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Pradnya Mangala
Since colonial times, the land grab of Adivasi lands is explained by many scholars as an integral and inevitable process of capital accumulation of colonies and nation states. In the neoliberal era, land grab for ‘development’ projects is articulated using Harvey’s Marxist conceptualization of ‘accumulation by dispossession.’
The Brahmin-Savarna ruling class enacted the Wildlife Protection Act in the year 1972 under the Congress government. The strong lobby comprising of Brahmin-Savarna elites since then has become a powerful force as wildlife conservationists who have time and again led evictions of Dalit/Bahujan/Adivasis in the urban, rural or forested regions of India. The framework of bourgeoise and middle-class environmentalism is employed in academic literature to understand, how desires of elites to live in a pristine, clean and green environment is the driving factor for these kinds of mass displacements.
The recent supreme court judgment of eviction of 1 million Adivasis from their forest land is neither sudden nor unexpected. It is the consequence of prolonged and systematic lobbying through litigations filed by these “middle-class environmentalist.”
What is the composition of this lobby and how is it sustained? If we look at the NGOs working for wildlife conservation, they are wholesale run by Brahmin-Savarnas. As a student of environmental science when I was taught about wildlife, in explicit and implicit ways the reason for the decline of wildlife in forest areas was blamed on Adivasis. Nobody questioned this narrative and the simplistic understanding was forcefully constructed in academia—if you want to save the wildlife, evict the Adivasis- they are the cause. This is done in the complete absence of any discourse implicating the consumerist culture and lifestyles of the Brahmin-Savarna wildlife environmentalists.
These wildlife conservationists do not operate in a vacuum they are part of the ruling class; they are the ruling class, they are the one who dictates your syllabus, they are the ones who decide how the ‘environment’ should be, they are the one who decides whose life is worth saving. They can and do prioritize wildlife over human lives from marginalized communities.
And when need be, they can distance themselves from the consequence of their lobbying for wildlife and reinvent themselves as activists in support of displaced and eviction ordered Adivasis.
From my own readings, people like Mahatma Phule and many Adivasi leaders like C K Janu have helped us think about the relationship between environment and society. They destroy the Brahmanical binary of human and nature. For them, the socio-ecological separation is an illusion. Adivasis and Bahujan nurture and are nourished by nature. They are the producers and protector of our ecosystem.
My intention is in not to romanticize this relationship. Rather I want us to bring back to the fundamental line of questioning- taking a cue from bell hooks, what allows the brahmin, supremacists, capitalist, patriarchal system to create and recreate the artificial separation between human and nature? How do we participate in this illusionary separation? How do these systems operate in a constant process of dehumanization? As the oppressed how do we use language for liberation in a non-anthropocentric way?