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By Aparna Pallavi
In yet another conflict over land between tribals and the forest department, government authorities brutally evicted 1,500 families from a stretch of land in Ghateha village in Madhya Pradesh, claiming they were illegal settlers. The tribals are now in hiding, desperately trying to earn enough to get by
 “There were so many vehicles full of policemen that I could not even count,” says Dubasia Devi Adwasi. “They surrounded us and announced on a microphone that we should clear the area in 10 minutes. We women went ahead to reason with them, because we thought the male police force would not beat women. But very soon they sprayed us with teargas. When we halted, with blinded and burning eyes, they began to beat us women like animals.”
Dubasia Devi is among the hundreds of tribal settlers who were evicted from a 1,000 acre stretch of land in Ghateha village, Rewa district, in Madhya Pradesh. On April 19, a large contingent of forest department and police men brutally removed around 1,500 tribal families from their land. The tribals are now hiding in little villages all over Tyonthar tehsil. According to local organisations, many of them are injured and in desperate need of medical help. Six of them have bullet wounds.
The incident was condemned widely by human rights organisations all over the country, including Amnesty International.
For nearly a week the police kept a tight cordon around the settlement; this was lifted only after the intervention of Samajwadi Party MLA from Sidhi, K K Singh. Meanwhile, the police have slapped riot charges against 600 people, further terrorising the local community.
Dubasia Devi and her friend Chandrawati Devi Khelari, two of the few survivors I managed to meet, now work in a stone quarry to earn money to eat. “We cannot go to our native village of Itawri or to Ghateha because, in both places, the police is lying in wait for us,” they say.
The Ghateha incident is fraught with contradictions. The status of the land, the nature of the encroachment, and the police action -- all are open to question. The police and forest department maintain that it is a case of fresh encroachments on forest land. The tribals and representatives from people’s and human rights organisations say that the encroachment dates back to 2004, making the settlers eligible for encroachment regularisation under the new Forest Rights Act 2006.
According to Dadulal Adwasi, the settlers are landless tribals who have no source of livelihood. They have been demanding land allotments from the government under the Land Ceiling Act since 1965, but have received nothing. Having run out of alternatives, people from villages in Tyonthar tehsil in Rewa district, formed the Birsa Munda Bhumi Adhikar Manch (BMBAM) and decided to settle on this stretch of land, in 2004.
“We wanted to cultivate this land under a cooperative,” says Dadulal’s brother Munshilal. “But due to lack of water (the region is drought-prone) we could not do so. Every year, after we migrated for work, the upper class landlords of Ghateha would raze our houses. Fed up with this treatment, this year we held a meeting and a rally, on March 15, and formally occupied the land.”
The status of the land itself is unclear. The village of Ghateha has been awaiting denotification since 1974. Anil Garg, an expert on forest affairs in Madhya Pradesh, says: “The incomplete state of forest land denotification in the state has been brought up in the state assembly, and both the forest minister and chief minister have given assurances in the assembly, in November 2006 and February 2007, that no eviction would be carried out until the records are properly updated and disputes between the forest and revenue departments settled.” The Madhya Pradesh forest department, he adds, has repeatedly defied the instructions of the state assembly, and the Rewa incident is just another in a long series.
Apart from the nature of the encroachment and status of the land, the manner in which the attack was carried out puts the local administration squarely in the dock.
The settlers themselves and local activists of the BMBAM and the National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers (NFFPFW) say that no notice was issued to them under Section 80-A of the Indian Forest Act before action was taken. It is also unclear whether complaints under Sections 26 (reserved forests) and 32 (protected forests) of the Act were registered against the settlers before the eviction was carried out. Dadulal says: “From March 15 to April 19, all that the forest department did was to threaten us repeatedly. On March 18, they made an abortive eviction attempt, and on April 5 they arrested eight people for carrying lantana sticks, and slapped bamboo-felling charges on them. But they did not carry out any official procedures. The April 19 attack came all of a sudden.”
When questioned, local officials were markedly defensive. Ashish Verma, DFO, Rewa, refused to comment at all on the plea that he was not “authorised” to do so. Collector D P Ahuja said that a POR (Primary Offence Report, the equivalent of an FIR) was registered but that he was unable to provide information on whether other procedures had been followed. Superintendent of Police Ravi K Gupta washed his hands of all responsibility, saying he had only supplied the force requisitioned by the forest department.
What’s surprising is that the eviction happened just a day after a delegation representing the settlers, led by K K Singh, MLA, Sidhi, met the collector and acquainted him with the legal issues involved in the case, including the disputed status of the land. According to Singh, the collector assured the delegation that no action would be taken; he even asked them to file an application to this effect. “The attack was timed deliberately in order to scuttle the democratic process of rights settlement,” says Singh. “It was timed to prevent two things -- firstly, the filing of our application, and secondly the passing of a resolution in the Ghateha gram sabha on April 21 allowing the settlers to stay, under the Forest Rights Act.”
When confronted with this fact, Gupta denied any information regarding the meeting with the collector. Collector Ahuja went a step further and said that the April 18 meeting had not been about Ghateha at all but about denotification procedures in general. Singh claims the collector is lying and says he will be moving an insubordination motion against him in the assembly.
Meanwhile, the site of the attack bears witness to the brutality with which the evictions were carried out. Every house in the settlement has been destroyed, some burnt to the ground. An old man who lives on the outskirts of the village, on condition of anonymity, said: “The thakur-bamans (upper caste landlords) of Ghateha and the neighbouring villages were with the police and they fired at the people too. The people ran away in panic leaving children behind in the huts. Afterwards, the police and the landlords robbed the huts. They took away bicycles, cots, utensils, everything they could lay hold of, and later set fire to the houses.”
“The policemen rammed the ends of their sticks into the backsides of the running women, making them fall,” says Munni Devi, displaying a telltale black bruise. “They were firing at the running people. I saw one person hit by a bullet.” “We had to run 15 km in the noontime heat to hide in the forests,” says Chandrawati Devi. “People ran with children on their backs -- sometimes two children. My hand is swollen and I can’t move my wrist. I can’t go to a doctor for fear of the police.”
“This (the incident) was a serious rights violation,” says Munnilal, convenor, National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers. “The forest department has misused its powers and acted like a feudal landlord by evicting people by brute force even before they could claim their democratic rights. At a time when the process of framing rules for the crucial Forest Rights Act is on, such an incident sends a negative message about the intentions of forest departments all over the country.”
(Aparna Pallavi is an independent journalist based in Nagpur)
InfoChange News & Features, May 2007
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