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Article
in outlookindia.com, dtd. April 10, 2000
Green
Peace Shattered -By Sujata Anandan
A court order on Mumbai's Borivili National Park creates a
rift between Adivasis, slum-dwellers and their backers.
They both stand for people and planet earth's survival. Yet,
circumstances have driven a wedge between the Bombay Environmental
Action Group (BEAG) and Nivara Hakk Samiti (NHS). The bone
of contention for these friends-turned-foes being the Borivili
National Park (bnp) in Mumbai. Strange though it may sound,
both the organisations in their fight for justice and egalitarianism
are pitted against one another. If the tribals are evicted
along with the slumdwellers, they will die as they don't know
how to live without a forest.
While the BEAG has staked its all in upholding the cause of
the tribals inhabiting the Borivili forest, the NHS is hell-bent
on securing the rights of slum-dwellers who have been forced
by an abjectly objective situation to encroach upon the park.
The consequence has been bitter acrimony and in the process
the two sides have ended up putting at stake the fate of 300,000
slum-dwellers on the periphery of the forest and more importantly
2,500 families of Warli tribals (comprising 45 per cent of
the Adivasi population). Besides, of course, the Kokanas,
Katkaris, Malhars, Kolis, Dhodis and Dublas who have been
living inside the forest for decades if not for centuries.
Manik Rama Sapte, whose family tree goes back 500 years, is
one of the many examples.
The BNP was designated a reserve forest in 1983. It has taken
less than two decades for the city to come home to tribals
like Sapte. Slums abut the BNP and the Bombay High Court in
a sweeping order last month, encompassing the Adivasis, ordered
their eviction.
To add insult to injury, Sapte and his fellow tribals have
been asked by the forest department to pay Rs 7,000 as expenses
towards being rehabilitated. Sapte was outraged. On behalf
of all the tribals and aided by the Shramik Mukti Andolan
(SMA), he filed an intervention application before the high
court on March 22, expressing his anguish that the 15,000
tribal households should be asked to quit what has been their
traditional home and source of income long before the seven
islands of Bombay were gifted in dowry by the Portuguese to
King Charles II of England three centuries ago.
As the islands were joined together and much land was reclaimed
from the sea as well as the nearby villages, the city came
into conflict with the tribals' habitat. Says SMA's Vithal
Lad: "The Adivasis did not come to Bombay. Bombay went to
the tribals." Lad is a co-petitioner in the case.
He asks in broken English: "From here where they will go?"
It is a serious dilemma and one that should concern the government
as well. For, these tribals have known no other home and,
along with other Adivasis elsewhere, are constitutionally
empowered to live off the forests which they do not deplete
but help preserve, in their own interest. Avers the SMA: "They
are neither slum-dwellers, nor are they encroachers and trespassers.
They have no dwelling or native place other than the forest
which has been theirs for so many centuries. And till today
they haven't experienced migration." In other words, they
would simply die if evicted.
This is not one of those top-of-the-hat statements but is
based on rigorous study and scientific inquiry which had been
conducted on the Indian tribals by British anthropologist
Verrier Elwin. So, when Lad says, "You might as well send
them to Kerala or Kashmir as Kalyan. They will die anywhere.
They can live only within the forest," he is basically arguing
this well-known formulation.
The story of tribal conflict with the urban environment goes
back to 1957 when the predominantly tribal Thane district
was bifurcated to carve out the Bombay suburban district,
leaving 20 of their 56 hamlets in Thane and 36 inside the
BNP, and some (like Ravanpada, so named because the tribals
here worship Ravana as a god) in the entertainment zone which
has a tiger safari in the reserved forest area. As a result
of urban settlements pushing their way into the jungles (which
provide for 90 per cent of Mumbai's green cover), there have
been incidents of leopards boarding empty best buses at the
jungle terminus and stretching out on the long back seat,
unnoticed by humans - later frightened out of their wits as
the animal sat up and roared when the bus began to move.
But while the passengers might have abandoned the bus, the
city did not give up its claim on the jungle - it receives
much of its water supply from the two lakes inside the bnp.
This is one of the reasons why the BEAG filed a petition in
the Bombay High Court which on May 7, 1997, passed an order
for the demolition of the hutments edging the park and not
the the Adivasi homes within it.
The then Shiv Sena-BJP coalition government should have obliged
with alternative housing and infrastructure and livelihood
to the people. Now there is a Congress-NCP government in place,
but it too has been unable to resolve the problem and is,
therefore, caught in the crossfire between the nhs, whose
president is Shabana Azmi, and the BEAG, led by Debi Goenka.
Says Bittu Sahgal, editor of Sanctuary magazine and member
of the Maharashtra Wildlife Advisory Board: "In the three
years since that high court order, I am afraid neither the
past nor the current government has displayed the political
will to solve the problem. They have thought only to put their
interests before the people to win some cheap votes. As a
result, the poor slum-dwellers and the forest have suffered."
So has the relationship between the NHS and the BEAG, which
began on the same side in 1997, coming together to identify
rehabilitation procedures for the slum-dwellers. Sahgal, now
playing peacemaker between the two, describes them both as
"good organisations forced by an apathetic government to fight
with each other rather than together against the common enemy".
The adversary being the government, the politician and the
slumlord, though not necessarily in that order. But now such
is the antipathy between the two that noted architect P.K.
Das, associated with the NHS since its inception in 1981,
minces no words in describing the environmental activists
as anti-people. Says Das: "They are ignorant about any human
issues and they are looking at environment without people.
Environmental activism today is totally elitist." "Not true,"
retorts Sahgal. "The NHS people are completely off the wall
and are behaving irresponsibly. The easiest thing to do is
to accuse environment activists as anti-people. But why blame
each other? Has anyone thought of what would happen to Bombay
if even one lake inside the BNP which has sweet water is polluted
and destroyed? If there are two consecutive monsoon failures,
the city will have to be evacuated in 48 hours." But the NHS
argues that BNP's Adivasis are bootleggers and illicit fellers
of trees who rent out their houses to outsiders and that they
are not living off the forest but seeking jobs in the city.
So who brought the city to them anyway, queries the SMA, which
is now pinning its hopes on the Supreme Court, even as Adivasis
await the high court's ruling on their application.
According to Lad, evicting these Adivasis from their traditional
homes would only open up the forests to the nefarious networks
of poachers, timber smugglers, land mafia contractors and
middlemen. Today, they help the forest department control
these activities, even as they live off its produce. "They
live because of the forest and the forest lives because of
them. Each needs the other." There is no dilemma in the tribal
mind, at least, about who belongs to whom and where. Clearly,
they belong together.
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