it. And after this took place, you know, of course the people from Ramnagar were devastated. They had to go back to Govindagar. They had to live next in the, the Dalit neighborhood next to their attackers. They'd lost the kind of relative freedom that they'd found in Ramnagar with their own land, no longer having to work for the dominant caste landlords. But it also, it sort of put me in question for them because I was this anthropologist who in some sense was trying to have it both ways. I was trying to be even handed in a certain sense. I was trying to kind of look at both sides of the story, you know, look at, you know, spend time with this, this what I call the Sangatan and their movement in the. To establish Ramnagar. But also this other group associated with the Bhadvasi Sevarasram and their efforts around the Forest Rights Act. And, and they basically I, I arrived one day and you know, I was used to arriving in, in Ramnagar with, with a degree of, I mean, really kind of enormous hospitality from people who had very little to give, you know, materially. They would, you know, give me a share their limited food with me. They would, they would often, you know, share their, their Mahua, their drink that they would brew. They would, they would often kill a chicken for me, which was, which was, you know, you know, for people who have, who have barely enough to eat to kill one of your own animals for a guess. It just, it's extraordinary hospitality. But that hospitality was suddenly missing when I arrived after the attack one day. And I, you know, I experienced instead this kind of coldness. And finally one of them said, you know, Anand, you can't have it both ways. You, you know, are you with us? Are you with them? Those people attacked us. They destroyed our village. You know, we need to know that we can trust you. And they essentially said, you can stay here for the night, but we'd like you to kind of make some public statement showing that you're on our side and not on their side. And they asked me, in fact, to write, to write a piece about the destruction of the village and the role of Jaika and the Banvasi Sevastram in the attack, which, which I did. I mean, I, I, my sympathies were with them and I was, I was on their side. But it was, it was this. I mean, there's sort of many crises in fieldwork, but this was one where, where their crisis meant that the kind of ostensibly even handedness of the detached outside observer had to be dropped. There was no room for that if I was going to continue to research there.
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B
Thank you. Thank you for sharing this. And as you say, there's such an emphasis when you do anthropological research on being objective and neutral and placing yourself outside. But when you start doing research, especially using ethnographic methods, you realize there's no outside. The outside is just a myth. You are always in inside somewhere. And locating yourself in those, locating yourself in those material stakes is so important when you do field work. Speaking of this everyday and the methodological aspects, again, something that really struck me was how moving was such a central part of this book. Movement was such a central part of this book, not just in the sense of social movements, but also your own movements from Delhi to Ramnagar, and then the movements of the Ramnagaris, because they had no home anymore, so they were moving. And especially when you do legal research, sometimes I find that law has such a conventional attachment to fixedness. Legal norms are seen as legitimate only when they're fixed. And I wondered whether that was a conceptual tension for you at all. The. The conflict between moving both bodily but also conceptually through the law, but working with a discipline that's otherwise known to be very fixed. And how did you sort of reconcile these conceptual tensions?
- [21:11]
C
I love that framing between the fixedness of law and the kind of movement of the movement of a movement, the movement of the people I was working with, there's a line from the anthropologist Anna Singh that I. I quote early on that movements require movement, that in order to put together a movement, you have to actually move around because you're gathering people from elsewhere and ideas are moving and so on. And yet you're right. Certainly the ideology around law is that it is something very fixed. There's kind of a pithy line that a lot of people, I guess, a lot of legal scholars will. Will use that. Everyone who goes through law school is trained in law school. You're trained to think of law as this fixed thing where a given legal problem has one solution. And the task of the lawyer and the judge and so on are to establish exactly what that one solution is. It's kind of a machine where you input A and you get B, predictably. And yet every lawyer knows that their job as a professional lawyer is. Is to meet their client and to find some way to use this apparatus of the law to come up with a desired legal solution. So in practice, every lawyer knows, every judge knows that law is not at all fixed. And given contradictory premises, you can come up with any conclusion, given the problems of interpretation, that meaning itself is unfixed. And we're all involved in projects of kind of reshaping it, reframing it in just communication. So there certainly is that tension. And that's something that you encounter all the time. You'll meet people and they'll say, no, but this is what the Forest Rights act means. The Forest Rights act means this. How can you even talk about it in all these terms? Because this is what the Forest Rights act means. The Forest Rights act says that, for example, forest dwellers must have established residence on or before a certain date in 2005 in order to claim. In order to claim rights. And, you know, the people that I was. I was working with in Radnagar, they couldn't establish that residence on that particular piece of land in 2005, because they weren't there. They learned about the law after it was passed, but this was land that they'd understood to be their ancestral land. This is where they. But their families had lived for many generations. And you counted this all the time. But the question of. And this is sort of a key. The idea that law is fixed is sort of central to the way that law works. If everyone understood law to be unfixed, then they wouldn't be referring to the law at all. It would just be politics. So some of the force of law depends on everyone kind of buying into the Idea that it's fixed even as they're in practice trying to shift it. But the, I mean, there are many interesting ways in which sort of law and