Kolkata: It was evening, and the villagers of Bahadurpur and Arbolda in West Bengal’s southwestern district of Nadia sat together under a giant tamarind tree to get some respite after a hot day of toil and the enduring effects of a battle raging for about half a century between them and the State.
It was the day after a Calcutta High Court on 2 January 2024 quashed an eviction notice and forbade coercive action against what are called “other traditional forest dwellers” in the Palashgachi forests, until forest rights were recognised, as per the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, commonly called the FRA, and 2007 Rules and Guidelines.
The laws describes other traditional forest dwellers as “any member or community who has for at least three generations prior to the 13th day of December, 2005 primarily resided in and who depend on the forest or forests land for bona fide livelihood needs”.
The high court judgement gladdened 113 families of Bahadurpur and Arbolda—the villages are next to each other—who depend on the land in question.
There is no specific count available of such forest dwellers nationwide, but along with scheduled tribes they number more than 350 million, according to a 2009 estimate by the union environment ministry.
The ruling was particularly relevant to West Bengal, where the Trinamool Congress party government of chief minister Mamata Banerjee and its predecessors have rarely addressed “historical injustice”, as the law says, in a state that ranks second-last nationally in implementation of the FRA.
“We are happy that we achieved this victory through a legal battle… Everyone resorts to violence these days,” said a visibly relieved Asadul Sekh, one of five petitioners and foremost among community representatives in a legal saga that arose from India’s grassroots.
The other petitioners are Shripati Mandal, Manik Rajowar, Rabi Rajowar and Tapan Rajowar, who in March 2024 offered to represent the others when they challenged an eviction notice from the government in January 2024.
The case was fought by five young lawyers, Abhishek Sikdar, Sahili Dey, Deeptangshu Kar and Purbayan Chakraborty and Santanu Chakraborty, whose fees were paid by contributions from the families and a farm union.
For two years, the government had turned down the application of the 113 families for forest rights, refusing to consider as proof their documents, including their grandfathers’ domicile records and certificates that named them as heirs.
These documents, the families said—and the court agreed—proved their possession of the land for three generations.
The Link To India’s Climate Commitments
The struggle of the Bahadurpur-Arbolda gram sabha (or village assembly) struggle has larger significance at a time when India’s international climate change commitments involve executing a controversial plan to increase “forests” to absorb an additional amount of 2.5 billion to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing a vaguely worded programme—first proposed 15 years ago when he was Gujarat chief minister—that encourages the replacement of government and community-governed forests by private plantations as part of India’s climate-change commitments.
Over five years, the idea of such private run plantations has been opposed at least three times by one of his own ministries and by a Supreme Court committee, as Article 14 reported in September 2023.
These “afforestation” attempts fail to re-create ecosystems, do not compensate for the large-scale destruction and dispossession that forest land “diversions”, as such takeover are officially called, cause in forests, experts have said (here, here and here).
This, indeed, is the case with the Bahadurpur-Arbolda forests of Palashgachi, a name that emerged because of the abundance of the palash tree (flame of the forest) that lights up the landscape in spring.
The Story Since 1930
Their story dates back to nearly a century when landlords, the zamindars of colonial India, allowed the grandfathers of the people of Bahadurpur and Arbolda to farm their land.
About 113 families grow paddy, wheat, vegetables and date palms on 130 bighas (81 acres) of land, the subject matter of the high court victory in January. Little children collect palash flowers from the trees to make garlands and sell to tourists for Rs 10 for two.
Since 1930, the people of Bahadurpur-Arbolda planted trees, farmed and paid rent for the land, part of the estate of a zamindar or landlord called Babu Shyama Charan Gangulee.
In 1956, after the estate was taken over under the West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act 1953, a portion was retained for public use, some part given to the forest department, which never appointed a “settlement officer” to settle rights before it became a forest area legally.
Eight families have homesteads in this region (they have built homes, others farm the land), and every family depends on the forests for livelihood. Government records acknowledge that the families are “possessors” of the plots but hold that possession as “illegal”.
The Land Acquisition Act had been used repeatedly to oust these villagers, and by 2004 they had exhausted all legal remedies.
The government implied they were “encroachers” destroying forest land, a colonial mindset that remains at the centre of similar struggles being across the country.
Many cases like these are mired in accusations and counter accusations, with political parties blaming each other for electoral gains. In 2011, when the controversial Singur Land Rehabilitation and Development Bill was passed, those from this region hoped they would get their land back.
In 2012, the Calcutta High Court struck down the Singur Act, saying it violated the Central Land Acquisition Act 1894, criticising how it dispensed with the idea of rehabilitation and compensation. This ruling sparked new discussion and hope in Bahadurpur-Arbolda.
