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Arpitha Kodiveri, "Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests" (Melbourne UP, 2024)
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Books Network hello everyone. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Raghavi Vishwanath and today I'm in conversation with the brilliant Arpita Kodiwari about her new book, Governing Forests, State Law and Citizenship in India's Forests. Arpita is an environmental law and justice scholar and assistant professor of political science at Vassar College. Governing Forests builds on years of fieldwork she's done in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Odisha and Karnataka with forest dwelling communities, activists, lawyers and bureaucrats. And it masterfully tells a story of the shifting regimes of forest governance and in the colonial and the postcolonial Indian state, the entanglements between green capitalism, eco casteism, resource extractivism and changing ideas of sovereignty. And it deliberates the possibility of healing these chasms, these antagonisms between conservationists and forest dwellers by finding a model it calls negotiated sovereignty to me, really Governing Forests is a story about how we can listen better legal conversations taking place from below by those who are directly impacted by these conflicts with conservation and how we can pragmatically push for a forest jurisprudence that anchors on care and repair for the future. Thanks so much for joining us today, Arpita, and I'm really looking forward to picking your brains about this wonderful book. To start at the start, the book opens with a really moving and I think, candid preface about your travails through the different modes of environmental lawyering. It's really an indictment of the ethics of environmental lawyering. And I wondered if you could speak to us about how you reconciled the different voices within yourself and what were the particular challenges of the combination of being a practitioner and presenting as a lawyer that were coinciding in your body when you were doing this long field work? Yeah.
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Firstly, I'm so excited to be here and get to talk to you about my book because you had so many exchanges over the years about fieldwork, the ethics of it and the dilemmas, and also the joy that comes with it and I think the learning that comes with it. So in terms of how the book came about was when I started to practice as an environmental lawyer, I found myself in all of these diverse contexts. So the first ever encounter with the Forest Rights act and lawyering around the Forest Rights act happened in the Sariska Tiger Reserve. And this was in 2013. And it was interesting because speaking of the tension of being a scholar, a practitioner, thinking and ideating with the law while also trying to listen to communities on the ground, there was one particular story that really highlights for me, like the, I want to say, like the point of entry into all of those conversations. It was an interesting story where I was witness to a conflict within the community, where part of the community wanted to relocate because it was declared a tiger reserve and part of the community wanted to stay. And the law, like the Forest Rights act, had reconfigured that conflict very differently all of a sudden, because now you had the right to stay. Prior to the Forest Rights act, it was not, you know. And so I could see the divides becoming more profuse, the conversations becoming heavily juridified and legalized. And there I was as an environmental lawyer, supposedly, you know, doing some community based lawyering, witnessing this conversation and this tension and this conflict. And I realized the only way to kind of reconcile a lot of these voices is to be able to tell that story of tension, because I think the law is always trying to look at A resolution, or at least as lawyers we get trained, that a strategy is eventually going to resolve a conflict or some kind of resolution, it may not be the end of the conflict that I had to tell myself that it get comfortable with this tension, get comfortable with this contestation and talk about it. And because as lawyers were pressured to sort of not just look for resolution, but to actually implement the law and support communities in implementing the law, the scholarly voice or the scholarly possibility became my refuge. Where I was like, here I'm at least devoid of those pressures, and I can just tell the story as is over time. I want to say that those voices still exist and they are still constantly pushing back against each other. But it's a healthy, healthy tension, I think. But I think over the course of, you know, because the story starts with my legal practice, which I stopped at around 2017 because I started my PhD, so I had to go back to the same field site sometimes as a researcher. So that is a very different tension. I remember going into the areas affected by the Posco integrated steel plant in Jagat Singhpur, and they were like, so you're a lawyer, but you don't want to? So can you do this for us? And I'm like, yeah, I can, but I'm also here as a researcher. So it actually kind of. Interestingly, the communities kind of were able to see the duality of that, but they were also interested in making sure they are able to utilize my capacities as a lawyer. You know, it was kind of interesting where they were like, you have a certain kind of ability to. To be productive to the con, you know, to the social movement, so why not? So I found that it was actually something that made me feel a lot more comfortable too, and less extractive. And I don't know if that's a story I tell myself, but at least that's the feeling I had at the time, which was like, okay, I'm able to do these interviews, but I'm also able to fill like, FRA applications or do other kinds of mundane bureaucratic work, because why not, you know.
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Thank you. Thank you so much for this. I was just wondering, based on what you said now, how you engage with the discipline of the law itself. There's such a self interest that one tends to operate from when you're either professionalized within the discipline or you're. Even when you're scholarly. From a scholarly vantage point, when you're interested in a discipline, there seems to be a fear of abdicating that discipline, of walking away. It almost appears that you are giving up on some kind of responsibility that was placed on you when you, when you say you want to walk away from a discipline. And oftentimes when you do field work, you do realize that that association or that kind of responsibility you feel to a discipline may not be a responsibility shared by the. By your interlocutors, by a universe of communities. So I wondered how you navigate that, that element of self interest that sometimes keeps pulling us back simply to the preservation of the discipline. And in this case, that discipline is lower.
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Yeah, it's such an interesting question, actually, because I. It's interesting you feel that a lot when you're doing fieldwork. I don't know if you've personally felt that too, but there is this sense of loyalty to the discipline and it's very baked in. And I've been trying to like, peel the layers and figure out where is it coming from. And what's interesting about the law is it's, it's not. It is a discipline that's very insular. It's trying to perpetuate its own discourse. It's hierarchical, it's gatekeeping, it's all of those. But when it comes to research method, the law is very confused. Right. So you do end up, like, having to look at the law and movements to go and draw from it and then bring it back to the law. So in some ways, the law is a bit like a parasite. It's not necessarily a discipline that's porous. I want to say it's kind of. It'll interact with another discipline based on its own priorities. At least that's how I've kind of read a lot of that. And I think immersing in anthropology really assisted me in seeing the flaws in my own discipline. So it was like I had to move completely away from the law to really see the limitations of the law. And I'm very, very grateful to my professor, Amitabh Bhaviskar during my Young India Fellowship days because that was my first, like, reading of Sociology of the Environment and this idea that, you know, the law is flawed in multiple ways and that not everybody sees every conflict as a legal conflict, especially on environmental issues. But it's been an interesting journey for me because I decided to abandon the law, so to speak, and actually embrace anthropology. But as I tried to do that, for some reason the discipline of anthropology was very difficult to enter into because it required, it had its own code and its own barriers. So I kind of felt like I was in an island in the middle, surrounded by the Sea of different disciplines demanding different things. So I said, okay, you know, I think I just need to go back. And interestingly, the legal discipline was more open to this approach. So I end up having to do a PhD in law, and I continue to work as a lawyer on climate justice issues. And it's been an interesting homecoming, let's just put it that way. And I think I have a healthy skepticism of the law. So I think moving outside the legal embrace and coming back to it, that journey has kind of taught me where it's okay to abandon the law without guilt. There are certain times where the law, where the absence of the law is more empowering, especially for communities, than the imposition of the law. So I'm grateful for that. But I'm also grateful for the legal discipline, despite all its limitations to being open to my methods and my ways of writing, which is kind of an interesting story, actually. Thank you.
