Making Individual Claims Under the Forest Rights Act,2006: Clarifying and Defining Adivasi Lands

Introduction

In June 2012, Narmada district in Gujarat, Western India, was abuzz with an anticipatory flurry of elections. Plastered across public spaces were images of the then chief minister and the development programmes of his office. Of these, images of the Van Bandhu Kalyan Yojna (Forest Dwellers Development Scheme) dominated. Inside the gates of Shoolpaneshwar Wildlife Sanctuary, government cars equipped with electronic screens manoeuvred the narrow streets of revenue villages. The chief minister presented himself before the Adivasis ¹ inside the sanctuary through a mobile electronic campaign. His efforts did not stop at this. It was as if the need for finality over disputed land claims gained a new sense of urgency. In its long-dragging bid to reconsider the claims to land rights of forest dwellers, the district revenue and forest department began visiting villages to examine plausible proofs presented by the claimants. In the villages, an anxious fever spread as claimants once more took on the task of disentangling the jumble of documents that recorded their existence as cultivators of legal forestland. They made several trips to the mamlatdar ² (block-level inspector of land records) for maps and to the legal aid society ³ for assurance that there was coherence to their paperwork. The forest and revenue offices resounded with conversations on ‘reviewing claims’ as the elections drew near.

Encapsulated above is a snippet of an Act’s journey. Enacted in 2006, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act (henceforth the Forest Rights Act, the Act or the FRA) was projected as a breakthrough in the trajectory of Indian forest legislations. In its stated aims of recording ownership and user rights of historically underprivileged groups, the Act was viewed as a landmark law. Its implementation, however, did not live up to its promise.

Newspaper reports and scholars attribute its shortcomings to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies on part of the state machinery. ⁴ Without confronting the validity of such assessments, I argue that there is more to the indeterminacy of this Act than bad governance and administrative lethargy. I follow how this legislation is mobilised and contested in a particular socio-ecological setting. ⁵ Far from being lifeless, the actually existing operations of this legislation demonstrate how it becomes a vibrant site for dissident interpretations. Indeed, as Pradip Prabhu, a seasoned activist and lawyer who played a key role in the Act’s making, passionately told me:

No one presumed that after the Act’s passage, rights would automatically fall into the forest dwellers’ laps. Marginalised people’s rights are never granted, they must be aggressively taken! They demand a struggle at every stage of the law even after its enactment. ⁶

This article concentrates on the procedural struggles that breathe life into the legislation. It attends to the work of documentation involved in activating the rights guaranteed within the Act. Sparse literacy among the Adivasis, their unfamiliarity with the legislation’s technical processes as well as the government bureaucracy’s opacity cumulatively create a structural asymmetry in knowledge between marginalised forest dwellers and state functionaries (Satpathy 2017), an asymmetry that has thwarted the Act’s implementation in many ways (Chaturvedi 2016). Indeed, a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court of India ordered the government to overcome this asymmetry to recognise and protect forest dwellers’ rights. ⁷

But what happens when forest dwellers deal with such layered knowledge asymmetry, navigate procedural hurdles and embrace documentation to realise the promises embedded in the legislation? Beyond tropes of opacity attributed to bureaucratic functionaries, what are the passions and interests glimpsed in the Act’s implementation? The Act’s implementation shows us how government officials and forest dwellers alike interpret and mobilise the legislation.

Far from being disembedded, wings of governance emerge engaged in a dynamic exchange with the forest and its dwellers. Far from being a pristine space of pure nature, the forest emerges as a highly bureaucratised space, historically enmeshed in interactions between ordinary dwellers and the government, a space in whose quotidian life documents have long been entangled, much like what Matthew Hull finds in the city of Islamabad (Hull 2012: 114). Despite socio-ecological differences between the forest and the city, the documentation entailed in the Act’s implementation, therefore, resonates with the democratic struggle for land rights in urban areas of the Global South (Anjaria 2016; Benjamin 2014; Holston 2009).

The Act is increasingly analysed as a legal tactic within a repertoire of tactics that coalesce to create an overarching strategy of resistance against coercive conservation and large-scale extractive projects (Davidsdottir 2021). But we can also understand it as a strategy that generates tactics in its implementation. A strategy is a blueprint embodying the long-term vision of an organisation or a social movement. Tactics are the smaller tasks generated to execute the strategy. A strategy has an in-built room for manoeuvre and embodies the core values of an organisation. Therefore, it takes time to amend. The room for manoeuvre within a strategy generates flexible actions, or tactics, adaptable to site-specific contingencies and responsive to immediate obstacles. As a strategy, the Act enshrines the Indian state’s core mission to redress historical injustices done unto forest dwellers. It is oriented towards a long-term future, an equitable and sustainable one. Rather than being a mere tool for doling out land grants, it offers a blueprint for the recognition of rights. It offers a room for manoeuvre through which forest dwellers respond to place-specific challenges involved in turning their claims into rights. One room for manoeuvre the Act offered is about the parameters that qualify as evidence of land use. ⁸ By failing to specify a valid source of evidence, the Act generates a battle of authorship and innovative tactics to consolidate rights over land. It emerges as a vibrant site for competing readings on what counts as legitimate evidence to prove one’s claims to land.

