The arbitrary takeover of land is one of
the country’s biggest faultlines today. New legislation proposed by the
government does little to fix this.
IN A recent interim order, the Supreme Court of India denied permission
to British company Vedanta to mine the hills of Niyamgiri in Orissa.
But that’s only half the story, for the apex court went on to suggest
that Vedanta make its Indian partner Sterlite apply for and obtain the
clearance. In doing so, the court has gone against the report of its
own Central Empowered Committee (CEC), and in effect has allowed the
Niyamgiri hills to be mined till they run dry.
The Dongria Kond tribals, the indigenous population of Niyamgiri, are
baffled by the logic of events. They cannot understand how a group of
people sitting in New Delhi can decide to sell their venerated
Niyamgiri hills to a company without consulting them when they have
been the inhabitants and protectors of the hills for ages. They have
neither heard of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, based on which their
lands are going to be appropriated from them, nor that in Delhi’s
corridors of power moves are on to further strengthen it.
Still very much in force, the Act has managed to bring under its regime
tribes that even the British could not. Its defining feature is the
consistent loyalty it shows to the colonial principle of “Eminent
Domain”, meaning that the State is the super sovereign and the owner of
everything — land, water, forests and so on — and citizens have only
custodial capacity of them. This was quite natural, since the
colonisers’ intention was to make the existing customary laws
irrelevant and allow the artificially created “rule of law” to take
their place.
The Indian State, whose administrative history and constitution is just
60 years old, took over where the colonial masters left off, and now
dictates over communities who had their own traditional laws for
thousands of years, and who have never imposed their laws on anyone
else. While this may sound illfounded to some urban nationalists — but
others, whether historians, anthropologists or sociologists — cannot
ignore the inalienable rights that indigenous communities hold over
natural resources. Their principle is not of eminent domain, but of
“domain of the commune”, where people own and share resources as a
collective.
That is the reason why Scheduled Areas were created under the
constitution and an effort to give community rights to indigenous
peoples under guarantees like the Panchayat Extension to The Schedule
Areas (PESA) Act and the Forest Rights Act were initiated. Yet, all
this has done nothing to change the colonial mindset of present rulers
or the newfound protectors of their interest — the judiciary.
The Niyamgiri hills are not the only sacred community space that has a
price tag on it. The Lepcha community of Sikkim stands to lose their
ancestral land, their holy Dzongu mountains and their entire history
and tradition, if the Teesta Valley Hydel project comes into place.
Similar is the case with the people of Dhinkia, Nuagaon and Garaku
chang — who are fighting Naveen Patnaik’s pet FDI project initiated by
POSCO, the Korean steel giant. The fate of several thousand families in
Kalinga Nagar, Kashipur, Raigarh, Kakkinada and Gorai is also not very
different.
IT IS in this context that the two recently proposed legislations —the
Land Acquisition (Amendment) Bill 2007 and the Rehabilitation &
Resettlement Bill 2007—needs to be seen. Issues of both land
acquisition and resettlement and rehabilitation have been discussed and
debated for several years now. However, no process of stocktaking has
yet been initiated by the government, and even basic information
required for an effective assessment of present polices is not
available.
The government will do well to bring out a white paper on all the land
acquired using the Land Acquisition Act in the past, its current
utilisation and the status of displaced people before the present Bills
are considered by the Parliament. Development planning, land
acquisition and resettlement and rehabilitation are intrinsically
linked with one another and cannot be dealt with in isolation, or
without addressing their root causes. For several years now, people’s
movements across the country have demanded comprehensive legislation
that covers development planning, no involuntary displacement and just
rehabilitation; demands that have yet again been ignored.
In the past, arguments against the Land Acquisition Act were shot down
on the basis that in a developing socialist economy such critique was
detrimental to the “welfare” state’s right to ownership of resources
vis-à-vis “individual property rights”. This hypocrisy stands
completely exposed now, with the State openly championing an economic
policy that empowers corporate profit at the cost of its own subaltern
people, at times forcefully acquiring land from them in the name of
greater national interest, in return for often meagre cash compensation.
Many years back, when a group of eminent citizens was visiting the
Narmada valley, an old Adivasi leader from the Narmada Bachao Andolan
pointed to an old tree and made a pertinent point. He asked them
whether it was possible for the government to rehabilitate the tree at
another location. Then, with both tears and determination in his eyes,
the tribal elder said: “Adivasis are like this tree, you cannot replant
us anywhere else without killing us.”
In an election year, the UPA government and political leadership will
do well to remember the challenge from the tribal elder of Narmada.
That is where debates on displacement should start; not in arguments
about the quantity of cash compensation. To march ahead with the
current displacement-oriented development paradigm would be to invite
disaster and civil conflict on an unprecedented scale. The wombs that
gave birth to Birsa Munda and Tilka Majhi have not become infertile.
The offensive from the State will be countered, and not by Gandhian
methods alone.
This is no romantic rhetoric; it is what has been demonstrated by the
stiff and localised resistance in places as varied as Raigad, Singur,
Nandigram, Gorai, Kalinga Nagar, Kashipur and recently Rewa, Chengara
and Jagatsinghpur. It remains to be seen how long the stalwarts of
neo-imperialism — from Manmohan to Chidambaram, Buddhadeb, Raman Singh,
Naveen Patnaik and Montek Singh — will be able to hold on to their
seats in the impending heat. The fire is about to spread, but no
attempt is being made to douse it. Certainly, amendments in the Land
Acquisition Act or a newly packaged Rehabilitation Bill will not be
enough to do the trick.
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