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Thank you for sharing this. It resonates so much with me, just as you speak about this homecoming where I've also tried desperately to stray away. But there's something about the closeness of other disciplines that pulls me back to the law. And I guess I've also been grappling with the idea that as much as sometimes we feel like there is no law, there is a utopic law. In some paradigms. There is a. There are new conceptions, very radical conceptions of what reality and normativity could look like, which the legal discipline may not identify as law, but that is law. There is law in those social interactions, in those political interactions. So perhaps that's why there's also this magnetic pull that brings us back to.
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The law after we tried it.
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I want to ask you one more question about your authorial voice and how you've been doing your research, and that is about teaching. There's a point in the book where you speak about your courses on the climate crisis and forest laws. And I wondered how much of your method of environmental lawyering has also benefited from teaching as a new kind of site of thinking about the environment, thinking about the construction, the making and unmaking of legalities. And I wondered if you could speak about how the classroom has sort of contributed to your mode of environmental lawyering.
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Such a poignant question. Because I think that the classroom is such a safe space to experiment with ideas, to, you know, to imagine new possibilities, to be able to also be vulnerable and honest about your own challenges, that I. I say this to my students all the time, but it's. It's basically, I get paid to experience therapy with my students. So I think more to be more concise. I think the way the classroom has informed my writing and my lawyering is it's allowed me to sort of test ideas and hear how different students interact with those ideas and also to kind of confront the multi, not multitude, but like this kind of interesting conversation that I have, especially with young students around. What are the stakes at play when it comes to the climate crisis? Unlike, say, teaching in early 2000s or even say 2013 to now, there's a marked difference in how internalize the climate discourses. And so it's interesting to kind of see that and have, and to be able to have that real time argument, as it were, in the classroom. So like recently in my core class, we were talking about the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion and they were so alarmed. They said it took so long for the law to realize it's a binding obligation. And it was interesting because, you know, for us the struggle has always been trying to move the needle a little further along in terms of incremental change. And so it's a lot of, I think, humility too, where you go in thinking that this is a amazing, you know, you're witnessing an amazing movement in the law. And then you kind of look at, you know, the youth and they're like, I don't know about this, like, why did it take so long? But I, I think the other thing that the classroom offers, which I suppose other spaces don't necessarily offer, is generosity. Generosity in terms of. Not that they're a captive audience, but generosity in terms of engagement with the work. And Vassar is such an incredible space also because we get to teach to our strengths. So a lot of my research informs my teaching, so they're not too isolated spaces. So I keep changing the courses and the titles as my research changes. So I get to think with my students, which has been a really nice kind of luxury.
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Maha, thank you. Thank you for this. There's also this element, I think, especially in environmental discourse, which is so intergenerational and you see it often played out in the classroom. I feel when ideas that come from a generational place encounter new conceptions, challenges, counters, questions. And I feel like the classroom is often ignored as that site where those encounters take place in any kind of lawyering. So it was really quite refreshing for me to see how you speak about the classroom so poignantly in the book. I thought now we could start by going back to your kind of genealogy of the shifting regimes of forest governance by speaking about the colonial forest laws. So the Indian Forests Act, I think of 1927, I was thinking about lots of the innovations you speak about, such as the Forest Department being placed in the Revenue Department, the distinctions that the colonial regime develops between government and reserve forests. And I wondered if you could speak about the kinds of underlying discourses, but the legal tools that were unique to the colonies that the colonial regime developed in its forest governance, perhaps using the Indian Forest act as a kind of case study there.
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I think when I started to do the research for that particular chapter, I just remember coming from having been embedded in the Forest Rights act movement. There was already a prescriptive gaze I had on colonial era laws, which was they had dispossessed communities. But to my surprise, I think once you play, pay really close attention to the different iterations of the Indian Forest act, you start to see sort of the political contestations that were at play and the legal innovations that the colonial state had to kind of generate in order to achieve its ends. Right. And you start to look at the law as such an interesting space sight to be able to unpack those questions in terms of just looking at the Indian Forest Act, I think. And in that exercise, what really stood out for me was this idea that the Indian Forest act was meant to control and manage India's forests. All while this was overlaid and kind of having to interact with questions of Adivasi sovereignty. Very often these histories are told separately, the legal histories are told very separately. So I wanted to bring those two stories together. And so when you see the Indian Forest act, it talks about rights and privileges, right? So the colonial state wanted, and the Forest Department in particular, using, you know, scientific forestry as the sort of logical basis in order to enable this extractive governance. It wanted discretionary authority of making that choice and having the ability to selectively decide when rights were applicable and what can only be a privilege. And once rights transition into the legal arena of privileges, then it becomes a much more complicated question for forest dwelling communities, because then their existence is dependent on this kind of ability to work with the bureaucracy in order to be able to access some of these rights. While all of this is happening, you read these amazing stories of Adivasi resistance, whether it's Birsamunda or other, you know, revolutions, but seldom do we look at the legal basis of that. There are definitely scholars who've written about it. But what I tried to do in this book is to say what really happened to excluded and partially excluded areas. And I came across a very fascinating Document where the Government of India act was being negotiated. And the Marquis of Zetland actually goes on to kind of narrate this story of how Adivasi communities are as innocent as sheep and they need to be shielded from the wolf like external world. And that's the reason the colonial state should be present, but also absent. And it was a very interesting kind of aspect to dive into because it's like, on the one hand, the colonial state wants absolute control over forest areas or discretionary control over forest areas. And at the same time it knows that there are difficult geographies that it has to regulate and it cannot regulate. And so how do you actually make sense of that? And how do you kind of understand those changes that are happening during that period? And what you realize is none of those strands are in any way resolved even in the post colonial moment, nor is it now with the passage of the Forest Rights Act. Those are the threads that continue to remain loose and untethered when it comes to forest governance. And so for me, that was a big learning of going back to some of those earlier legal frameworks. And I think the other interesting legal innovation, apart from rights and privileges and this notion of the colonial state being, you know, that the absence of the colonial state renders Adivasi sovereignty as being expressed. So this excluded parsimi, partially excluded areas is where the colonial laws don't apply, but they partially apply. Right. Was the third innovation, I think, which we continue to retain when it comes to scheduled areas governance is the notion that sovereignty is something that has to happen in conversation with the formal state. It's not something that can happen in isolation of it. And so you kind of see the development of scheduled areas governance throughout the Government of India act of 1935 and during the constitutional debates as well. But what we actually see in the constitutional debates is how Jaypal Singh Munda talks about the dilution of the notion of Adivasi sovereignty that they were hoping scheduled areas could provide, that eventually it does become just another node of. And it's mostly in an advisory nature, the tribal advisory council that will make those decisions. So for me, I think the interesting thing about legal innovations of colonial forest laws was rights and privileges, of course, but the ability to kind of manage Adivasi sovereignty, it wasn't just about controlling forest resources. It was also about using conservation as a way to. And scientific forestry as a way to limit and control Adivasi sovereignty as well. Shopping is hard. I can never find anything in my size. I don't even know my size. I Buy my clothes the same place I buy my groceries. There's a better way. Make it easy with Stitch Fix. Just share your size, style, budget and done. Your personal stylist sends pieces picked just for you. That was easy.
