A new proposal threatens to disempower forest-dependent communities by changing the name of an institution.
The National Commission of Scheduled Tribes (NCST) has drafted recommendations to rechristen the Indian Forest Service as the Indian Forest and Tribal Service. If let through, it will diminish the agency of people dependent on the forest while reinforcing the forest department’s conservation discourse.
The recommendations will form part of the commission’s annual report to the government next year. The one to change the ‘Indian Forest Service’ (IFS) to the Indian Forest and Tribal Service. The IFS institution is tasked with the administration, management and protection of India’s forests. The NCST highlights the close ties between ‘tribals’ and the forest and forest ecosystem as a resource-base. It argues that in recognition of this, merging forest and tribal welfare administrations will only further the participation of ‘tribals’ in forest management. The NCST believes it will also engender greater sensitivity on the forest department’s part towards the needs of ‘tribal’ communities.
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Setting aside the problematic framing of forests as being exclusive to tribal communities (as opposed to all forest-dependent communities), the NCST’s line of thinking is worrisome. The key issue here is the different meanings of ‘forest management’ and ‘conservation’ between the forest department and forest-dependent communities. If the two are to be joined, we must examine this difference and identify who benefits from it.
Historically, the department has viewed forest-dependent communities as a hurdle to the effective protection and management of forests. Members of these communities were, and continue to be, identified as the chief source of forest depletion across the country. Since the colonial period, forest management rules – such as the Forest Conservation Act, the Wildlife Protection Act, the National Forest Policy 1988, etc. – have focused on excluding forest-dependent communities from the forest ecosystem.
When the National Forest Policy (NFP) 2018 was enforced, the discursive meaning of ‘forest conservation’ evolved to include the commercialisation of forest resources.
At the other end of the spectrum lies community-based and community-derived meanings of forest management and conservation. In contrast to the departmental discourse, forest-dependent communities have a more complex relationship with the forest – viewing themselves as an intrinsic part of the ecosystem, influencing and being influenced simultaneously. This dialectic of forest life is founded in cultural practices and knowledge systems that reflect centuries of intimacy with the ecosystem. Unlike the bureaucratic conception, it is not built on viewing the forests as independent, lifeless things for commercial exploitation or as instruments with which to reverse the effects of industrial capitalism. For forest-dependent communities, conservation is equivalent to symbiosis and sustainability.
The contradicting discourse is an essential part of India’s forest politics. Such agonism is valuable for two reasons. First: it establishes non-universal meanings of forest management and conservation. It is a contested space where competing discourses on meaning are in constant struggle, and so the meaning itself is in a constant state of reformulation. Second: in this struggle, competing discourses don’t possess the same perceived legitimacy or influence. The department’s formulation can thus come to dominate communal formulations thanks to material realities. But no matter the extent of dominance, the competing discourse persists.
Thus, the agonistic relationship here is vital to identify hegemony and counter-hegemonic voices in public discourse. The contradiction between the departmental and communitarian formulations helps us recognise the hegemony of the bureaucratic formulation while also identifying alternatives, such as those of the forest-dependent communities.
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Finally, viewing the departmental formulation as hegemonic is important because it impacts the draft NCST recommendations. If the IFS is renamed, the departmental definition of conservation will entirely subsume others. By combining the two, the counter-hegemonic discourse of communitarian forest conservation will lose all legitimacy. In effect, by unifying ‘tribal’ welfare and forest conservation, the illegitimacy of bureaucratic ideas of conservation will carry less weight because the department will be ostensibly acting for the welfare of forest-dependent communities.
This is why the IFS should not be renamed according to the NCST’s draft recommendations. The agonistic discursive space must exist. Sure, the draft recommendations are well-intentioned, but they also carry the potential further marginalise forest-dependent communities, and that must be recognised.
Tanay Gandhi is a graduate in law from NUJS, Kolkata, with a strong interest in political and critical theories of ideology and discourse. He presently works with Adivasi communities in Gujarat on questions of self-governance and forest rights.