movement come together. The, you know, the law is. It's passed in one place at one time. It's passed in Delhi in 2006. It has to circulate across the country. But it was passed after this large mobilization of forest dweller organizations, conservationists and so on across India who had kind of come together in a new way to lobby for it. So there was kind of an infrastructure that brought people together from forests across India in a new way. And I argue it sort of makes, you know, forests had become a national political problem in a new way over the preceding decades. But then the. And so it makes its way to forests and these various channels are established that reshape the ways in which laws that. That moment at which you find its fixity, in the moments at which it's opened up again. Sally Falk Moore has this, the legal anthropologist. He has this nice framing of, you know, we, rather than thinking of law as, or any sort of, Any meaning as, or sort of social practice as absolutely fixed or unfixed, we should look for the practices through which meaning is opened up and closed again. And a lot of the politics around the Force Rights act was sort of looking for ways to fix and unfix at certain moments, kind of strategically. So the law makes its way to these villages, including Tiradnagar, where they establish a new village. But then when they claim their rights through the law, first their claims have to go through a village level committee, the village. The only officially recognized village near Ramnagar is Govindagar. So the claims have to go through the dominant caste, Yadavsky, who owned all the land. And their claims are rejected. They go to the local district magistrate, the head of the local administration. He also rejects their claims. So those are moments at which the law has been fixed. It's been fixed by saying, you and Randagar have no rights to this land. You are illegal encroachers through the Forest Rights Act. And then the attack on the village is another effort to fix the meaning of the law, to open it up again. They have to move in some sense, they have to kind of build new political coalitions. They sort of find the support of a new a recently elected minister of parliament from the area who's kind of seeking a local constituency for herself. So they start moving around in the district or in her constituency. They'll go to every single one of her events and every rally she holds so that she knows that they are the most visible part of, of her constituency. They start going to rallies in Lucknow in the state capital and they start showing up at rallies in Delhi quite regularly if there's including rallies that have, have very little to do with what's going on in Ramnagar or with the Forest Rights act in general as part of kind of larger coalition building efforts. So the movement in moving, they don't sort of stay the same. They kind of reframe themselves in new ways in Delhi. They're part of a larger coalition, sort of a larger kind of progressive left social movement coalition that shows up in, in protests in the capitol, in, in the, the politicians rallies in, in the district. They're showing up as a part of her constituency. They're kind of doing different things at each level. But they, but, but they have to move and they're constantly on the move in a way that's, that's really quite remarkable. They're, they're always on jeeps and buses and trains sort of sort of moving around for this. But also the they and the movement, they're associated, this is less, less the forest dwellers and the various kind of activists, lawyers and journalists associated with them. They understand that law moves and laws interpreted in different sites by different people. So if the local district magistrate says one thing, well, we can go to the High Court in Lucknow or sorry, Elabad and maybe we can find we can get a different judgment in the High Court than we got here. We're sort of seeking the friendly judges, the friendly benches in different sites. And this is what. One of the interesting things, there are many interesting things about law is that law, it's sort of operating on multiple scales that are sort of understood to be nested in a certain way. In India you have the Supreme Court and the High Court and you have kind of local courts, you have bureaucracies, you have villages where people are interpreting laws. And these are kind of understood to exist in a hierarchical relationship with each other. But that hierarchical relationship can be kind of undone by the fact that, you know, at least within sort of formalized legal interpretation, precedent is supposed to be respected and facts on the ground in a certain sense have, have a weight. So if, if a, if a High court bench within the high courts in India are constitutional courts, if they decide that if they kind of make a ruling on the, on the constitutionality of the Forest Rights act, on people's rights to land, then that can kind of have binding precedent across India. If enough people have claimed land in different parts of India through the Forest Rights Act. And people try to undermine those claims in different ways. The fact on the ground that they have the land provides some kind of weight that can kind of undo the scalar hierarchy. And there's a sort of. The circulation of legal precedent is another one of these circulations that I'm. I'm trying to track across these different scales.
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B
Thank you so much. It almost appears that like you say, movement is a, is a register of lawmaking, then finding legal meaning for lots of these communities, because movement is what allows them to discover the various scales, the various sites and temporalities in which lawmaking was taking place. Speaking of sites and temporalities, I'm really fascinated by the conceptual and epistemic space that is the forest itself. And I thought I'd ask you about what you think it is about forests as a space that makes them susceptible to these divergent collective actions. You speak in the book about leftists taking refuge in the forest because it frees them from state surveillance. You speak about colonial conservators who think of forests as uncrystallized states. There's almost a sense of forests being empty or bereft of norms. So everyone has. Everyone fills the forest as a space with a different kind of normativity. And I was, I wanted to know what, what your approach to forests as a conceptual and normative space itself was. Do you think there is something in that kind of spatial category that allows for these multiple collective actions to take place in a way that perhaps other categories, spatial categories, do not?