After attending to the potential evidence presented by the Adivasi claimants, I turn to the concerns underwriting the tactics of claim-making. What contemporary concerns shape Adivasi claim-making and the hurdles presented by the state government? Given that the central anxiety stalling the Act’s enactment was the conservationist urge—where a lobby of wildlife enthusiasts, foresters and conservation biologists questioned the Act’s ecological credibility (Seminar 2005)—it is important to consider the ecological concerns underpinning the claimants’ and government officials’ interpretation of the Act. Beginning with the premise that government agents do not act from abstract automation, what ideological stakes undergird the official rejection of over 100,000 forest dwellers’ claims? In effect, I explore how in its demand for evidence, the Act extends—even as it modifies—its political and economic legacy. It extends the pre-existing clashes between the state government and the Adivasi claimants, which it was meant to mitigate.

Evidence-making: Territorialisations and Representations of Space

The inhabitants of Sankli village inside Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary, Narmada District are a rare group of claimants. Their almost exhaustive catalogue of potential evidence includes methodically, meticulously arranged receipts of offence; petitions to the forest department contemporary to a time when the government issued resolutions to regularise all irregular land claims: written and photographic documentation of a collaborative field visit that details the elements of land claimed. The claimants presented these files before a three-tier system of quasi-judicial state authorities in charge of considering the claims and passing a final verdict on their eligibility after processes of hearing, adjudication and deliberation. ⁹ What follows elucidates how the documentation offered as evidence serves as a significant imprimatur of a time passed and a space used. Such documentation becomes a textualised testimony of an individual’s history. It chronicles the trajectory of land use and traces the prior legal contests to which the land has been subjected. A collection of claimants’ records tells a social history of how the village has used forestland. As potential proofs, these textualised social histories work as tactics of local territorialisation. They herald new ways through which space turns into territory.

Territorialisation is the process of delimiting space and creating zones through boundaries (Sack 1986: 19) that automatically create terms of inclusion and exclusion. These boundaries clarify and restrict people’s access to zones and resources within (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995: 388). State territorialisation tactics include village and forest mappings, household registration and land titling (Peluso 2005: 4; Vandergeest and Peluso 1995: 408–13)—grids and texts representing spatial and social arrangements. Although government-led processes may carry official authority, territorialisations are not restricted to the government; these are deployed across social groups that may contend with each other (Peluso 2005: 213).

The Act enables innovative territorialising tactics in its prescription to codify spaces of land use so that fields may be artificially separated from forests. The exercise of collecting and organising potential evidence works as a territorialising tactic. Histories of land use are measured and slotted into a uniform format and made comprehensible to quasi-judicial state authorities. Evidence-making, then, entails creating new official demarcations that challenge prior legal geographic arrangements which derecognise the presence of cultivated lands within forest jurisdictions.

The records also work as a ‘representation of space’—formal abstractions of a lived terrain, conceptualised primarily by those occupying expert positions as urban planners, technocrats and policymakers (Lefebvre 1991: 38). As territorialising tactics that lend themselves to a codification of knowledge, these potential proofs seek their place as representations of space. Modularity is embraced rather than resisted. The Adivasis participate in a cognitive task assigned traditionally to a realm of expertise and take on the role of cartographers. Maps, files, lists and surveys are not only techniques of top-down governance but also negotiated products, co-produced by people and places they aspire to govern (Hull 2012: 587).

Measuring and demarcation, thus, become preoccupations across interest groups. Representations of space, armed with ironclad rules moulding organic lands into sharply bounded territories, permeate the Act’s operations. Those who know how much their claims measure have a stronger defence in their confrontations with government officials. During a session in which a forest officer was inspecting evidence, he asked a claimant about his area under cultivation. Given a vague answer by the claimant, the officer retorted, ‘You cannot say whatever comes to your mind. Andaaz [an estimate] will not do anymore’. The claimants seem to recognise the necessity of quantifying land, demonstrated in actions such as measuring fields with a thread in the absence of other tools.

Panchnama

The panchnama—collaborative report of field investigation and verification—is one such local territorialising tactic and a representation of space engendered by the Act. The field investigation involves government officials, villagers and lawyer-activists representing the villagers in the court. It attests to the visible physical attributes found within the field. From these physical attributes, the panchnama infers the period of land use.

First, Forest Rights Committee ¹⁰ members list possible physical attributes. Activists working with the villagers convert this list into tabulated categories. The Committee members then call upon the forest department whose official must participate in the proceedings. The Committee members and a forest officer, usually a beat guard, ¹¹ jointly assess the field; two neighbouring villagers serve as witnesses. Together, they must gauge the age of the field based on factors such as the texture of the soil and the maturity of the trees.

As an official procedure of observed facts executed before witnesses, the panchnama is not new to legal practices. However, it is predominantly applied in criminal cases of tax litigation which require detailed search operations at scenes of crime. Mandated under the criminal code in investigations of law-enforcing bodies like the police, Income Tax, Customs and Central Excise, a panchnama usually illustrates the features of a site where incriminating evidence is collected and legally disputed objects are seized. Studies exploring forest conflicts rarely mention panchnamas. When they do, it is primarily when a person is convicted for perpetrating a forest offence (Baviskar 1994: 2500). In the implementation of the FRA, however, the panchnama’s objective shifts from proving crime to archiving land use. In its reinvention as a local territorialising tactic that estimates the time since when a piece of land has been cultivated, the panchnama departs from its previous associations. It overturns connotations of criminality.

Designed in compliance with rules based on precedents established by search operations of tax evasion and theft, the panchnama begins with a formal testifying letter. The testifiers in the letter swear that the ‘facts are true and correct to the best of (their) observations and knowledge’. The letter also invokes a section of the Act under which the investigators are obligated to make a list of observable facts. It is followed by this list or an inventory of all representable aspects in the field and concludes with the time when the observation begins and ends. As a tabulated document, it describes every feature seen in the disputed land: number of trees, types of trees and crop, number of bunds (embankments), number of padas (trenches) and signs of recent fires such as burnt remnants indicating a recent tree felling. It also notes the field’s relative location in relation to the chaturdisha (four cardinal directions) and includes nearby landmarks such as a river or a school.