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Applying for no Ding Decline cards won't hurt your credit scores. If you aren't initially approved, initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores. Experian yeah, thank you so much for this. It's really interesting, as you say, to see how conservation was developed in order to earmark this conflict with adivasi sovereignty. And I think it also points to, at least I had One of the questions that came to my mind when I, when I read that chapter about colonial laws was why sovereignty? Why was sovereignty chosen as the kind of legal battleground between conservation and adivasi rights? And what are the dangers of this kind of legal signification through sovereignty? Many scholars write about how, you know, even when law recognizes indigenous people's rights or their special relationship with land, law tends to signify that land. It says you can only have a special relationship with what we call land in law. In the same way. Sometimes I wonder whether the category of sovereignty does that too, whether it kind of creates a bounded space within which what you do or what you say or who you are can be called sovereign or sovereignty. And I wondered if how you reconcile with those, or whether you thought that it was a kind of intentional device also to say that there is this conflict between sovereignty, Adivasi sovereignty and the conservation of forests. Right. From the kind of colonial discourse.
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Yeah, I think it didn't occur to me when I was doing my research to kind of see sovereignty both in its empowering and disempowering sensibility. But what occurred to me was how the colonial state used and deployed sovereignty through the language of being better equipped to steward the lands. So there was this idea of the capacity to steward attached to the ability to exercise sovereignty. And if you notice, the way the law around indigenous rights globally and the Forest Rights act in India also is discursively understood is that, yes, Adivasis are better equipped to steward these lands, thus their sovereignty has to be recognized. And so that, to me, was an interesting interaction that I was noticing in terms of the boundedness of sovereignty. I think you're spot on. I think there is this territoriality that gets attached to the concept of sovereignty, which definitely limits the way especially forest dwelling communities understand sovereign expression. I remember being in Kondamal in Orissa, where they would name each of the hills based on different stories, and one of them was called Blue Palika. I said, why is it called Blue Palika? Because they said that the sovereignty extends into the sky and the blueness of the sky merges with the hill. And to me, that was such a different conception altogether of where hills meet the sky as being part of the, you know, idea of territoriality. But of course, I, and this is the bit that I think fascinated me in terms of that interaction between sovereignty, stewardship and conservation was how much of the burden has now shifted onto Adivasi communities to prove that they're a good steward in the eyes of the law in order to be able to access those rights. And so, you know, when we were working on the implementation of the Forest Rights act, so I want to kind of connect it back to that colonial story. A lot of the community members would look at all those sacred areas that had been demarcated and would emphasize that as the legal evidence for submission of community forest rights. And that, to me, was interesting and, sorry, it's a bit of a long winded idea. So the other aspect around the conversation around sovereignty was also the capacity to gargle. So there was this understanding that the colonial state had the bureaucratic infrastructure and nobody else could access that sophisticated bureaucratic infrastructure. And thus their sovereign right made more sense over these forests. And to me, that was kind of fascinating because it completely erased existing legal decision making that happened within communities to be able to conserve or extract these lands.
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Yeah, no, that's so interesting. As you say, there's such a enmeshment between sovereignty and capacity to steward, but also sovereignty and governmentality that there's a certain kind of register. There are Certain kinds of infrastructures that allow us to govern and only those entities that have that infrastructure can be sovereign. So it limits literacy fluency along lines of class, along lines of race, along lines of gender. So all of those kind of imperial categories of exclusion have a big gate open for them to come in through this, through this discourse of sovereignty itself. I was also thinking going forward from the colonial period to the moment of decolonization. And in the book you speak about the Coal Bearings act, which is shortly after India becomes independent and a decade after India becomes independent. And it is presented as a kind of response to this energy demand also. It seems to come from a kind of place where a post colonial state is saying that control over forest resources is the mark of achieving sovereignty, really. So I wondered if you could speak about the discourse preceding that Coal Bearing Areas act and how it kind of intersected with the politics of decolonization, the global politics of decolonization that India was a big spokesperson of, especially in that Afro Asian, all of your Afro Asian coalitions. Bandung India was constantly trying to occupy political space. So I wondered how that political moment kind of intersected with the forest response through that.
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Yeah, that's such a great question. I think the Cold Bearing Areas act to me is such a significant piece of legislation to really observe how India imagined these ideas of sovereignty, these ideas of, you know, conservation as well. Right. I think much of it can be kind of examined through the lens of the permanent sovereignty of natural resources as a legal principle. The post colonial movement was where a lot of the countries who had been victims of the colonial empire demanded that they now have, they have the sovereign right to extract. No external actor can come and exploit our resources. We need to have the first sort of C in that process. Right. And what's also interesting about the Coal Bearing Areas act is it nationalized all the coal mines as well, which happened much slightly later. But it was a product of the Coal Bearing Areas Act. And there you see sort of the Indian state coming in, you know, to say that now nation building is the project that we're going to be working on. And thus nation building requires the absolute authority to extract. Right. And the Coal Bearing Areas act has the, I want to say the most radical legal expression of that where national necessity renders itself so strong that any other claim to rights or sovereignty is dissolved. Because coal is such a important resource. And when you talk to communities on the ground. So I was doing field work around the Mahanadi coal fields and I also went to Talcher in Orissa which is a huge coal mining area. And you talk to communities, they will very often have this idea of the inevitability of extraction in these zones, right? So communities will always say, you know, this is a hard battle because once you find coal underneath your land, the land does not belong to you anymore. And so it's so kind of visible even in the everyday interactions of the law in these sites. But I think the other shift I noticed with in the post colonial movement is where sovereignty moves, at least in its expression in coal bearing areas as well as forest areas, moves away from just the capacity to conserve as the basis of sovereignty, but also the first right to extract as the other kind of element of that sovereign authority. And much of it, you know, there's a lot of conversation also that happens in forest dwelling communities where they talk about this movement of sacrifice for nation building. So a lot of conversations you would have, especially in coal bearing areas, is we've already given so much of our land, right? We've fulfilled our duties as citizens. So there's a way in which even the state citizenship relationship gets mediated through extraction. But I haven't opposed your extraction because I fulfilled a duty. And that's another interesting aspect to the coal bearing areas and sort of the post colonial movement in forests as well. Even during dam construction, there were a lot of communities I met who had been displaced twice, one by the Hiraku Dam and second by a mine. And in both of those instances, while they do resist, in the second moment of extraction during the first process, they kind of said that this was a part of their experience of nation building. And I think that it's left to scholars like you and me to unpack what that actually means, because we did not have the legal infrastructure to articulate dissent. The Indian Forest act was, and I'm trying to find a subtle way to describe it, but the Indian Forest act concentrated so much of authority in the forest department in the Indian state that citizens could not have an interaction apart from, you know, consenting to dispossession. That that was sort of the only legal room accessible. Which of course communities then changed and carved out a space. But yeah, so it was a sort of a very absolutist sense of sovereign expression.
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No, that's. I'm really glad you brought up citizenship as well. I think when I was reading the portions about citizenship in the book, I was thinking about how it's really interesting that in the background from. In the background of this transition from the colonial to the post colonial moment, there is also seemingly A shift in the way that the state signifies forest itself normatively. So almost in the colonial period, forests were being classified as an area devoid of norms, as empty land. And suddenly in the Coal Bearings act, in that post colonial moment, as you say, there is a kind of right, the first right of extraction placed on the forest. And equally, the citizenship expectations that emerge from the forest seem to suggest that the forest is now being seen as a global common or a common commodity, a shared commodity. And that's why these responsibilities, citizenship responsibilities, extend to you as someone who is being dispossessed. You are performing, as you say, you're sacrificing for nation building. And I wondered if that's also something you could speak about just what was happening in the background normatively, in terms of the way the state was signifying the forest itself. Yeah, yeah.
