India: Forest Areas, Political Economy and the
"Left-Progressive Line" on Operation Green Hunt
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/gopalakrishnan040610.html
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Some basic features of the political economy of forest areas are
outlined in a sketch here. The key defining feature of these areas is
one legal-political-institutional complex: India's system of forest
management. The British initiated the current system of resource
control in forest areas in the mid nineteenth century, and it reached
its present form around the turn of the 20th century. The system has
since then maintained a remarkable continuity for more than a century,
an indicator of its importance to India's ruling classes.
This system has its roots in the requirements of British industrial
capitalism in the nineteenth century, for which timber was a key raw
material, both within India (for the railway networks that
strengthened imperial control and allowed extraction of resources) and
in the UK itself (particularly ship building). The systems of forest
control that existed in India at the time, where village communities,
religious institutions, local rulers and tribal societies operated
multiple and complex systems of management, did not permit such easy
extraction. They also did not serve British interests, since timber
trees were naturally not given high priority in such management
systems. As a result, the British instituted the Forest Department
and passed a series of three Forest Acts -- in 1865, 1878 and 1927 --
to essentially bring India's timber resources under their control and
provide a legal-institutional form for their management. The 1927 Act
remains India's main forest law.
The British Forest Acts were based on the principle of expropriation:
any area could be declared to be a government forest, whereupon rights
in this area would have to be respected/settled (the process varied
over the course of the three acts). The form of such rights was
whittled down to essentially individual land rights by the time of the
1927 law, and even these were subject to the decision of a forest
settlement officer. The resulting failure to record even the
individual rights of adivasis, Dalits and most other forest dwelling
communities is well documented. This process continued and was
consolidated after independence, excepting in the Northeast.
But this was not merely a question of administrative failure. The
forest laws had three key consequences for production relations. The
first was that, as with enclosures anywhere, they sought to reduce
what were essentially territories and landscapes to commodities, in
this case exemplified by timber. The variations in pre-colonial
management systems notwithstanding, none of them was based on
principles of commodity management; though often far from democratic
or egalitarian, they were concerned with regulation of use and (at
most) extraction of revenue. Their purpose did not revolve around the
extraction of a single commodity; this was an innovation of the
British. The result of this process was to bring Indian forests into
a specific position within the global capitalist commodity circuit,
servicing the industrial needs of transport sectors within the
imperialist bourgeoisie.
But, unlike the classical enclosures of England, the enclosure attempt
in India's forests failed -- bringing about the second consequence.
The attempt to seize most of central India's forests met with fierce
resistance, being one of the triggers for a series of adivasi
uprisings across central India (the tribals of the Northeast having
largely fought off British control from the beginning). The British
lacked the force to clear these areas of people and suppress their
management systems, and the post-colonial Indian state -- despite its
ever increasing reserves of repressive power -- has also lacked the
ability to do so. The result has been that one reality exists in the
world of law, where forests are uninhabited wilderness, and another
exists in reality, where millions use and depend on them for survival.
More important than the fact that these uses are illegal is that they
are not recorded, and as such outside the knowledge of the state
system.
This produced the third and most important consequence: a distorted
system of property relations, from the point of view of classical
'capitalism'. In short, security of private tenure does not exist in
the forests. Enclosure, rather than creating and defining the rule of
private property, has produced a chaotic situation of competing
claims, de facto management systems that clash with de jure ones and
state policies that are based on a combination of fantasy at the time
of policymaking (Project Tiger, for instance) and brutality in
implementation. These apply to all resources in the area, not only to
land.
Integration into India's Political Economy
A lack of defined property relations has, in turn, further shaped both
the integration of these areas into Indian capitalism1 and the forms
of resistance adopted by people in these areas. First, accumulation
in these areas is simultaneously constrained and driven by the direct
exercise of state force. Close relations with the formal state
machinery are a precondition for acccumulation in forest areas,
whether one is a tendu leaf contractor, a landlord, a tea estate, a
forest guard or Vedanta. This is accumulation by dispossession as a
continuous process.
Such a situation obviously poses risks both to legitimacy and to
'orderly' accumulation. But it also proves to be a useful compromise
in a context where state force alone simply cannot exterminate or
remove the entire forest dwelling population. The current situation
provides direct benefits to large sectors of India's ruling classes.
On the one hand, the continuous subsidy to capital that is created by
the provision of free or cheap minerals, water, timber and land from
forest areas has contributed an untold and inestimable amount to
India's capitalist 'development', both earlier and in the recent
neoliberal era. It is no accident that most large projects at all
stages since independence have involved forest land. On the other
hand, this situation has produced a partially proletarianised
population of crores of people -- mostly, but not only, adivasis --
whose traditional productive resources (particularly forest produce)
have been expropriated, and who are now vulnerable to
super-exploitation as migrant workers. Nor are the consequences
limited to present day forest dwellers; the resulting desperate
reserve army of workers has had a historical and geographical 'ripple
effect', diminishing the strength of the working class as a whole
(most visible in the heavy and increasing use of adivasi migrant
labour across India's "developed" capitalist belts).
Resistance in Forest Areas
The consequence of this is that the link between capital, the state
and the use of force is thus blatantly obvious in forest areas in a
manner that it is not elsewhere. If hegemony consists of the
combination of consent with the armor of coercion, it is the armor
that forest dwellers see. This, together with the reality of
ill-defined property relations, has had consequences for the way
people have fought back.
Indeed, I would argue that the persistence and reproduction of
collective property relations among adivasi and tribal communities is
not the result of some kind of historical exceptionalism, or relics of
a "past culture" or "feudal mode of production." Rather they are a
reflection of the concrete combination of weak private property
relations and state repression on the other. In the forest and tribal
areas, the nature of capitalist exploitation makes collective
production both concretely possible and a key source of resistance
(since it is the subject of direct repression), and as a result these
forms of production are being reproduced. Indeed, the communities
with the strongest systems of collective production in India today are
the tribal communities of the Northeast, such as the Nagas, the Mizos,
the Garos and others, who have literally been at war against
expropriation attempts continuously since the colonial period. In
central India, where such struggles have been less successful, the
state suppression of community management systems has progressed much
further -- but they remain alive in such phenomena as community forest
management (practiced by thousands of villages in Orissa and
Jharkhand), collective gathering and management of minor forest
produce, collective grazing systems, etc.
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