Detailing the stuff that makes up a panchnama demonstrates the labours with which it evokes the law’s majesty and efforts with which it seeks state legitimacy. The panchnama conforms to a legal vocabulary in its oath to record the truth and echoes the cadence of a person bearing witness in a court of law. It bears the signature of a forest officer who participates in the proceedings. In a sense, it seeks its place as a formalised representation of space, classifying previously unrecorded intricacies of a land. Fields and forests become material tellers of time and what they tell is transformed into a format intelligible to the government. It condenses the minutiae found in a piece of land into a standardised register in an idiom deployed traditionally by law enforcement officials. In this way, the panchnama presents itself as a lawful method of making claims to land.

It would be an overstatement to argue, however, that the panchnama fulfils a claimant’s need to prove the length of their land use. Its inadequacies do not arise from its collaborative approximations to make inferences but from the overlooked shaky legal grounds on which these lands have been cultivated. The uncertainty of irregular landholdings means that claimants make little material investments in the fields. Palpable markers of time—planted mango trees, wells and signs of irrigation—are not easy to find because they are likely to be absent. Two reasons inform this absence.

First, conspicuous indicators of human use would indicate a villager’s barefaced defiance of legal authorities, increasing the possibility of a frontal confrontation with the forest department. A flagrant exhibition of their land use practices would jeopardise even their ill-defined positions as users of forestlands and push them back into small revenue landholdings.

Second, the absence of formal legal rights to work the fields in the forests gives them little incentive to make material investments that would endure the ravages of time.

Such tactics of making durable marks in the forest are akin to ‘autoconstruction’, the term James Holston (2009) uses to describe how Brazil’s urban poor slowly turn unregistered settlements into districts, formalise individual property rights and consolidate their right to the city. Through ‘autoconstructed’ dwelling, urban squatters and forest dwellers alike co-create legal territory in vibrant democracies. But autoconstruction in India’s forests remains highly tenuous. Imminent evictions create a dearth of permanent material structures on fields inside the forest.

Fine Receipts: Embracing the Criminal for Future Legitimacy

Since the claim that a panchnama makes is ambivalent, it warrants further documentation to prove the claimants’ eligibility as cultivators inside forestland. The fine receipt from prior forest offences is another record that serves as a tactic to re-territorialise lands. A slip of paper that criminalised them as official transgressors of law, the fine receipt now becomes a memento that confirms their attempts at cultivating forestland. It enumerates, roughly, the area of cultivated land, dating back to a day when the forest guard penalised the claimant.

Once more, the record embodies the inescapable irony of how a marker of criminality becomes a prized possession. Being a criminal is tactically embraced as a mechanism of validation. Over the years, the receipt has become more symbolic—the actual fine owed is never too large. Instead, it serves as a persistent reminder of people’s untenable status as encroachers on forestland.

Subjective experiences are less of wrongdoing than of irregularity and insecurity of navigating unclear boundaries. Offence slips are thus instrumental to clarifying inchoate boundaries of land use. But evidence-making by mobilising fine receipts is not a new phenomenon. Previous attempts at regularisation—turning claims to land into rights—have also demanded the production of fine receipts.

Writing in the 1990s, Amita Baviskar (1994) describes Adivasi struggles to gain titles in the absence of fine receipts. The claimants and the forest department are, therefore, long familiar with the generative significance of fine receipts. For this reason, a precarious economy is woven around the receipts. Because they potentially serve as another mode of territorialising, offence slips are not dispensed easily. On occasions of bribery, a beat guard may pocket the fine without issuing a slip. On other occasions, forest officials issue slips that only accuse the Adivasi cultivators of being a gunehagaar (an offender). Such slips fail to mention the exact nature of the cultivators’ crime and evade details of how much land was cultivated. In other cases, slips accuse the claimants of theft instead of encroachment. There are also instances where, when pleaded, the beat guard penalises the cultivator for a smaller area of cultivation. If this happens, the area qualifying for a transfer of control accordingly diminishes. Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary’s range forest officer (RFO) and district forest officer (DFO) spoke of how the Act accelerated the demand for fine receipts in the hope of future legalisation of Adivasi landholdings. For this reason, they argued, they must issue slips with discretion. Such caution with which the forest department issues receipts undercuts the use of the receipts as a territorialising tactic.

Such an economy of fine receipts runs across both the forest and the city. Through fine receipts, state functionaries seem to manage the illegality of both forest dwellers and urban squatters rather than completely obliterate it. For example, Mumbai’s municipal officials collect a small fee from unlicensed street hawkers in exchange of receipts. The hawkers use these receipts as proof of their existence and negotiate their right to the city (Anjaria 2016: 107–61). In this way, the fine receipt become a tactic through which both street hawkers and agrarian cultivators access and lay claim to their working environments.

State Orders

A third plausible category of evidence recording preceding encounters with the law are prior orders by the government and the judiciary. These orders demonstrate how the Adivasis become enmeshed in a whirlwind of landmark judgments, inconsistencies of the central government and the electoral whims of the state government. The legally precarious fields of the Adivasis become sites where disagreements between the regional state government, the centre and the judiciary play out. Scanning these episodic orders dating to the early 1990s helps determine the legacies of interim relief and evictions that underwrite the Adivasis’ fragile status as occupants of forestland.