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C
That's a great question. You know, I've been thinking recently with an argument that the legal scholar Brenna Bhandar makes about the relationship between the category savage and. And. And property. She, she sort of traces a. She sort of traces the history of the word and sort of sees. Sees the savage as the figure through, through the writings of Locke, in fact. And the kind of. The savage is the figure who is, who is not kind of morally capable of, of property in some sense. Who hasn't, who hasn't kind of come into sort of moral self realization enough to be trusted with property. And that's kind of the way that I've been thinking about it kind of aligns with the way that I've been thinking about forest in this book and elsewhere, or the forest as a conceptual space where I understand it in some sense strictly legally. There is no land that is kind of in itself forest land. It has been named forest land through this legal procedure. And in fact, for most, for most kind of non Indian readers. They might have something very different in mind when they think of a forest. And if they saw the forest where I was working, where there are in fact many fewer trees than there are in Portland, Oregon, where I live right now. The trees have been cut down over the years through these processes of extraction and so on. It's been named a forest and therefore it is a forest. But to me then forest kind of names this relationship with property. And the communities that have lived in the forest have been excluded from property in various ways over the years. They've been excluded on the grounds of kind of protection from the market. In a certain sense. Colonial administrators saw these communities as primitive and therefore easily susceptible to predation through debt and other means by caste Hindus coming from elsewhere, elsewhere in the region who could get them into debt and then they would lose their property. So they, they kind of established, they excluded these areas from the laws of the rest of the province in British India. And they particularly excluded them from transferring property to non, what gets called tribals. But also these spaces were an area where, because of this kind of ongoing exclusion from property, it became a site where other projects of extraction could take place, where you could, you know, it would be, it could be a space for revenue gained from, from timber, for example, and then later from, from coal and other forms of mining. This is where you can establish a dam, a factory. If you don't want to buy the market, you don't, you don't want to buy land at the market rate. Everyone talks about how the, the forests in India. There's this large central Indian forest belt which some coincidentally is where, where most of the mineral wealth in India has been found. I don't think that's a coincidence at all. I think the forests happen to be the place where you can, where you can dig and explore for forests. There could be mineral wealth under Delhi that we have no idea about, but you can't go digging up Delhi. So it's about this relationship to property. But it's also a space where, I mean some of this history of the inability of the people who live in forests to kind of make a stake a claim against dispossession. Also kind of names their long term relationship with the state and with kind of histories of state formation in India. So these are the people who weren't able to mount a claim against the Colonial Forest Department and others. They weren't able to mount a successful claim. And that names something about their relationship with state formation and the absence of state formations that they could Kind of that could contest these claims. And I think that also this is something, you know, people in the, in, in Rambinger were talking about how they, you know, they hadn't seen, they, you know, no one had seen a rupee until, until, you know, the 1950s or so. The state was actually kind of thin on the ground until the last, you know, 50 years or 50, 60, 70 years. And, and this kind of thinness that, that the, the only face of the state ends up being the forest department. For many people who show up to tell you, you can't cut down those trees, you can't gather those leaves, you can't gather that firewood, that thinness also kind of enables other political projects to kind of find their way into the forest. So in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the run up to the emergency, left activists would kind of flee state suppression by making their way to the forest. And the story that I was told is we came to the forest to escape state repression, but once we arrived, we kind of came to understand the political economy of the forest and we got involved in forest politics in one way or another. And this includes, of course, the rise of the Maoist movement in the forest. So the thinness of the state, it's being left out of property relations, sets the stage for forest dweller dispossession over the, over the decades and centuries. But it also opens it up to these different political formations making their way into, into the forest. And it also sets the. It's also the reason why it's. Relatively recently, I would argue that forests became a national political problem the way they did, because forging those connections between the forest and kind of national scale politics in Delhi takes a lot more work than it does to forge a connection between, I don't know, Bangalore and Delhi and to make a political problem in Bangalore a national problem.
- [36:42]
B
Thank you so much. This is really helpful. And thank you also for bringing up the figure of the state. There was this one line in the book that I thought I'd pick your brains about, which was you saying that the state was an agent of domination, but not hegemony in the context of the forest. And I wanted to understand what you meant by that. What is the distinction between, what was the distinction in your mind between domination and hegemony there?
- [37:08]
C
Right. So this is, of course, it's a Gramscian framing that I'm getting from conversations with and work by the forest rights activist Shankar Gopal Krishnan, who points out that in a sense, the welfare functions of the postcolonial India state. The, the sort of governmental functions of the state arrive in the forest late, if they arrive at all. And if people don't have rights to the land that they live on, then their, their livelihoods have been criminalized, essentially. So the way in which you would meet the state is, is through its, is, it's, it's through the state as domination. It's the state as, as kind of a coercive actor who, who arrives to, to sort of penalize you or arrest you for gathering firewood or for gathering tendu leaves or whatever. Whereas the project of kind of gradually winning the consent of sort of different Indian populations and the rest of India has been, it's been a long one through social movements such as we can think of, of peasant movements in India, we can think of workers movements, we can think of different sort of caste based coalitions that have been active in Indian politics for, you know, since well before independence. And they kind of find their way into kind of different governing coalitions in one way or the other. I mean, we can think of the rise of peasant politics in particular in the second half of the 20th century as really shaping Indian politics in profound ways and the different ways in which concessions have been won and these have become kind of powerful governing blocks in different ways. In Uttar Pradesh, this is the rise of the Yadav caste as a central part of sort of a series of political coalitions. This doesn't happen in the forests. Instead, the state appears as an agent of domination. And this is why you have, you have kind of histories of sort of rebellion in the forests in one way or the other. And in some sense, I think the people who were involved in drafting the Forest Rights act, they understood this perfectly well. I spoke with politicians who were involved in the kind of early stages of the drafting process and they said this, they said, hopefully if we, this is a moment in the early 2000s when people saw the Maoist insurgency as a real threat. I think Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Maoist the greatest internal security threat to India. And you had on the one hand kind of military, paramilitary responses to this that the government was directing. But you also had things like the Forest Rights Act. And the idea was if we give them some form of land rights, then perhaps they'll put down their guns, essentially. So perhaps we can turn this relationship of domination into one of hegemony. Was, was the bid.
- [40:11]
B
Thank you. Speaking of this, I, I was also wondering when I was reading the book, why was it that law was chosen as the instrument for forest rights mobilization. Given what we know about the really antagonistic relationship that law has with marginalized communities and the fledgling relationship that law has, frankly also with the state, given the fact that law is so indeterminate that I am sometimes surprised that an institution like the state, which is so interested in finding determinacy, would use the law for its political ends. So something I wondered about was what was of particular value in the site that we call law to stage these collective actions from both directions.