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I think that the way in which the Indian Forest Act. So if you think about it, the iteration of the Indian forest Act of 1865 continued to inform the Indian Forest act of 1927. So the decolonial movement was also a moment of inheritance of colonial legal artifacts and laws. Right. So it wasn't necessarily pushing back on that. So in some senses, the. The law continued to view forests as a zone of, you know, managing, controlling, conserving, extracting. But, you know, a story that I often go back to when I try to kind of understand how did the post colonial state really look at forests, right. What is actually happening? And I feel like till the 1970s, it was kind of this, you know, not just the permanent sort of, you know, authority over permanent sovereignty over natural resources, but the other aspect was, you know, this kind of notion that the forests are an element of pride for the Indian state. Right. Whether it was for purposes of tourism or whether it was purposes of recreation, there was a sense of attachment of national identity to ecological value and ecological spaces. And where that becomes really pronounced was when I was looking at a lot of the archival data that was available on the categorization of the Sariska Tiger Reserve and well before we had the Wildlife Protection act way back. I think my knowledge is a little rusty now, but I want to say somewhere between 1950 to 1960, there is this sort of sudden realization that we need to protect these areas because the tiger lives there. There is a sort of ecological consciousness that you start to see emerging and fusing with a sense of nationalism. And you also start to kind of, and I'm borrowing from Natina's work here, but you start to see the law, environmental law, domestically also. Operating on those logics of like, civilization and biology. Because when you kind of see how they think of forests, they also think of forests as spaces which need to be policed, Right? The emergence of poaching as a crime, the use of forest offenses as a way to discipline communities, all of it come within those logics of. Of civilization also, that these are not just communities. So the fascinating thing there is, like, you look at conservation and you look at the pressures to develop, all of it being expressed onto this one geographic zone, all while communities have to sort of find and make room in the law to be able to say that, well, we have been practicing, you know, Targu Benki or like small lit fire, for example, the Soliga community does that historically. And it's good for the forests, but it doesn't really appeal to the forest department and the logics of the science. And so the forests again become this site of scientific expression also and scientific knowledge. So I think you kind of see a fusing of a lot of, or rather the emergence of like ecological consciousness. You see the emergence of scientific authority. You see the emergence of wanting to sort of civilize and manage the Adivasi communities through the use of criminal law. And I do think that the bureaucratic governance of forests does see those shifts happen in postcolonial moment. So. And my entire argument in the book is a lot of that can be traced in wanting to isolate the forests as zones of easy extraction under the guise of a lot of these discourses.
- [45:14]
B
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. I was just wondering, as you were speaking about civilization, there's also a really poignant argument you make about ecocastism in the book. And I wondered how much of this was aided by the. By moving the center of conversation to human and non human or human, or more than human relations through the Wildlife Protection Act. It appears that a lot of the critiques we see now about ecocastism seem to circle back to the Wildlife Protection Act. And this very suddenly very overt prioritization of cosmopolitan interests where certain kinds of animals were awarded greater protection at the expense of other kinds of animals. And the language of civilization that was, as you say, that was constantly being baked into forest governance was suddenly very explicit in the Wildlife Protection Act. And I wondered what it is about the move away from the anthropocentric paradigm that reveals the civilizing grammars of forest governance, or really of the ecocentric systems governance that allows it to become so obvious. So if you could speak about the Wildlife Protection act and really how it started to utilize these discourses of exclusion and caste very explicitly.
- [46:51]
A
Again, such a poignant question. I think the way the Wildlife Protection act itself is designed is based on this notion that there is something pure and that there is a way in which Adivasi communities or communities who depend on these forest lands, not only do they need to be disciplined because of that logic of civilization, but they are the pollution in these spaces. So that larger idea that caste has sort of, you know, literally configured the grammar of Indian society, there's always that binary of priority and pollution. And one can read that in every aspect of forest governance in terms of how do we zone, right, how do we decide when a community can access a water resource and when they cannot. And that is not to take away from the particular experiences of Dalit forest dwelling communities, because for them it is sort of a double whammy. But just to say that, I think because a lot of the conservationists who were involved in drafting the Wildlife Protection act and who had direct access to the government at that point in time very often came from a higher caste, elite background. And so there was sort of an elite consensus that the lives of the tigers and the species that were worthy of protection could come at the cost of the loss of human dignity of these communities. And that to me was such an interesting story of what do we consider human? And where does the human lose at the cost of the more than human? How does the law prioritize and where does that ability or idea of injustice even emerge from? And to me, I could often locate it back to these earlier stories of purity and pollution. This. And of course there is Western science informing a lot of this. So I don't want to sort of, you know, isolate it to the Indian context, but I think the Indian, the reason it was so easily absorbed into the Indian legal sphere was because we had this grammar existing already. But to kind of go a bit further on that idea of eco casteism, it emerges also very, very sort of in very subtle ways. And I think sometimes I, as someone who's coming from the higher caste, I sometimes wonder if I'm not able to see all of it right. I have my own limitations. But the sort of subtle ways in which I noticed it is in, say, like there is a program in Karnataka, voluntary relocation. So it is this idea that communities want a better life, they want upward mobility, thus they will voluntarily choose to relocate from tiger reserves. And there's an entire civil society movement around that. And again, I'm not here to say that's good or bad, but I just wanted to unpack the subtlety of it. And in a conversation with one of the activists involved in this voluntary relocation process, he's like, you know, at least if they come to urban areas, they don't have to worry about caste as much or caste based discrimination. So it's interesting that they packaged what is an eco casteist framework as a caste liberatory framework, right? To say that if you move away from the forest, you will then face lesser discrimination because then you're mainstreaming. And to me, I was so interested in understanding how those two interact. And then you start to kind of come to this understanding also that conservation under this kind of Wildlife Protection act framework emerges from the capitalist understanding that, you know, places can be cordoned off, it can't be messy, right? The idea that once you join the sort of mainstream urban area of economic life, the forest can then be allowed to thrive because they're not the economic center of activity anymore. So you're able to completely separate those two lives of communities and ecosystems. And I think, of course, India pioneered how to look at ecology and equity together. But I think for the Wildlife Protection act, that's how it imagines zoning and life and caste and exclusion and all of it.
- [52:06]
B
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- [53:29]
B
Learn more@capella.edu yeah, thank you for that. I was in connection with a piece I'm writing. I was reading about Ni Dhar Jal, who was a mountaineer, who was amongst one of the people that was in India's delegation when the Convention on Migratory Species was being negotiated. And you see such a. The same kind of, you know, overrepresentation as you see everywhere. This Brahminism is everywhere in the making of laws, also in environmental laws, including, as you said, the Wildlife Protection Act. It travels up. The same people will then inform what become South Asian interventions to international treaties that are negotiating forest governance or wildlife protection, biodiversity protection. So the same ideas of caste that were otherwise being for a long time being seen as domestic have been exported since the time that lots of these states started having the chance to contribute to international legal discourse also. And as you say, it's because in the Wildlife Protection act, suddenly now the human was the threat. There was such a wide window to reconfigure the figure of the human itself by infusing these ideas of purity and pollution. And that's why you see eco casteism perhaps more clearly in the Wildlife Protection act than others may have noticed in the legislations preceding it. I was also then thinking about the Forest Rights act, which is of course where you start really in the book, and the Forest Rights act adopted in 2006. And it's really sort of presented as a model of community based conservation. And you see how there are the beginnings of deliberation, deliberated sovereignty, negotiated sovereignty. You see a deliberative model emerge in the Forest Rights Act. The Forest Department was suddenly now being identified as a kind of assisting body. There were a lot of facial readjustments taking place through the legislation to sort of usher or say that a departure from a draconian forest governance model was being assured through this law. And I wondered if you could speak about how this law was received by wildlife NGOs, businesses. What were the initial kind of. What were the initial feathers it ruffled? And why was it that lots of these non state actors started to get perturbed by the departures that the Forest Rights act was ushering.