On behalf of the Adivasis, nongovernmental organisations filed several petitions in 1984, 1988, 1989 and 1990. In response, the High Court of Gujarat issued an interim order that maintained the Adivasis’ status as disputed users of forestland but prevented the forest department from evicting them. In 1992, just before the elections in Gujarat, the state government issued a resolution to regularise all pre-1980 occupations under the Forest Conservation Act (1980). But the gap between the state government’s declared resolution and its implementation remained, effectively continuing the Adivasis’ irregular status as grantees of interim relief. The resolution, nevertheless, stimulated several forest dwellers to file claims in the forest department, thereby giving them another document that currently illustrates their attempts at securing legal holdings. In 1997, the High Court ordered the Gujarat government to favourably reconsider applications for regularisation. This set into motion another flood of appeals—supported with forest offence receipts—seeking permanent government sanction for their cultivations. However, their interim status continued.

In a case filed at the Supreme Court in November 2001, the winning lawyer argued that encroachments in the forest were the greatest cause of deforestation. Acting upon this argument, the Supreme Court restrained further regularisations of fields in forestland (Rosencranz, Boenig, and Dutta 2007: 10035). ¹² Guided by this intervention, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) of the Government of India issued a circular directing state governments to evict all those who did not have a licence of ownership or use from the land they possessed.

The MoEF circular resulted in coercive evictions and crop destructions in many parts of the country. In Northeast India, for example, it triggered the forest department to use elephants to destroy people’s homes (Rosencranz, Boenig and Dutta 2007: 10035). The circular culminated in the consolidation of groups like the Adivasi Mahasabha ¹³ who lobbied for the Act’s enactment (Patel 2011). In Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary, I discovered 30 villagers who had been arrested under this 2002 order. Unsurprisingly, they now treasure the chargesheets pertaining to the order.

Such sporadic official orders—underlain by often contradictory anxieties such as electoral imperatives and an alarm against deforestation—exemplify the dramatic ways in which state measures interrupt and impinge on Adivasi livelihoods. In doing so, they illustrate how forest dwellers have long occupied an irregular space between the legal and the illegal. Their irregularity creates the conditions for government declarations on land regularisation. As the opening vignette to this article also suggests, the desire to create a loyal electoral constituency for the provisional political sphere often drives these promises of land regularisation (Benjamin and Raman 2011).

Invalidating Records: A Contest over Authorship

The panchnama, fine receipts and texts such as prior government directives, court orders and petitions filed under them help fathom the extent to which the claimants wrestle with the law. These documents serve as witnesses to the claimants’ scramble for land rights and endeavours at seeking state legitimacy. In doing so, these documents may be acceptable as evidence under the Act. However, by unilaterally rejecting over 100,000 claims across Gujarat, ¹⁴ the government authorities deny the validity of an elaborate collection of complementary records that might prove people’s status as long-standing users of forestland. They derecognise the panchnama and the fine receipt as absolute proofs relegating them to the domain of secondary insubstantial evidence that requires corroboration. ¹⁵ In conversations with the DFO and the RFO, I observed their insistence on ‘record-based’ evidence and ‘documentary evidence’. The corollary of such insistence is a yawning reluctance to treat a range of sources as evidence. A predisposition towards the written document as the only authentic document shifts the valence of power to those with historical access to the written word. In this one way, preexisting power relations shape the Act’s implementation.

Even as the written word is privileged, Sankli’s villagers seek state legitimacy and translate their land use histories into texts through records such as the panchnama and the receipts. Even as the equation of a ‘record’ to a written object is itself questionable, claimants transform their histories of use into the written mode. And yet the claims supported by texts such as panchnama and fine receipts are categorically rejected by the state government on the grounds that ‘the evidences attached by the claimant are “doubtful” ¹⁶ and “concocted”’. ¹⁷

How may we understand the ‘doubtfulness’ of these records? What renders these records suspect? Since an emphasis on the written is no longer enough to reject claims, a contest over authorship enables and sustains the invalidation of truth. When a variety of records are gathered as territorialising tactics to legitimise landholdings, authorship becomes the bone of contention. Since the Adivasis appropriate dominant tools of representation, the body permitted to document and enumerate becomes the central concern of the disputation. The panchnama, for instance, is a collaborative venture whose design and onus lies on the claimants. Although it involves the forest officials, the claimants typically initiate and coordinate it. The state functionaries’ resistance to consider the panchnama as evidence reflects their unease about its initiating authors and coordinators. The state government’s rejection of records such as forest receipts and the panchnama as evidence leads to greater complicity with state territorialising tactics as claimants use conventional mapping techniques to represent their landholdings.

Counter-mapping

This section explores how mapping based on satellite imagery marks the beginning of a major contention over authorship. Satellites with high-resolution cameras make it possible to see landscapes from many metres above the earth’s surface. This utility presents technology as a neutral medium of cartographic facts. This section examines the consequences of over-reliance on satellite images and explores the question: whose maps are valid evidence of land use in the eyes of the law?