- [41:03]
C
That's a fascinating question and it's hard to give a complete answer to. I think there's a sort of. There's kind of a more specific story that you could tell about what was happening in India at that moment. There was an effort by a kind of a new governing coalition in the United Progressive alliance government led by the Congress Party to build a new basis for their own hegemony. They. There's an article that's an essay that's written by the Congress politician Manishankar Iyer a couple years before the election in Seminar magazine where he says, here are the constituencies that we have been losing out on and we need to do something to bring them back into the Congress fold. And one of them that he names as forest dwellers, he says this problem of forest dweller landlessness is a real one that should be addressed in some way. So they set out to build this coalition. And the way that they do this, there's a sort of a new strategy that they are attempting in their first term starting in 2004, which is called kind of the rights based legislative revolution. It's the series of rights based legislation where they establish legal rights to not just forest rights, but to education, to food. There's a, there's a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. And the idea here is, is to kind of, for them it's to get around the. Or for a lot of people involved in this coalition, it's. It's to build this, this larger kind of hegemonic block. But it's, it's also to get around some. What's understood to be some of the problems of the Indian state and the Indian bureaucracy, where the bureaucracy is understood to be kind of, you know, corrupt, inefficient. Leaky is a phrase that was being used a lot in those days. And the way to get around it, rather than coming up with a scheme, this would be the old way to do things, to have the state would be this kind of patrimonial figure that would gift something in a certain way through a new scheme. And it would deliver something to various marginalized communities in India. Instead of that, you would say, no, by law, we are declaring that these people have a right. And in some sense we're leaving it to them to claim that right. But this will also kind of ideally empower them in some way because they kind of see themselves in a new relationship with the state. So we're going to fix the state from below, in a certain sense was the framing. There's another way that you could tell the story, which is to say that the forest rights activists, after the dispossession in 2002, led by the Supreme Court, started to see the law as a problem in the sight of the potential solution. Because if the Supreme Court was citing law in dispossessing people, then in some way you needed to wrest the law back from the Supreme Court by writing your own law. But there's a longer history of laws being used, and you can sort of track this in different parts of the world. It's not just an Indian story. You can see laws being used as kind of tools of counterinsurgency and specifically legal sort of titling measures. This happens in Thailand. This is happening in Colombia right now with the kind of the resolution to the long civil war in Colombia with the farc. And to me, there's something about the law itself as this fixity and openness that you're talking about, that it sort of re situates the struggle in a certain way around a question of legal meaning. And ideally, though not in practice, as the Ramagaris learned, it kind of. It can shift away from kind of open insurgency and counterinsurgency. The problem there, this is the problem that gets named as the problem of kind of the juridification of politics and so on, is that when you move from other forms of movement and politics to the law, it means that the people who have access to the sites, the language, the sort of interpretive tools of lawyering and the law have kind of a privileged role within social movements. And this is certainly something that I saw as well. But that doesn't mean that they're the only people who are doing the interpreting. The people in Ramnagar and the people in Govendagar might not have been lawyers, but they were certainly involved in interpreting the First Rights Act.
- [45:18]
B
Thank you. I think that brings us to the central phase of the book, which is the making of the FRA itself. And I wanted to zoom in on two institutions you've already mentioned, the courts and the executive, and the relationship between the two as The FRA was being drafted. I wondered if you could speak about the power wrangling that was taking place between the courts and the executive when the FRA was being drafted, and how much of this was informed, perhaps also complicated, by the introduction of public interest litigations.
- [45:53]
C
Right? Yes. So there's a long history of a battle between the courts and the executive in India. I mean, from the moment of independence, essentially. And the central issue around which they're battling is actually the question of property. And from the drafters of the constitution. As they're putting together the constitution, they are also in their home states, they're involved in drafting land reform legislation. And so they're trying to come up with a right to property in the constitution that will be limited and will allow for. And will allow for land reform to proceed as they envision it. This gets challenged immediately by the Supreme Court, and it goes back and forth over the question of whether India's constitution kind of has a kind of abstract coherence to it, whether a law, whether a constitutional right, can be kind of subject to exceptions in one way or the other. The court essentially says, you can't have a right to property that's subject to exceptions. Either there's a right to property or there's not, and there's a right to property. And therefore, in certain ways, land reform is unconstitutional. This goes back and forth. The Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, the immediate impetus for her declaration of the emergency, where she sort of suspends elections and certain forms of civil rights in the 1970s for two years, is over a battle with the Supreme Court. And then following the Supreme Court. This is Anuj Bhuwani, has written a great book on public interest litigation following the emergency. Anuj argues that the Supreme Court sort of tries to claim the mantle of executive power away from the executive, and they. They do it through the vehicle of what gets called public interest litigation, which sort of sets aside rules of standing. Who can bring a case to the court to say that they are going to speak on behalf of, or they're going to speak and act on behalf of a larger Indian public. So famously, a journalist can take a case to the court on behalf of a group of homeless pavement dwellers in India to sort of argue for a right to, on the basis of the constitutional right to life, that pavement dwellers should be allowed to be free from eviction. But the Supreme Court starts kind of legislating on behalf of the public in this way, and they start claiming a greater executive role through the writ of mandamus and through sort of directing executive actions. And the largest such public interest litigation to date is the Godavarman case, which deals with forests. It's so large, it's a particular case involving sort of forest management in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu where they claim kind of indefinite executive power over forest issues. They start determining what land counts as forest land. They start kind of directing all kinds of individual questions of forest management across India. I think there have been thousands and thousands of sub cases that when a case involving forest makes its way to the Supreme Court, it ends up with what gets called the Forest Bench, which would meet weekly and was kind of controlling Indian forest policy for a number of years. So, so the forest rights. So in 2002 it's, it's a kind of a complicated convoluted process. The an A directive comes down to the Forest Department from the Ministry of Environment and Forests directing them to clear India's forests of their unauthorized forest dwellers. They start, they start evicting hundreds of thousands of people across India, some of them quite violently. The forest activists in what would become the Campaign for Survival and Dignity try to trace back exactly where this directive came from. It was an unpublished administrative order that cites another unpublished order. And it turns out this all leads back to a kind of a misinterpretation of a Supreme Court forest Bench order. And so it's a little bit difficult to establish who is actually directing what. If this chain of citations is actually, it's a chain of miscitations, is it the Forest Department, the Ministry of Environmental Forests? Is it the Supreme Court Forest Bench who's done it? In any case, this overwhelming power that the courts have claimed over forests has resulted in not just the continuing problem of forest dweller landlessness, but their act of eviction. So they kind of turn to the executive to claim that power back. And this new opening that's provided by this new government in this now progressive alliance government, and they kind of find their way into this rights based legislative framework as a way to sort of claim it back through the vehicle, the Force Rights Act.