- [56:09]
A
So what's interesting about the Forest Rights act was very often when I spoke to the bureaucrats about it, they would often describe it as a rebellious law because it wants to completely move away from the existing framework and re engineer, as it were, what forest governance can look like. All while both of those worlds uneasily coexist because the Passing of the Forest Rights act, as you know, didn't result in corresponding amendments to the Indian Forest act or the Wildlife Protection Act. Because of that situation and that the conflict was alive both in the law and in the bureaucracy, the way the Forest Rights act was received by wildlife NGOs in particular was a threat, right? It was seen as a threat to forests. So much so that a group of nonprofits challenged the constitutionality of the Forest Rights act before the Supreme Court. And their main argument in that petition was the fact that the Forest Rights act was seen as a land rights legislation. And because within the Forest Rights act, you have the individual forest rights, which recognizes land rights to the extent to 4 hectares. So they said, oh, no, you know, ecology and equity have gone too far in this piece of legislation. Now there are going to be community members who want land, who are going to use this law to access land, right? And in doing so, there's going to be immense fragmentation of forest areas. And that was fascinating to me because here you have a situation where communities don't really get land rights within the Forest Rights Act. What they get is tenure and security. So. And you cannot alienate the land. And tenural security was seen as a way to give communities a sense of security while living in forested areas. And the evidentiary threshold was fairly large as well. I would, in fact, say that it's a barrier to be able to access these rights. So when I pose those questions to the wildlife NGOs that had filed this case, they were particularly perturbed by the category of the other traditional forest dweller. So they were very comfortable with the idea that, okay, Scheduled tribes can use the Forest Rights act as a pathway to land rights. That's completely all right. But it is this other forest, other traditional forest dweller who's going to come and gamify the entire legal system, you know, and for the audience. So the other traditional forest dweller is a legal category where you need to prove that you have lived independent on forest areas for three generations or 75 years. And again, it's the amount of rejection we see of, you know, OTFT claims to land rights is immense. In some states, it's 99% at least. This was the data back in 2020. So I think that was the way it was received by them as this kind of fear that this has gone too far. I think with the businesses, it was seen as increase in red tape, you know, increasing the time that it will take to obtain all the different clearances. I remember having this conversation with someone who Works in the Ministry of Mines, but also is a consultant with some of these mining companies. Very interesting characters. And he described the Forest Rights act in one word. He said, it's a big roadblock to anything that we need to do. He said he's like, environmental clearance already takes us so long. This is just going to complicate that whole process. None of the businesses looked at this as a way to streamline, as it were, the process of land acquisition, because we know how much of the process of land acquisition has been kind of mismanaged. There are challenges that businesses have faced where land gets acquired, but then communities continue to resist. I was interested why none of the businesses saw it in that light. And I think the reason that didn't translate was because of the distinction between forest land and revenue land. They were used to those kinds of conflicts in revenue land and in forest land. Because conservation entangles itself with resistance around extraction. It has always seen a slightly better legal outcome compared to revenue land. So they suddenly kind of were a little sort of like, oh, now that is going to get amplified more through these laws, as opposed to think of it as kind of organizing or making it.
- [61:53]
B
Thank you for this. I was also thinking as I started some field work in the summer and. And I was speaking to a couple of lawyers who, who within the Forest Rights act, they advocate for the filed community forest rights claims, basically. And many of them remarked about how the story of forest laws often, not only stories of forest law, but also advocacy within forest laws, often ignores urban town planning acts and urban redevelopment regimes which have a big impact on forest land. But even within civil society and lawyering and strategies, there seems to be visible neglect towards urban town planning and your urban kind of plethora of laws. And I wondered if that was something you had noticed and why it is that there's such a focus on laws that look at forests as a site overtly, but little focus on this large infrastructure, large machinery of urban laws that are doing the same thing.
- [63:03]
A
Yeah, that's such an interesting question. I think like. So there are two parts to that that I'd like to answer. I think first is sort of the ratification of forests as a particular geography that's occupied both legal and political imagination, I think so much. So the interesting thing is that in our own advocacy circles there is a very particular understanding of where forest rights as an act operates and where it doesn't. And I say this keeping in mind the example of Sonbhadra in Uttar Pradesh, because in Sonbhadra I encountered a patch of Forest land that was by the side of a highway next to a thermal power plant. Right. And there you had Shobha and her family trying to assert their rights under the Forest Rights Act. But somehow in my own, and this is probably more on me than advocacy circles, more largely, but I was sort of confused. I said, you want to implement the Forest Rights act in such an urban landscape. I don't know if the tenets of this law will allow for that. But that's where I had to take a step back and realize that these boundaries are so blurry. The urban entering into the forest kind of coming back into the urban is so, so present. But in terms of your question around attention being paid more to forests around these questions than in urban areas, I think a lot of it also has to go back to this subtle difference that we draw for ourselves of areas worth conserving as opposed to areas which are meant and isolated for development. It's, it's, it. And this is again, I would love to hear what you have to say, actually about this, because in my early conversations with a lot of lawyers and involved in this work, they sort of looked at the forests as the last bastion worth conserving because of a particular way of life and the amount that it kind of has to sort of shield it from the forces of development. So there's a sense of like the last frontier for conservation. And urban areas seem to be more messy. It's not so neat. Right. It doesn't render itself very easily to that possibility. And of course, you know, the work of Amitabh Bhavaskar and others teaches us otherwise, that there is so much of the language of the commons, the language of extraction, the use of town planning laws, all under the guise, kind of reorganizing space in ways which are similar to forest areas and not so different.
- [66:01]
B
Yeah, you're so right that there's such a, as you said, there's such a rarefication of the site that sometimes we forget to travel with the problem. Otherwise, this. I'm sometimes amused because there's such a pervasiveness of the language of crisis and problems. But when you're looking at laws, the laws are bounded to certain sites and then they don't see where the problems emerging from those sites travel. And I find the dissidents really, really amusing because otherwise the language of climate crisis is everywhere, it's littered everywhere in environmental discourse. And you see climate crisis being spoken about in urban spaces and rural spaces. Look at the climate problems, look at the climate problems.
- [66:46]
A
But for some reason the problems about.
- [66:50]
B
You know, problems emerging from forest rights claims are not being seen anywhere else apart from just the forest as a site.
- [66:59]
A
That is so interesting. You say that and it's this idea also that the law loves to like hyper specialize, I think. Yeah, it's like, oh, this is a completely different legal architecture compared to this, I guess.