Until 2013, under the FRA, Gujarat was the only state government in the country to appoint an agency that deploys satellite imagery for demarcating the divide between agricultural land and forests. The state government’s stated objective for using aerial images of land was to identify genuine claims. On 20 January 2010, the state Tribal Development Department issued a statement that designated the task of creating maps to a state agency called the Bhaskaracharya Institute of Space Applications and Geoinformatics (BISAG). ¹⁸

The point is not to discredit science as an instrument of persuasion. It would be too simple to equate scientific research to an ideological project that obscures the inequalities of its production. A more even-handed analytical endeavour recognises the formations of science within truth regimes and understands it as an object intimate with the political designs of its creation and application (Foucault 1975). If we begin with such a premise, the arguments made by the government officials are only reasonable. They state that satellite imagery would help verify existing claims in lieu of ‘other evidences’ and simultaneously tease out genuine claimants from counterfeit ones. ¹⁹ While the rationale behind such a venture seems convincing, this intervention by the government works to favour satellite imageries, effectively superseding the legal compass of claimant records which had been methodically collected over a year. Other representations of space are forced into an almost-obsolescence.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of BISAG presented me with a range of digitised maps plotting different elements such as soil type, crops grown and terrestrial contours. What struck me was not the utility of these maps but the CEO’s excitement over the opportunity afforded by the FRA to save technology from irrelevance. The CEO’s fervent belief that such mapping exercises are required to bring technocrats from the shadows to the fore unveils how the Act potentially invites a technocratisation of knowledge. Satellite imagery skills and those who have the skills become essential to controlling land rights. BISAG becomes the new ‘go-to’ body for visual representations portending the risk of shrouding deep political conundrums of land ownership in the purported neutrality of scientific expertise. Above all, the elevation of satellite imageries leads to a new battle over who is licensed to create the maps. By failing to specify an author, the Act generates a wrangle over who can make the maps and who holds the most accurate representation of land use.

Consider this vignette on the activists and Adivasis as they sought to use satellite technology. Upon learning about the state government’s plans, the activists working in the villages of Shoolpaneshwar Sanctuary took on the task of mapping lands through satellite imageries. Initially, fellow compatriots in the Adivasi Mahasabha expressed reservations. Satellite imagery techniques, they feared, would further alienate the claimants. Some physical features, these compatriots argued, also elude an aerial perspective. For instance, chauli, a leguminous crop, has a symbiotic relationship with trees. It grows under the shelter of trees, without which it cannot thrive. To the satellite’s eye such fields appear as forests. ‘Many cultivators grow this crop, what will happen to their fields?’ an activist queried. Using satellite imagery potentially imposes an artificial divide between forests and fields, coercing demarcations when none exist, erasing complex agricultural arrangements. Satellite imagery is therefore fallible. Treating it as the primary source of evidence in land disputes is dangerous, but when it does not overrule other evidence it supplements other tactics for consolidating land-use boundaries. Activists embraced the use of satellite imageries with this in mind, and set out to train Forest Rights Committee members in mapping mechanisms that would overcome the satellite’s blindness to mixed vegetation. ²⁰ Whereas BISAG superimposed satellite imagery onto maps from the district land records office to outline the areas of cultivation visible on existing official maps, the claimants used global positioning system (GPS) machines to record the area of the field along with its latitude and longitude. These coordinates were then superimposed onto the satellite imageries. When I asked how they conducted the GPS surveys, a resident said:

We must do it in the winters when the skies are clear. In the monsoons, it’s too dark and cloudy. The rays from the satellite do not reach us. For this reason, we can’t finish the mapping in one year. Sometimes, we have to stand in the field for hours, waiting for a clear sky.

Were they not confounded by the aerial visuals, I wondered, only to be told that a deep intimacy with their inhabited environments oriented them to the new mapping mechanisms: ‘If we go everyday, we know what’s been cultivated, we’ll recognise roads, the trees, the dug-up holes. Just like you can find your way around in the city when you look at a map!’ a Forest Rights Committee member humoured me.

In speaking the state’s idiom, local applications of mapping challenge the unequal power relations embedded in scientific conventions. The state government has the resources to employ an agency to collect satellite images and to correlate them to official survey maps. Its monopoly over the means to assess the land area under cultivation is undercut, to some extent, when villagers map their own claims onto the same satellite images. In this intervention lay the seed of a new disputation. The Act did not mention who must execute this deeply political task of marking cultivated land onto village maps. The government interpreted the silence first to reinforce its territorialisations through control over mapping techniques. When this control was disrupted by the claimants who took up the task of mapping, the government sought to render these Adivasi maps illegitimate on the grounds that they were unofficial, even as the Act does not designate a definite legitimate author for this cartographic act. In an official letter rejecting the villagers’ claims, the state functionary challenged the villagers’ authority to create maps:

Our satellite imageries are authentic and authorised by authority and need no further or repeated clarification, … I respectfully say that satellite imageries must be provided by authority and not in any crude form, … the area survey by GPS is not authentic and authorised by government hence cannot be placed on satellite imageries. ²¹

The significance of maps in representing land use was unquestioned by the claimants, the activists and the government. The claimants even pre-empted government manoeuvres by using satellite imagery to demarcate their cultivations. Yet, the activists and the government functionaries alike cast each other’s use of cartography as illegal in the implementation of the Act. Activists argued that the government’s hasty map-making was a ‘farcical exercise’ conducted to support their illegal decision to reject claims. ²² Government functionaries defended the government’s supremacy in executing the task of mapping and branded all other maps as illegal. They sought to contain counter-mapping by invoking the government’s political authority over its population, illustrating how the Act continues to extend government domination over forests.

Adivasi Concerns: Territoriality

Critics argue that counter-mapping ignores non-territorial modes of accessing resources. Customary practices based on flexible accommodations of space are modified if not erased by counter-mapping (Peluso 2005: 11). Even as collecting potential evidence through counter-mapping serves as a novel tactic for claiming space, it does not dismantle the historically specific relationship between territory and property. In Shoolpaneshwar, however, the ways inhabitants accessed resources are already embedded in ideas of territory. Counter-mapping only elucidates these ways. To the extent that non-territorial ways of seeing preserve the fuzziness of boundaries, they do not help the claimants’ need for clarity in legal land use. Measurements provided in potential proofs are essential for carving out territory from land masses so that the villagers are no longer unsure of the legal geographic lines they transgress. This underlying desire for ontological certainty drives the Adivasis’ territorialising tactics.