- [50:58]
B
Thank you. I really also enjoyed the bit in the book where you speak about the Jansunwais, the public meetings and how they traced back to the root mistranslation that may have led to this. And it also made me think about the many strategic choices, very interesting strategic choices that were made when the FRA was being drafted, one of which was to route the FRA through the Ministry of Tribal affairs at some point instead of the Ministry of Environment and Forests. And I wondered if you could also speak about the implications of that. So what do you think were the motives behind channeling these agendas to the Ministry of Tribal affairs?
- [51:41]
C
And.
- [51:41]
B
And what happened as a result?
- [51:44]
C
Right, yes. I mean, it's a very interesting decision. The Ministry of Tribal affairs, for context, it's a relatively small ministry. It's a relatively new ministry. I think it's established in the 1970s, if I'm not mistaken, whereas the Ministry of Environment Forest is much larger and older. But it's one of these questions of kind of seeking the right jurisdiction, or how can we open up legal meaning in the ways that we want it to be opened up, essentially. So in the same way that after the Forest Rights act has passed, you might go hopping, jumping around, looking for the right bench to hear your case, it's a matter of looking for the right bureaucracy to be what's called the nodal ministry for the implementation of the Forest Rights Act. And it was simply because the forest rights activists associated with the Campaign for Smiling Dignity saw, and I think they were correct to see the Ministry of Environment and Forests as in some sense hostile to their project. The Ministry, Environment, Forests and foresters in general, throughout the process of the drafting of the Forest Rights act, had been trying to limit its extent and its scope. Who could claim what rights? They were much more concerned with what they saw as a project, conservation that involved kind of restricting people's access and use to the forest. And they thought that if the Ministry of Environmental Forests, even though it was the ministry that had the most presence in the forest, were in charge, they would kind of undermine the act in important ways. Whereas the Ministry of Tribal affairs, you know, it might not have the capacity to kind of effectively implement the act, but it didn't either have the. It didn't have the capacity to undermine it either. So in practice, what this has meant is that the Forest Rights act has been implemented by NGOs, social movements, groups on the ground, friendly politicians who are looking for a constituency in one way or the other. And neither ministry has played the most active role. I mean, India is a large country and there might be places, I'm sure there are places where the Ministry of Tribal affairs has played an active, productive role. But to the extent I'm aware of, it's kind of absent from the story. So it was kind of this project of assigning people rights and letting them claim the rights to do an end run around the state. It extends to sort of choosing a ministry that just would be largely absent.
- [54:12]
B
That, I think, is really fascinating how people themselves are able to Think backwards and find, as you say, the most strategically effective nodal point for the political rights that they want to pursue through the law, which is a really interesting feature, I think, of the Forest Rights Act. As we talk about the Forest Rights Act, I thought it would be helpful if we could also discuss how the law straddles very competing different political projects of the Scheduled Tribes and the Adivasis, which again, becomes a central argument of the book, the word traps of the Forest Rights act that play a sort of wedge kind of role in sometimes infusing, but sometimes separating the Scheduled Tribes and the Adivasis.