- [67:13]
B
As we are talking about climate change and the climate discourse of climate crisis, there are loads of examples in the book about how adivasis are blamed for the climate crisis. And you see this increasingly happening with the official arrival of neoliberalism, the neoliberal developmental turn and how it sort of metamorphosized into the monster that it is now. But very early on with that arrival, you see a shift of the burden of climate conservation being placed on adivasis, on people who have traditionally lived in the forest. And interestingly, it's just the burden that has shifted, but not a recognition of sovereignty. Although earlier, as you said, there was such an entanglement between sovereignty and capacity to steward. But suddenly sovereignty and capacity to steward were being disentangled. And in this climate crisis, the Adivasis and scheduled tribes are being expected to only shoulder the burden of conservation. And I wanted to ask if you could speak about that, about the kind of ruptures that are generated because of this discourse of climate crisis and what are the material stakes of that for Adivasi and schedule tribes?
- [68:32]
A
Yeah, it's a really difficult question because on the one hand, climate change is providing a new foothold to reinvigorate some of the older questions of sovereignty, of, you know, of stewardship, of what it even means to relate to the more than human world. But because it is a crisis, the temporality of finding solutions has also created the other side of this story, which is not just burdening Adivasi communities with finding these climate solutions or making sure that we conserve our areas, but this notion that forests are going to become carbon sinks. Right. So the site of the forest now has migrated in the legal imagination just as a site of conservation to now as a site of climate solutions. And as soon as we start to climatize these older problems, environmental problems, we kind of reach a situation where it creates a new logic of extraction and a new basis of extraction. And in India we're particularly seeing it with the Green India mission, the National Afforestation Program underneath that, as well as the Compensatory Afforestation Act. So, you know, and going back to your earlier point on sort of the notion of the global commons Also, climate solutions immediately globalize the very local geography, because immediately what happens then is we're talking about the global carbon stock being reduced because of these areas being conserved. And unfortunately, that's allowed for more dispossession. So there were instances when I was in again in Kondamal in Orissa, where a community member started telling me the story of, oh, so someone came in the morning and they were surveying the land. So I said, oh, what were they serving the land for? And he was completely confused. He said, yeah, I don't know. I tried to talk to them, but we didn't hear back. And then three weeks later, they get a notice that the entire area has been declared a land bank. And then I was in an interesting position to actually talk to. The bureaucrats were categorizing areas as land banks. They said that we need to do this in order to demarcate the land for compensatory forestation and for carbon sequestration through that. So then you start to think of it and you realize, okay, so, you know, carbon sinks are nothing but a new way of acquiring more land, although it might be for the purpose of planting trees. So I think for the Adivasi communities, it's unfortunately what could become an empowering moment, where because the climate crisis is at our doorstep, that perhaps we realize the importance of Adivasi sovereignty, perhaps we realize the importance of indigenous knowledge as a way to solve the crisis. But instead it's kind of taken on this form of not reckoning with those questions, but instead creating more modalities of dispossession. Archana Soreng, who's a youth climate advocate and a really powerful voice on these issues, was telling me that we don't want to be the victims of climate policy, we want to be part of the solution. And that for some reason that space is shrinking. But I do hope that it expands. I kind of was reading this really amazing book by. I think I have it here. Yeah. Gauri Vijay Kumar called At Risk, and it's about the HIV and AIDS crisis. And I've been kind of curious of understanding how moments of crisis allow for disruption and then potential inclusion. And in that book, she talks about how for a brief moment during the climate crisis, communities who are always on the margins became front and center as part of the solution and were complete, always in dialogue with the state in devising those solutions. So I'm curious to see if we might see that turnaround. Of course, we can talk about what's happening in India right now and how that's a whole other conversation.
- [73:28]
B
Yeah, no, you're right that there is seemingly in this discourse of climate crisis and rupture, there is also a potential for more possibility, more radical futures, which in the book you speak about so fluently and so reflexively, this idea of negotiated sovereignty being born through these models, of. Through the shifting models, through this language of crisis. And I wondered if we could, which is the real thrust of the book, we could speak about responses, community responses, how after the passing of the fra, how did communities really use the opportunities they found in the law to sometimes forge partnerships, even strategic partnerships, to sometimes push back against the logic of extractivism or to poke holes really, in the vagueness in which that logic of extractivism was being advanced? If you could speak to some of these community responses, counter hegemonically.
- [74:37]
A
Absolutely. I think one of the most humbling experiences I've had as a lawyer is realizing that those who are at the forefront of being victimized by a particular law have the sharpest reading of those laws and have the sharpest understanding of legal interpretation and also see possibility very clearly. And so once the Forest Rights act was passed, I noticed how communities in Delhi were interpreting it was so different than the communities on the ground who were interpreting it. The communities in, and I don't want to isolate Delhi, but mostly urban communities were interpreting it in a very sort of rigid, technical legal form, saying, you know, this is exactly what the right means. And it was the communities who realized, hold on, the Forest Rights act is a bottom heavy legislation, so we have a lot of control in how this gets implemented. So if you look at the formation of the Forest Rights Committee, the recognition of rights, that entire process, it all starts at the level of the Gram Sabha or the village assembly. So there's an opportunity in that. They said, okay, so we are going to find a way to implement this law through the lens of what we need and how we can kind of work this system. And so some of the examples that I saw this playing out, which was again, such amazing learning, was in Uttar Pradesh. There was a village where Adivasi communities were living alongside, quote, unquote, other traditional forest dwellers. And they realized as they were starting the FRA process that only the scheduled tribes were able to get access to individual forest rights and none of the OTFT claims were being accepted. So they said, okay, what can we do about this? And so they read the law closely and they realized we can use the provision of community forest rights. Because once their interpretation of the community forest rights provision was that it'll Give us complete control over the forest area and we can decide among ourselves how people live. Right. So that's how they decided to do that. They said, we're not even going the IFR route. We're going to just do CFRs and then figure the rest out for ourselves. Which I thought was so interesting. Right. I don't think I would have even thought of that possibility as a lawyer. I would have been instead looking at how do we make sure the OTFT claims get included, how do we strengthen them? Similarly, in another instance, the coal mine was expanding and this was in the Manadi coal belt. And the community had filed a case before the Supreme Court and Matiya Soram had filed the case. They won the case before the High Court. Sorry, I don't know. Claims Commission had been set up. So the Claims Commission's job was basically, if a person had a family had been dispossessed, they have to provide a certain amount of compensation. And there was a lot of confusion at that point within the bureaucracy and the community of whether the Forest Rights act applies in coal bearing areas. Act so in coal bearing areas or not, though the Forest Rights act applies on forest land. So the community did something extremely sharp. They said, okay, but the Forest Rights act recognizes this as forest land legally. And archival data also shows this is forest land. And the LER, the Land Acquisition act, which was passed in 2014 under the category of landowners, recognizes forest rights holders as worthy of compensation. So they read two and two together and they presented that before the Claims Commission in order to get a higher amount of compensation, even though they were not able to resist extraction. So it was this kind of way in which communities are always trying to push the law and interpretation further, to improve the conditions of their own surroundings. And not just walking to the night quietly. Right. It's not just like going before the streets and having the dharnas, but there is sophisticated legal mobilization happening. And I think there's a lot we can learn from that process. And I think what the Forest Rights act, by virtue of being bottom heavy, allowed for, was this kind of innovation in legal interpretation and innovation and legal implementation. So you'd have stories of like, you know, the consent process requires the Gram Sabha say yes or no to a project, but they had their own existing customary bodies of decision making, so they would integrate that into this process. So it was this super fertile ground for this kind of amalgamation between legal interpretation from below, governance and sort of repair. And they would often talk about repair and healing as being sort of the dominant lens for both legal interpretation, but also how they saw the Forest Rights Act. But I think a point I didn't mention, which I just wanted to add here, is within the communities, there was also a criticism of the Forest Rights act because they thought that the Forest Rights act was not as radical as the Fungi Extension of Scheduled Areas act. But they also saw value in it because they felt that the FRA extended to all forest areas. So it was a more inclusive legal possibility. But they always drew from, you know, the PESA provisions in how they interpreted the fra, which I thought was always such a fascinating exercise.