Individual Ownership and Narratives of Subsistence

A similar, yet distinct, argument against representations of space is its erasure of kinship ties and sacred experiences. Land was not simply a container of forest resources but endowed with ancestral and sacred relationships, as Whitehead (2002) found in her study of Adivasi life in Shoolpaneshwar. Such more-than-material relationships, she argues, lend themselves well to oral histories whereas gridded representations of space either privilege a preservationist stance or individual ownership of property (Whitehead 2002: 1366).

Notwithstanding the significance of kinship ties, my fieldwork found a strong sense of individual property among inhabitants. Although each hamlet within a village comprises an extended patrilineal family where brothers live next to each other, each brother cultivates a separate field. The number of hands available to till the land or the number of people to feed within a household decides the breadth of their cultivation. While brothers may cultivate in each other’s proximity, they also maintain boundaries. ‘We keep some space between our fields, where neither of us cultivates, to avoid fights,’ an inhabitant told me. Pragmatic considerations such as a smaller fine payment for forest offence may lead to brothers projecting their divided landholdings under a single name, only so that one of them is penalised, with all brothers sharing the fine.

Mapping mechanisms using GPS, too, reveal a tacit compliance with individual ownership norms. The process of measuring lands I witnessed respected individual ownership and demarcation. Forest Rights Committee members equipped with GPS devices freely entered the forests with me. But we entered a field only in the presence of its putative owner. Turning on the device, the Forest Rights Committee members followed the claimant as he perambulated the border of the field. These quiet understandings on individual ownership were made explicit and, therefore, fortified when field coordinates are transposed onto the region’s aerial imagery.

In the village common room—a long-roofed hut situated on the top of a hillock—500 claimants from seven villages inside the sanctuary gather to view their claims on the satellite images projected onto a wall. Spotting his claim on the aerial visual, Ubadiya Bhai, a claimant from Vandri, a neighbouring village, raises an objection. Ubadiya Bhai is unwilling to split his mother’s land with his younger brothers in lieu of a smaller landholding. A fight between the brothers ensues over how the land must be distributed even as the eldest brother earlier controlled it. The urgency of the circumstance where claims must be mapped to qualify as rights demands a speedy resolution to the intra-family conflict. Other claimants persuade the elder brother to accept the proposed land divisions lest he loses out entirely if the land remains unmapped. The elder brother needs to concede so that government officials do not dismiss these land claims on the grounds that the satellite imagery does not support them. In this way, latent disputes and disgruntled resignations over the accepted authority within the patrilineal family emerge and are visibly confronted while making evidence. Suppressed conflicts on individual land control, rather than kinship alliances, get elaborated and crystallised through satellite imageries.

While the Adivasis may conceive of the forest as being sacred, it is important to emphasise that the forest for them is a quintessentially agrarian resource. In their narratives, agricultural images of jowar (sorghum), dangar (paddy), makkai (maize) and tuar (a legume) abound. They are plagued by calculating that exact moment when they must begin the annual cycle of clearing lands, planting seeds, fencing their fields, monitoring their crops, and reaping the paak (yield) undamaged by wandering animals, aligning with the double-edged sword that is the monsoons. The necessity of anticipating the rains and preparing themselves for the potential blessing or ruin the monsoons bring pervades their conversations. Such preoccupations suffuse their everyday calendars and guide their territorialising tactics. As an inhabitant explained to me in June 2012:

I did not expect it to rain so early this year. If I had planted the mar banti [a millet] two months earlier, the crop would’ve been ready in a few weeks. Now if the rains disappear early then I won’t reap what I’ve sown. But if the rains persist for a prolonged period, they will destroy the maize planted in the adjacent field. The rains will determine how long our grains will last us, and how much majoori [wage labour] we’ll need to do. That is nature’s paak, it doesn’t guarantee a thing. ²³

Claimants’ Environmentalism

The claimants’ environmentalism, thus, extends beyond an innate environmental stewardship or intrinsic reverence for nature. It is instead dominated by their agrarian priorities. What persists is not an unchanging memory of preserving their ancestral environments but memories interpenetrated by the weight of landmark events such as the legal declaration of the sanctuary. Such events occasion some analysis of how Adivasi concerns interact with a wider theatre of development and conservation.

The sanctuary finds its origins as a political stratagem to quell the environmental outrage against the Sardar Sarovar Dam built on the river Narmada (Whitehead 2002: 1366). Even as the stratagem failed to appease the environmentalists, a contiguous region containing 75 populated villages was declared a sanctuary. The sanctuary’s formation, resultant restrictions on felling and land use and the beginnings of a migratory workforce travelling to sugarcane plantations in industrial towns shape how Shoolpaneshwar’s inhabitants understand their relationship with nature. For them, ‘sanctuary’ implied fencing the forests, a historic moment after which they systematised surreptitious mechanisms to secure teak from the forests to build their houses. ‘Sanctuary means there’s no zameen [land], it means that the jungles have been closed’, an inhabitant told me. Practical-material consequences of the sanctuary’s formations thus featured palpably in the residents’ minds. Official conservation imperatives remained relatively unfathomed. Adivasi environmentalisms from Shoolpaneshwar resonate with an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ whose central thrust is a ‘material interest in the environment as a source and requirement for livelihood’ (Martinez-Alier 2003: 11). When I asked a claimant what he would do with the land once his claim was legitimised, he responded matter-of-factly: ‘I will plough, I will sow, and I will eat. What else?’