- [55:02]
C
Right. So this is a phrase that I get from a bureaucrat who was a friendly bureaucrat, who in the Prime Minister's office, who kind of helped shepherd the Force Rights act through its initial stages. His name was Arugopalakrishnan. And he was talking about how certain words and phrases, if they were allowed into the. Into the law's text, could open it up to particular readings. He said, you know, essentially he said that their kind of specific, literal referential meaning might be neutral, or it might just kind of refer to some specific referent out in the world, but they kind of situated that referent within a larger political context and narrative about, in this case, the forest and the people who live within them. I draw on the wrestling with Mikhail Bakhtim's idea of a chronotope here as the thinking about the ways in which language sort of sets up the persons and the place and the space of the action within which is taking place. So the term that he's citing is the word encroacher. Encroachment. So once you call a settlement in the forests an encroachment, and the people who live in it encroachers, you've already kind of lost the game because you've. The word implies that there was a forest that existed and then people arrived and in some way violated the forest that existed, rather than seeing, you know, the people in the forest as having kind of lived together in a certain sense. So the specific. And so this notion of word trap allowed me to kind of think through the ways in which politics made their way in and out of the law. The question of who is a forest dweller and who has what relationship to the forest, who can be kind of trusted to safeguard the forest if we give them rights hinges a lot on kind of different ways of dividing up, on caste lines, the groups who live in the forest. And this division between the category of Scheduled Tribes and a category that's that's created that they, they call other traditional forest dwellers. There are many people who live in forests who are not members of the, the state category of Scheduled Tribe, Scheduled Tribe is. It's, it's a, it's a category that dates from the colonial period that names these people who are sort of understood through colonial sociology to fall outside of sort of caste society in India. And they're associated with, with the forest. I think 60% of people who live in forests are Scheduled tribes. This is the number I've read. But of course they use that 40%. And the category of Scheduled Tribe is established at the state level. And so the same community on one side of a border might be members of Scheduled Tribes. They might not be on the other side of the border. So members of Scheduled tribes. The Forest Rights Act. Finally, initially there was a vision of only granting these rights to members of Scheduled Tribes who are understood in a certain political imaginary to be the only indigenous residents of the forest. And everyone else is some kind of encroacher. The various groups kind of won out in allowing other traditional forest dwellers to claim rice to the land. But members of Scheduled tribes have a much lower barrier to gaining these rights. They have to prove residents prior to 2005, whereas other traditional forest dwellers sort of have to prove how, how traditional they are in a certain sense by proving that they've resided in the forests without rights, mind you. So without, without kind of legal documentation for three generations, which the law defines as 75 years, which is a difficult bar for, for anyone to, to establish. It'd be difficult. I, I don't know how I would establish where my ancestors lived 75 years ago, let alone find documentation for it. The oral testimony is allowed as well. But for some of the poorest communities in India, this is an impossibly high bar. So this sets up a kind of differentiated access to forest rights in villages and in forests across India. And in the village where I was working in that, I call it Amnagar, you had, in the state of uttar Pradesh until 2002, none of the communities in this area that in neighboring states would be identified as Scheduled Tribes were Scheduled Tribes. There's sort of a vision of Uttar Pradesh as kind of standing in for the national mainstream and therefore not having these communities that fell outside of it. And so in an interesting way, they, they get worked into the, the quite powerful streams of, of Dalit politics in the state. At the time, the state was governed by the Bahujan Samaj, part of the bsp, led by Chief Minister Mahavati which is a sort of an explicitly sort of pro Dalit political party associated with the ideas and politics of Dr. B.R. ambedkar, the sort of leader of the Dalit movement in the early 20th century. So this contradiction between these two categories finds its way into the forest where around half, well, maybe two thirds of the people in this village were members of groups that had been recently classified as scheduled tribes in the preceding decade. And two thirds were not, sorry, one third were not. So these groups that identified as Dalit but were classified as scheduled tribes could kind of find common cause on a kind of anti caste politics with their scheduled caste neighbors. But they also had privileged access to claiming rights to the Forest Rights act, which establishes first the kind of the basis for their alliance in establishing the village. And then later on it kind of introduces strains into the alliance when they, some of the members of the scheduled tribe sort of set off on their own because they had an easier path to gaining the rights.
- [60:52]
B
I also wanted to address this one point in the book where you speak about how Geeta was trying to use the law to, in very novel ways where they were demanding collective rights for mixed communities. It was almost like an extralegal solution to the way in which the law was bracketing people into fixed categories and partitioning them along caste and gender and class lines. I wondered if you could speak more about these kinds of novel solutions and that were being produced indigenously. And as you talk about that, maybe it would also be helpful if you could discuss this idea of patronage and the knowledge economy of who was able to produce these kinds of solutions. Was it that because Gita had the kind of knowledge she had, because she was an activist and she was straddling lots of spaces, she had the vocabulary to develop this novel solution. Or do you think that, do you think that the knowledge economy was not as gatekept in reality?
- [61:55]
C
That's a great question. Yeah. So patronage is something that I spend some time on in the book. In a sense. I see the, you know, there are lots of reasons why the residents of Ramnagar with Dalit and Adivasi set off on their own from Govind Nagar to establish their own village. You know, they didn't have their own land in Govindnagar. They had to work for the dominant caste landlords. But that also, and they would talk about this, that would put them in caste based patronage relationships with the dominant caste that included all forms of violence and exclusion. And so in some sense they were setting off to establish their own village to escape patronage relations. But to do so required the citation and kind of working with this new law that, you know, they had, you know, some of the men could read it in Hindi. None of them spoke any English. Most of the women could not read it in, in Hindi or in English. None of them had had legal education of any sort. And this, this, you know, very dynamic activist who was Delhi based, who I call Gita, had been among the, the people who told them about the Forest Rights act in the first place. And she was, as you say, she's very creative with the, with the ways that she's kind of thinking about and using the, the Forest Rights Act. She was involved in, in the campaign for survival indignities. So she'd been present in many of those early discussions. She knew everyone who was, who was in the room who drafted the first, drafted the Forestry Acts Act. There's a moment that I cite in the book where early on in my fieldwork she was arguing with the district magistrate about the correct meaning of the law and who had the right to arrest a forest dweller for improperly gathering firewood, I think he was, or cutting down trees in, in the forest. He said, no, the forest department still has those, those rights. And she said, no, the, the Forest Rights act