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Plus an additional 10% off every order right now. @blinds.com rules and restrictions apply. Thank you so much. And it's really such a powerful account, as you say, of how communities navigate the interstices of a foreign tongue, but find possibility for emancipation in some ways. In that, in that space and in the book, there's this, there's this portion where you talk about, I think you speak about Shankar, who is an activist in Sonpatra, who speaks about the grief and the ideas of loss that forest laws bring. And that immediately made me think of how for so many communities, the way they articulate their relationship with the forest is an affective relationship. It's filial. It's based on grief and loss and emotion and hope and love and law is otherwise so stripped of this affect. It's so kind of wedded to numbers and letters that there is no space for someone to say that, you know, I'm affected, I'm grieving, I'M grieving caused by this law. And I wondered if you could also speak about how this kind of community mobilizing of forest laws is infusing affect into laws that were otherwise really hesitant and I think resistant to affect. And I was wondering that, you know, when you start to think about law together with affect, you also start to appreciate that law has historically been an instrument of violence and extractivism. Affect actually opens the door to a recognition of violence that law carries with it. And I was wondering if you could speak about just this infusion of affect through community mobilizing of forest laws.
- [83:56]
A
Yeah, it's so interesting. One of the moments that I go back to when it comes to legal interpretation being infused with affect is the Niamgiri story, right? The Nyungiri story is testament and is hailed as this very progressive movement, both for Indian democracy but also for forest governance, where a community said no and it was finally heard by the law. And that idea of the no came from the notion of the sacred. It came from religion. It came from intimate ties to the land and the forest and the hill that I finally journeyed to Niamgiri to go and witness the Parba festival where they celebrate the hill and Niyamraja. And you really see that affective layer of the. And not only affective layer of legal interpretation, but how the law can take away and the law can recognize. And it's a celebration of the judgment as well. And I was speaking with one of the Longdia Khan community members of what does this festival signify to you and what does the judgment really mean to you? And he just said that finally the law is able to conceptualize a relationship between Adivasi communities in the forests, which is beyond stewardship, where it is about certain connections. That not only is the law felt like it needs to manage and discipline, whether it's through conservation or extraction, but that it's impossible. And so that was when I started to see a lot of how community mobilization emerging from that kind of politics of the affective relationship and can heal the law and force the law to recognize that. But there have been instances where it's the other way around also. So especially in Sonbhadra, it has been a site of incredible extraction and a lot of the community members there, the affective element was disillusionment with the law and grief and loss, but also that you cannot give up on the law. Even in Niamgiri, there was always this idea of the law as like a dual headed creature or like a friend who needs to be convinced, but not A friend you want to abandon entirely. So while there was disillusionment, there wasn't legal abandonment. So there was always this turning back to the law and saying, what about this? You know? And I think we owe so much to these communities and their legal interpretations and ways in which they view the law, to the possibilities they have opened up in the law for a lot of us. Right. There's no way that we can even remotely talk about consent without the struggle that Niam Giri and others have pioneered. Of course, it emerges from international law also. But at the same time, I think that we need to listen more closely to that. And as you say, I think the affective will open doors in the law which are uneasy, uncomfortable, but severely important.
- [87:54]
B
Yeah. As you were speaking, I was also thinking about this really interesting portion in the book where you speak about fixers, about dalals, and how dalals embody a new kind of governmentality. Right. Because they suddenly become the face of the interactions communities would have otherwise had with the state itself. State recedes, it pushes itself to the ground, and it allows private actors to do their thing. And in some cases, private actors see themselves as parroting the template of the state. But in other cases, private actors surely come with their own kind of strategic interests, developmental concerns. And I wondered how communities navigate that. That new presence there is already the law, that. That carries very violent baggage, but now there are new people who.
- [88:51]
A
Who are.
- [88:52]
B
Who are in between them and the law. And I wondered if you could also speak about the dalal and the interactions between communities and dals and how that is perhaps changing.
- [89:02]
A
Yeah, I think they were the most informative set of interviews that I did, only because they're such interesting interlocutors between communities, the companies and the state. And the role that dalals or fixers play is different in different zones of extraction. So I'll speak a bit with, like, through examples and through stories. So one of the interviewees was someone that had been called soon after a huge protest broke out in Kulinganagar. This is the Tata Steel plant. And he describes it as, you know, I got a call, you know, four Adivasi protesters were killed. I received this call saying, you need to come and resolve this problem. So they're sort of seen as these, like, technical, sophisticated operators who can go into these conflicts almost like mercenaries, but resolve it in the direction of extraction. And so he gets called and he comes into Kalinganagar and he starts to tell me this story of how the state had acquired the land, but the state had not adequately Compensated the community or interacted with the community. So what then happened was the land was handed over to the state plant, but none of the political tensions were resolved. So usually this has been the experience, at least for him, where he gets called into these land conflicts and he keeps saying the state doesn't care about its citizens. So when we enter as the external actor, we want to do justice to these communities, we want to make sure that they're compensated. And then you start to see the kind of politicking that happens. So it's a lot of micropolitics, it's a lot of embedding themselves within the community. They're sort of clever ethnographers. So they start to study the community, the division, the who can they talk to, who cannot, you know, who's not convinced. And their entire playbook is devised on this notion that if we can convince half the community to come on board with the setting up of this plant, then the rest will follow. And the way they do that is through, you know, attending weddings, kind of if someone is having some kind of health crisis, showing up at the hospital, paying the bills. So you see, you sort of get seen as this benevolent force of good and someone who can alter this reality. But also there is a sort of a paternal kind of relationship that communities also have about the state for some reason, as sort of the caretaker or the caregiver. And they sort of fill that vacuum in some sense, and that over time, they become fairly popular among the community members. And it's a slow process, It's a slow trust building process and that eventually they're able to then come into these spaces. So it's. I find that the fixers are quite instrumental in this entire informal legal process of land acquisition. But in another story, this was in the Posco area. This was interesting because here was a situation where Posco had left and now jsw, the Indian company, had come in to set up the integrated steel plant and they were having a public hearing under the environmental clearance process. Because through some, you know, I can't, I still can't get over the fact that the law allows this, but you can transfer the forest clearance from one project to another. So there was no avenue to resist under the fra. But he started to talk to me about how he had canvassed so much even before the public hearing. And he had managed. He went to the temple and prayed for four hours. And he had, you know, he was. All these stories of how they were using drones and then some kid had taken the drones. Elaborate story of how the Dallals had been working with the youth in the community through showing them what opportunities the integrated steel plant could offer. And why the story of the drone was interesting is because a drone crashed in the village and one of the youth community members took it. And the father was afraid that the company is going to accuse him of stealing. But instead the Dalal comes in and says, no, we're not going to do that. We are going to protect you from the law. And thus you start to see this emergence of that protector, the benevolent, you know, the presence in these areas. And that was apparently a turning point where the community was sort of starting to see the company is not merely coming to take away their land. And so the social movement has had been trying to also, you know, work with the community to talk about the challenges of extraction, but they were losing popularity because of the fixers. So much so that eventually Pasco Pratirodh Sangar Samiti was a strong presence in one village of all the villages. And so he, after that incident, they were able to bring on board the community to come for this public hearing and make sure that they say yes to the project. And you had another entire alternative public hearing happening elsewhere where the Posco Pratirot Sanghar Samati was saying no to the project. But what was formally reported was the one that the Dalal was orchestrating. And this was completely ignored. And in fact, they were even prevented from attending the formal hearing. So this is how they manage to, you know, penetrate at that level of the community and organize and create the conditions for consent for the project. And so they use the law, they abandon the law. They are also clever legal thinkers in their own way. Like, they will say things like, we will use the LAR as the basis for complex compensation. We won't do what the state did. We won't give you a small amount and leave. So a lot of learning with those interviews for sure. Yeah.