But the FRA as a legal intervention in Shoolpaneshwar also seems to shift the orientation of an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ from the present into the future. Anchored in the promise of secure ownership, many Adivasis spoke of how they would build trenches on their fields, plant trees and harvest bamboo on the borders for sale and use. Many hoped to irrigate their fields to protect themselves against the monsoons’ vagaries. I asked the claimants whether the Act actually worked against their interests considering its effective implementation foreclosed possible future encroachments. I wondered how they expected the next generation to survive if future encroachments were foreclosed. A resident explained:

Since we will own land, we’ll get peeyat [irrigation]. ²⁴ Now we must walk two kilometres to fetch water for our farms. It’s difficult to live even within an acre. With peeyat, more people will be able to live off the same piece of land. Once we have our rights, we will preserve the forest. New encroachments will only damage our lands, threaten its productivity. In any case, we don’t expect to rely on our lands completely. Our children need to study and get jobs. They will still go to sugarcane plantations in the winter. But hopefully, our land will be to feed us all.

They cannot grow trees without titles because it gives the forest department reason to stall their cultivations. Many inhabitants nurtured trees over the years to border their fields only to invite threats from the forest department. Indeed, a stated reason for rejecting claims has been ‘there are five trees in the field’. ²⁵ An impending fear of satellite imagery negating their claims if trees overshadow their cultivations prevails. Legal entitlement would dissipate such anxiety and replace it with a reconstituted environmentalism. This environmentalism is steeped in territorial logics. It assumes, rather than denies, the forest dwellers’ historically sedimented agrarian status, one that is fuelled by circular migrations between the city, the field and the forest. ²⁶ It is driven not by dire everyday needs but by the possibility of a plentiful, verdant future. In this future, their lives are not dictated by a looming sense of irregularity where they walk a tightrope between the legal and the illegal. Finally, this reconstituted environmentalism and the role of trees within it, is not motivated by preserving an ancestral legacy of an untainted forest. Instead, the environmentalism underwriting their territorialising tactics transcends subsistence towards generating monetary gain.

State Government Concerns

What anxieties propel the government officials’ interpretations of the Act and their tendency to privilege certain evidentiary records?

Activists, representing the claimants, stress the Act’s ‘spirit’, its substantive ideal of recompensing ‘historical injustices’ against forest dwellers. The legal principles they resort to are of natural justice and due process. ²⁷ According to these principles, the claimant must be granted an opportunity to register their arguments and proffer evidence, before a verdict is pronounced against them.

Government functionaries magnify the Act’s ‘letter’. In the official statement justifying the rejection of Adivasi claims, they contend that they go strictly by the book. Because the legislation confers the bureaucracy with judicial powers in evaluating and dispensing land rights, legal formalism becomes a pretext for rejecting claims among the forest department’s lower administrative officials. ‘We only follow what the law says, our job is to comply strictly with the law and that’s what we’re doing’, the DFO told me.

Moving beyond this initial legal formal neutrality, the official statement justifying the rejection of claims proceeded to reveal the government’s predilections. The state respondents ²⁸ stressed the need to prevent the reduction of a diminishing forest cover:

The government is trying to prevent fresh encroachments and attempts to stop unlawful activities. If the interim order [to the allow cultivation until the rejected claims are reviewed] is granted, there is the likelihood of massive encroachment in scanty resources of the state. ²⁹

Conversations with the RFO and the DFO confirmed these apprehensions. Before they claimed strict adherence to the Act, they began with the premise that the Act itself will destroy forests. ‘The forest cover might decrease. A national policy demands that 33 per cent of land cover needs to forested. Gujarat only has 8 per cent,’ the DFO said. ³⁰ The DFO and RFO divulged other apprehensions in a staff meeting while pouring over a heap of claims. They were to report to the district collector within a day, who in turn was instructed by higher authorities to expedite the process in anticipation of state elections. These apprehensions pertain to measurements. The RFO professed, ‘These people do not know how to measure, they simply write whatever comes to their mind. If they say five acres, it’s actually likely to be two.’ Indeed, a reason for rejection in the dismissal letters given to the claimants includes ‘claimed more land than the actual cultivation’. For the first time, I also heard about claims to community rights filed under the Act. These claims relate to infrastructural needs such as schools, cemeteries and crematoriums. ³¹ Again, the foresters challenge the land area presented in the applications. The RFO exclaimed, ‘How can they possibly need one hectare for a school? They have no idea how much land they are asking for. I don’t understand; if you’re burning bodies, you don’t need so much land.’ The DFO pointed out that if there are Christians, they need to bury bodies, which means they need more land. The RFO retorted, ‘You only need [an area of] 15 feet by 15 feet for each body. One hectare is insane’. With unflinching honesty, the RFO further revealed his discomfort with the Act. The perforated garb of legal formalism spotted in the written official response justifying government rejection of forest dwellers’ claims sheds itself entirely to unveil a categorical denunciation of the Act.

‘The FRA is all about illegal cultivations, premised on fine receipts. It’s basically driven by political imperatives and electoral waves. And the tribals are driven by a greed for land, like any who is getting free land would be’, the RFO said.