gives those rights to forest weather communities. They go back and forth about the law. The district magistrate, the chief bureaucrat for the area, quite a powerful man. He says, no, I've read the law. I know how to read the law. You know, I can see what it says here. And she pulls out her phone and she says, look, I have the numbers of everyone who was in the room when they wrote the law. We can call any of them and we can, we can ask them exactly what they meant. And, and at the moment this kind of, she wins by kind of citing this other channel through which the Forest Rights act had traveled. You know, not just the kind of the bound volumes through which it reached the desk of this bureaucrat, but also through Greeta's mobile phone. And so she continues to be very creative in these ways. When the claims initially fail, as you said, she says, well, this differentiated access on the basis of scheduled tribe status versus other traditional forest dweller status. This language isn't there in the laws, provisions around community forest rights. So if they can claim common rights to the forest rather than individual rights, then perhaps they can get around this. And I'll say this also doesn't work for them. It's creative, but it's perhaps not creative enough. She's the one who's kind of aware of which Benches in which courts will be friendly and which will be unfriendly to them. She has a very kind of minute analysis of the local political landscape where she knows all the local politicians and she knows how to kind of play them off each other for the votes of this movement. Because Ramnagar isn't the only new forest village that's been established through this movement of the area. So she's very canny these ways, and none of this would really have happened without her. But this sets up a form of, kind of dependence of the forest dwellers in Ramnagar upon Gita and her help. So at moments when there's kind of disagreement between them, this patronage relationship seems to be at stake. Some of the. She understands this as. As a women's movement and she's trying to empower the women in the village. But as soon as she leaves and the other kind of women activists she's associated with, the men will kind of start mocking the women in the village, saying, you're not so strong when Geeta's not around. You don't stand up for yourself. The same when Geeta's not around. There's a tension, there's an awareness of that patronage relationship and what it allows and doesn't allow that particularly the men in the village resent. And the women are, feel themselves quite reasonably to be empowered by her. And so in a sense, I'm wondering how in escaping one set of patronage relations, they've ended up in another. I don't think it's the same sort of patronage relationship at all. Now they have their own land. In a certain sense. They are still on the land, but they're not able to because this is all being done through the law. They need someone who not only can interpret the law, but has an understanding of how. How to kind of work the law and to fix and unfix it in the ways that we've been discussing.
- [66:52]
B
Thank you. Thank you for that. Also really interesting that those bits you talk about where in her absence there is a sign. It almost seems like a suspension of ordinary gender dynamics when Gita is around and when Geeta is not around, you switch back to a paternalistic kind of way of organizing your forest politics. Speaking of patrons, I think one other kind of patron that finds mention in the book is Western organizations, Western donors thinking. You spoke earlier in our chat now about joint forest management guidelines and the joint Forest Management Committees. These policies and practices that were meant to implement forest conservation, meant to be in line with, aligned with forest conservation, which were aided by Ford foundation and the World Bank. And I wondered how central were these kinds of donor organizations, external donor organizations? What was their role in the making of the Forest Rights act and in its aftermath?
- [67:55]
C
Right, that's a great question. So one of the kind of many political intellectual strands through which the Forest Rights act comes into being is the history of joint forest management in India, which comes out of some early experiments led in Punjab and elsewhere in India, but also across Southeast Asia that were sort of coordinated and brought together by the Ford foundation in the 70s and 80s. And they're quite explicit about this. They see this as kind of of a piece with some of their rural development and sort of forest. Forest development programs. So the Ford foundation is actively involved in this. I think the bank gets involved in funding this. It gets funded through. It gets sort of channeled into the joint force management policy that the government of India passes. The World bank also ideas around land titling efforts as means of kind of poverty alleviation. I mean, these very neoliberal ideas associated with Tesoto and others, these are kind of circulating through the World bank for quite some time. This is kind of a long project of the World Bank's, I think, from the 1950s to sort of promote land titling efforts as counterinsurgency, in fact. So they're certainly present in the background. These Western groups in particular get cold feet around different projects in India over the 90s and early 2000s, the protests over the, the Narmada Dam in western India where, you know, lead the World bank to kind of back out or just, just be much more cautious about who they're funding. And the Ford foundation, when I spoke with some of the people, people there, they, they, they had become disillusioned with the way the joint forest management was playing out in India more broadly. There's a critique that a number of people have written about it and Nandini Sundar has written about this, about joint forest management policies in India where. And this is exactly what played out in Govindnagar and Ramnagar, that this idea of community forest management doesn't really specify who the community is and sort of who's in and who's out. And so it often, in many forest mills just becomes a tool of kind of already dominant castes to sort of further their dominance. Which is exactly what happened with the, the Gofundagar community forest management where they attack the Dalits. Nadivasis. Dalits, Nadivasis, Algoram Nagar. So this critique is something that the Ford foundation starts listening to. They become concerned. I think one of the Ford foundation officials that I met with, I'm forgetting his name. He said that they were worried that essentially joint force management meant we give money to the people in forests and they kind of do some kind of token efforts to. To plant some trees. But there's no kind of sincere effort at managing the forests. And it has all these other kind of undesirable effects they didn't want to have anything to do with. So what ends up happening is that state forest departments and other groups start going to other donor agencies in particular, they start. Donor hopping is the term that gets used. Donors that don't have the same level of. They're not concerned about their public image to the same extent. They don't have the same kind of checks in place. The World bank has become very cautious and in particular the Japan International Cooperation Agency JICA had been pouring money into India in this period. They're funding a lot of the Metro. The Delhi Metro I think was funded by JICA and they're quite eager to. And Japan has tried to forge new ties with India. It's counterbalances to China and so there's sort of geopolitics involved. And so JICA becomes the kind of unquestioning donor for joint forest management politics. And it's not a kind of. The whole point of jaiqa's involvement is that they're not asking too many questions. I spoke with them and they're quite open about this. They said, yeah, we sort of hope that the money is going in the right directions, but we're not actually poking around too much. So this donor hopping, it's less that the donor agencies are kind of in any way interfering with what's going on. They're providing money and so on. In the early days, the Ford foundation really does play a role in bringing together these joint force management groups. But Jaika's whole point is that it's largely no questions asked money, at least at that stage. I shouldn't slander Jaika in the other work that they're doing.