- [96:28]
B
And it's really interesting where there are so many people who respond to hostile laws by placing and placing a sort of obligation to refuse on the community marginalized by the law. But as you see in all of these accounts, communities use the law as such a rich, fertile site for negotiation for different potentialities, not all of which will conform to simply politics of refusal, because everyone is acting in their self interest. So if a Dallal is able to convince the community, so be it. Similarly, like when I was doing field work, I encountered instances where communities will say, okay, I will. If you are using scientific evidence, I will also offer scientific evidence. And Tell you why I should get grazing rights. If you're speaking the language of maps and receipts, I will show you receipts from tax I paid to maharaja this very easy co option of the language of the law. When a large section might think that oh, otherwise you should stray, you should refuse. And I wondered, in this kind of really messy muddy terrain where it is perfectly okay for a community to both co opt as well as reject some parts of law, knowing that law is otherwise violent, what would care and repair look like? Which is the note you end on in the book you speak about a constitution within a constitution. What would that infra constitution look like when these mediations are so muddy and messy?
- [98:18]
A
Yeah, that's our question. I'm still sitting with. I think the insights I gleaned from the communities and interacting with a lot of multiple actors in these contexts is how do we expand, as you mentioned, those potentialities of negotiation from moving from the scarce to the limitless possibilities. I think in that opening up is potentially the idea of care and repair. I don't think that the communities I had the, you know, had the privilege of working with ever spoke of having this kind of non extractive relationship with their forests. It was about the degree of harm and it was always about negotiating that both harm to the environment, but knowing that they're entangled with the environment, the harm that it will have on their communities. All while there was this pragmatic understanding that there are these, you know, strong external forces shaping how these conversations happen. I think the part that I always hold on to, and this is from my early days of, of environmental activism was the, you know, an Adivasi community member told me, he said, why does all of, why do all of these conversations happen? Knowing that extraction is the inevitable conclusion of the, of these conversations and how do we then use the law to open it up to the possibility of care and repair? Where extraction is about degrees of harm and not necessarily the absolutist binary we have now, which is no harm or complete extraction and how sovereignty has to be like another way in which they talk about repair and healing is that nothing is a constant. Everything should be up for conversation and renegotiation. So they talk about something like having a sort of a half baked open ended agreement with the state. It's almost like a contract that can constantly be looked at, re examined and changed because they're also well aware that power and politics and circumstances are going to constantly shift and priorities are going to constantly change. How do we make sure that the root room for those Big conversations exist. Right. And while to many of the listeners perhaps, or even I remember talking to some students during the book launch as well, they thought of this as sort of a very naive way of describing the, you know, ideas of governance and ideas of law. But if you think about it, it's actually a very sophisticated and intimate account of politics. Right. It's a very participatory skin in the game we will co create democracy account. And that politics takes work and repair takes work. Very often you have Adivasi communities sometimes who would identify their jurisprudence and their logic and their explanation of the law as a reparative possibility. Right. It's about how do we. And a lot of those conversations is not just about it being work, but it being work as making sure that power doesn't get concentrated, that decision making is dispersed. And to some that might seem chaotic, but actually, if you think about it, in forested areas, it's the only politically tenable way of making these decisions. Because we're talking about survival of communities. We're not talking about something abstract like, I don't know, like, you know, fancy idea of saving a particular kind of bird. Not like we shouldn't do that, just it's important, but it's just the pathway to that. And I think what they're talking about is a much, not just an intimate account, but is a much richer account of politics where the state is not seen as something that happens to us, but rather where agentic parts of creating it. And so for them, repair exists in those kinds of conversations and possibilities where we come to the table and actually talk about what's the problem at hand. And I think another aspect to the legal repair work and to the idea of care is also not to shy away from the radicality of care. I think a lot of Adivasi communities would often talk about the law as a very hard site that they had to soften through their interpretations, through the affective, through the notion of healing and challenge the inevitability of extraction. It's how do we take away from this harshness and the logic of like violence and extraction and soften it by saying it's okay, you know, convincing the law that it's okay to say that you can care about a piece of land. Yeah, it's not going to make you less valuable as a space, but rather, yeah, opens up the law to dealing with those realities in a more. In a more convincing way.
- [104:27]
B
Thank you. That's so powerful. As you say, it's the politics of care is such an intimate politics that pushes us to soften the harshness of the law. But it's also such a brave and courageous politics to think that you want to resign to a law that does not know you're just submitting to a law that's uncertain. And that itself is such a radical. You infuse such radical possibility in. In a discipline that has boasted years and years, it has only boasted about knowing. And suddenly you ask this discipline to stop knowing. Just stop knowing. Pause. Knowing. And that, I think is a really brave, chaotic perhaps, but actually a really brave and courageous proposal and a courageous life world that these communities introduce into forest laws. Maybe the last question to ask you is where are you taking this work from here on?
- [105:35]
A
You asked that at a time where I'm actually trying to re examine some of this. I think a lot of the learning from this work has been, as you mentioned, the bravado of care. And I have sort of found myself in this interesting intersection as someone who's queer kind of encountering, you know, the idea of care differently when it comes to the environment, when it comes to relationality, when it comes to ideas of ecology. Because as a queer person, I was always sort of alienated, as it were, by those conversations that I'm trying to now bring both those ideas and worlds together, because there's a certain language of care and repair that I've been familiar with as inhabiting this world as a queer person, but always disentangle that from my environmental lawyering and my conversations of care there. So now I'm trying to find ways, both in my scholarship and in my writing, to see how I can take the learning from Adivasi communities and the learning from, you know, queer communities and see what. What that can do for the. The law specifically. And coming from Bangalore, I kind of want to go back home in some way and try and unpack some of these intersections because both of these aspects of my work and my personal life kind of emerged in that city. So, yeah, I'm a bit of a wanderer right now. This is the broader idea of where I want to go, but it's definitely in the direction of unpacking radical legal possibilities through this kind of politics of care and repair, but emerging from very different spaces and at very different times. And I think I want to see if there's a way to stitch those lessons together.
- [107:49]
B
That sounds lovely. Thank you so much, Admita. This was such a rich, powerful and moving conversation. And yeah, I cannot be more grateful for the time you gave me to allow me the chance to pick your brains about this fascinating work. And anyone who reads it can see that it's so intimately written. And it's such a personal account of, as you say, a very brave politics. And it's often difficult to even find the words to honor such bravery appropriately. And I think you've really done it so commendably. So thank you for giving us the gift of your work. And I hope that listeners have taken as much from this conversation as I have. So we'll end there. Thank you.
- [108:37]
A
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And that's a huge compliment that's going to stay with me for a really long time. Sam.