If the claimants narrated a tumultuous history of interacting with the government, the RFO too chronicled his triumphs and tragedies as a forest officer across 18 districts in Gujarat. Some noteworthy junctures help situate the motivations guiding his claim rejections. The RFO recalled an episode where he believes he saved South Gujarat from Naxalism. ³² The RFO proudly claimed that in 1991, he used arms to protect his forest to douse an organised resistance against the forest department: ‘I am accused under Section 302. ³³ I took up weapons to protect my forests and I fired.’ Driving such combative measures is an alleged sense of belonging. ‘I have become attached to the forest. I can feel its loss’, he told me. In the same breath, he said, ‘The FRA is a product of this very Naxalite activity I battled against. Do you know when this Act was passed? At 11:00 pm on 31 December when the Parliament was fast asleep. It is obvious that some undemocratic factions forced its enactment’. Although the factual credibility of his statements may be refuted, noticeable is his contempt for the legislation and its origin.

How may we connect such deep-rooted opposition against the Act’s emergence to its operations? Arguably, the written official statement justifying the rejection of claims, the satellite imageries and the reluctance with which the forest officials execute their tasks relating to forest rights are useful clues into the impediments presented by the forest department. Nonetheless, we need more proof to uncover how long-standing government concerns become entwined in present-day actions. In this, the RFO’s unapologetic declaration that he will reject all FRA-induced claims is useful. ‘It isn’t just the collector who has a say in this. As a member of the SDLC, ³⁴ I have the right to reject claims’. Here, he activates his newfound role as a quasi-judicial authority to realise his worldview. He proceeds to evoke the doctrine of public trust in his legal duty as a member of the state to protect natural resources. Simultaneously, he employs the Indian Constitution’s Article 21 to argue against the destruction of forests under his right to live in a clean and healthy environment. ³⁵ Predictable pronouncements of ‘national heritage’ and ‘national wealth’ follow. Unsurprisingly, it is these catchphrases that peppered conservationist justifications against the Act (Seminar 2005). Illustrated in the RFO’s selective evocation of national policies is an orientation bent on preserving wilderness for the nation’s sake, where the future interests of an imagined nation are prioritised over particular, immediate needs (Cederlof and Sivaramakrishnan 2005).

The DFO’s rejection letters to the claimants also evoke official conservationist policies. Stock reasons such as this is ‘a sanctuary’, ‘eco-fragile vistar’ or ‘critical wildlife habitat’ abound in these letters. Legally defining a ‘critical wildlife habitat’ demands a collaboration between the scientists and forest dwellers. ³⁶ The rejection letters use the term loosely to create a semblance of lawfulness without actually undertaking the process of defining the area through such collaboration sanctioned in law. In gathering these scattered shards that shape the opposition to the Act, I have attempted to show how they assemble to form an environmentalism that confronts the Act even in its operations.

Conclusion

‘A central concern of any rule-maker should be the identification of those social processes which operate outside the rules or which cause people to use the rules, or abandon them, bend them, reinterpret them, sidestep them, replace them’ (Moore 1978: 7).

Studies on India’s colonial forest policies have shown how practical exigencies and competing interests endlessly modify the operations of the law (Pathak 2002; Sivaramakrishnan 1999). On this front, it seems as if not much has changed in the last 200 years. Innumerable procedural struggles shape how legal geographic categories are rearticulated in regional settings. The Act’s implementation exposes frictions between the government and forest dwellers that indefinitely postpone its denouement.

First, the Act does not exist in isolation. It is momentarily forgone in lieu of other official policies. These policies are often at odds with the Act and its intent of establishing user rights over forest land.

Second, government functionaries’ reinterpretations of the Act highlight age-old preferences for written documents and simultaneously elevate newfangled technocratic representations, compelling the Adivasis to disproportionately bear the burden of proof.

Nevertheless, forest dwellers embrace every mode of evidence-making to confront the procedural hurdles placed before them. Tactics generated in response to the procedural hurdles arguably shape Adivasi imaginations of the past, present and future. That the Act is experienced as the latest phase in government promises of regularisation, forces us to see the similarities between the struggle for land rights across forests and cities.

From Bombay, Jonathan Anjaria writes how street squatters experience the state ‘less as an extension of disciplinary power than as a locus for the negotiation and legitimation of spatial claims’ (2011: 59). Territorialisations entailed in the Act’s implementation similarly highlight the tentative process through which forest dwellers and government functionaries encounter each other and partake in legitimising their claims to space through a curated creation of evidentiary artefacts. The production, control and circulation of evidence shapes how both, the forest and the city are created, regulated and inhabited.

Tactics generated by the Act clarify the historically specific, legally grounded and economically alive desires that drive Adivasi claim-making. They reveal just how dynamic Adivasi imagined futures are. The collation of plausible proofs by the claimants, in its obedience to a propriety of text and form, reveals an immense faith in the law. In seeking this lawfulness, the claimants hope to leave behind their unfixed predicament to seize tightly a future of certitude. It is a certitude lodged well within territorial classifications. Ingrained in their demand for lucid, transparent land demarcations are ideas of ownership steeped in an individual property regime. Driven by motivations of settled cultivation and prosperous agrarian futures, the need for legal titles to land is preeminent.

Above all, the claimants and the government functionaries express a strong sense of an interminable past reverberating into the present continuous. Both experience the Act not as an end in itself but as the latest in the longue durée of interactions with the legal-administrative sphere, a chapter that extends their differences through tactical adaptations to unanticipated obstacles. These tactics include fixations on measurement and counter-mapping techniques that respond to new official ways of documenting evidence and polemics steeped in legal formalism. Fractures between the government and the claimants penetrate the life of the legislation, opening up the possibility to consider the imaginations that shape the fate of the forest.