- [72:18]
B
Thank you. That's really so fascinating to think about the kind of role that donors have played in forest politics. As you move towards the end of the book, you talk about the instrumentalization of forest politics in the current political movement in India with the. The rise of right wing nationalist politics. In that background, something that I often wonder was the Forest Rights Act. Simplicitus seems like a liberal law. It is a law that was enacted in order to facilitate property redistribution. So it is, it's a rights providing. It's a progressive saving law, but it is a law that is used by communities on all parts of the spectrum towards a liberal end. Seemingly there is a sense that you want to use this law selfishly, like you use all laws. But specifically with this law it is very easily susceptible to politics from all directions. And I wondered if there is. If this kind of easy transformation of a liberal law into an illiberal vehicle happens only in certain kinds of political contexts. Do you think that it is perhaps only in illiberal context that you would see this kind of instrumentalization of a liberal law towards illiberal ends? Or do you feel like these kinds of transitions or instrumentalizations are independent of the larger design of the polity in which the laws are based?
- [73:48]
C
That's a great question. Yeah, I mean we're certainly past that early 2000s moment in India at least where the United Progressive alliance was sort of passing all of these rights based laws with an eye on kind of a generalized empowerment of the citizenry around rights. That's over. And in a sense it's hard to imagine this set of laws being passed today in India. It's very difficult to imagine. But that doesn't end the kind of. The possibility of unfixing and refixing any law in new ways doesn't end with that. And, and the Forest Rights act has been used by political formations on the Hindu right in exclusionary ways. This question of who's in and who's out of these rights, that was never really established in the first place. There was never any consensus on that in the first place. This continues to be redefined in the current political atmosphere. The question of who is on the ground organizing forest dwellers. This varies because there is no one kind of central ministry that's doing this in a consistent way across India. This becomes whoever is present. And a lot of forests in India. The only game in town, as it were, is our organizations associated with the Hindu right who are mobilizing the Forest Rights act along with their. In line with their larger political project. But the law. But I mean, that's happening. But also, I mean the Hindu right is a very large formation. It's, you know, it's, it's a, it's a mass movement in every sense of the term. And it, it contains within itself many contradictions. So the, at the same time as it's being mobilized to claim more rights by groups associated with the Hindu rights right in certain forests in certain parts of the country, it's also being chipped away at by, by the governing coalition in Many ways. Who are, you know, they, they're sort of seeking to, to bring it in line with, with the interests of, of capital in one way or the other. The Forest Rights act, among other things that it does, is it, it, it restricts this. You know, a quarter of India's land area had been kept out of the market in, in land in some way. And, and as the, the price of land goes up, you know, exponentially in India, one way that you get access, you have been able to get access to land is just to have it, you know, through a legal process, transferred from, you know, forest department use to whichever private company or public company wants access to it. So it's, in fact, much cheaper than other sorts of land. And as people get these rights to the land and as they gain rights over community conservation, as they gain authority, this actually has put a number of large investments in India's forests in peril and it stopped a number of them. And so this has angered many people that this is in the latter days of the United Progressive alliance government newspapers were talking about what they called a reign of green terror, where in the name of the Forest Rights act, the economy was going to be ground to halt. There wouldn't be enough coal to power the cities. The lights would go off across India. And so these people who, who have always. This form of kind of corporate collective action that has always opposed the Forest Rights act and the property rights and the conservation authority that it gives to forest dwellers, they haven't stopped and they've been quite successful in recent years at kind of chipping away at the rights that the Forest Rights act does provide. So then openness continues and it's being deployed by formations on the political right, but it's actually not being deployed in the same direction by different facets of the Hindu right. You have groups that are claiming rights to it and you have groups that are trying to restrict the rights that can be claimed. Yeah.
- [77:34]
B
Thank you, Anand. This was such an insightful conversation about different kinds of politics, different kinds of elements of forest politics, throughout time, throughout space, throughout parts of the political spectrum. Perhaps the very last thing I'd like to ask you is where is your current research taking you? Are you still examining the problem of the forest? Where are you examining other problems to tell us about that right?
- [78:02]
C
I'm sadly moving away from forests in my new work. I've become quite interested, and this is very early research. I've been quite interested in labor politics in India. This is sort of inspired by a statistic that I had read that gets cited here and there that India and South Africa are the two countries that have seen a consistent rise in union density over the last few decades, which kind of runs counter to all the narratives that we hear about or the kind of standing narratives that we hear about the labor movement, the union movement in India and runs counter to what we understand about India's political economy after neoliberalization in the 1990s. And yet more and more people are joining unions. And so what this means on the ground is something that I'm starting to look at. It's also, I think anthropology in general has left unions to the sociologists who they've done a good job with it, but I think anthropologists have something to say about unions. So this is what I'm starting to look at now. But it's very early dates.
- [79:03]
B
I see. Sounds really exciting. Thank you so much, Anand. Really rich discussion and I hope our readers take as much as I have done from it. And with that I think we are signing off. So bye bye.
- [79:15]
C
Thank you so much, Sam.