Assistance came from a farmers and farm labourers union, Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity, working in the area for decades. It has been part of the Nadia land struggle and helped the local community in claiming their rights.
In 2007, when the West Bengal forest department filed false cases against a few villagers, Anuradha Talwar, a senior activist with the union, also found herself wrongly incarcerated till the Ranaghat Court dismissed the case in 2019.
“It has been a long battle,” she said, “And with the coming of the Forest Rights Act a new opportunity arose for these hard-toiling working classes”.
The State Does Its Worst
The people of Bahadurpur-Arbolda said constant threats from the forest department had imperilled their livelihood and access to their lands for three generations.
From 2006—a year after the forests rights act was passed—they visited government departments, trying to find out more about the law, but there was no progress, they said. The local member of the legislative assembly offered no hope either.
Meanwhile, the forest department continued to harass them, they alleged, sometimes destroying their standing crops, forcefully planting non-native trees, such as eucalyptus and sagun or teak, and by sending goons to menace them or even destroy borewells used to farm land.
The police, they said, refused to accept complaints. Some hired as strongmen were given money and alcohol. We know this because they confessed to doing so, and are now part of the Bahadurpur-Arbolda forest rights committee.
While the villagers were coming together for meetings in Bahadurpur, many in Arbolda, especially those who possessed scheduled tribe (ST) certificates, stayed away. An ST certificate is an official identity document that the government uses to process grants, subsidies and applications for reservations in jobs and education.
Those from Arbolda believed that nothing would happen to their lands since they had ST certificates. The West Bengal Land Reforms Act 1955 says tribal land cannot be sold or leased, without legal clearance, to a non-tribal.
Many from “outside”, locals said, tried to set the people of the two villages against each other to prevent them from coming together.
In August 2022, just after the villagers had planted their crops, the forest department pushed its way in, and a confrontation broke out one day between the forest department and villagers.
The Shantipur block development officer (BDO) intervened, calling for a meeting of village representatives, the forest department and the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity.
Why The Palashgachi Forests Matter
In November 2023, the gram sabha protested when contractors for local sawmills, allegedly in connivance with forest guards, felled teak and akashmoni trees, worth crores, in daylight. This was not the first time it was happening, and the locals alleged local saw-mill owners, in cahoots with the forest department, were involved.
This time they submitted a written complaint from a letter-pad of their own and confronted the forest department.
When they saw that the forest department was doing nothing about it, they complained to the BDO and the police. Within a few days of these complaints, the tree-chopping stopped, but no one was held responsible or punished.
For the people of Bahadurpur-Arboleda, the Palashgachi forests must be protected for not just their proximate interests but larger benefits. The forests, some said, mattered more than their ST status.
The sought-after ST status, said Lakshmi Shekh, a Bahadurpur widow, was “just a piece of paper for the government”.
“Our life is our access to this little land we have,” said Lakshmi Shekh, whose late husband was active in the struggle. “If this goes, then we go. Who will breathe all the oxygen that the department wants to make by planting trees? They do not care for any oxygen.”
“They only want the money from the illegal timber cut,” said Lakshmi Shekh, whose son Indrajit now tracks court proceedings, helping the elders with photographing and sending documents through his smartphone or sometimes accompanying them to government offices.
As he held two copies of the high court’s judgement and headed to give a copy each to the BDO and forest range officer, Asadul Shekh said with pride, “We have written more than a 100 letters to the departments and done a dozen rallies and gheraos outside government departments.”
Processes & Hurdles
In December 2022, the Bahadarpur-Arbolda villagers came together to form a forest rights committee and gram sabha as the FRA provides, and in March 2023, 63 individual forest rights (IFR) claims were submitted.
In copies of this letter, they also requested the sub divisional officer of Ranaghat to assist the gram sabha’s attempts to file for individual and community forest rights. The sub-divisional level committee (SDLC), the first tier of administrative structure set-up as per the FRA, did not respond, despite several follow-ups.
After a year waiting, in February 2024, they submitted their claims again, this time of 80 titles to the district magistrate, who is the head of the district level committee (DLC), and to the backward class welfare and tribal development department.
Within less than a week of this new application, the divisional forest officer of the Murshidabad division sent a letter to the gram sabha saying that the claims’ application should have been submitted to the “block level committee” and, so, their applications were being returned.
This was contrary to the law, which the gram sabha had followed, despite the difficulties and legalities involved; it was the officials who disregarded the law.
New fears arose in 2024 when the villagers received an eviction notice in English on 3 January, with no names mentioned, from the range officer, Krishnanagar range. The notice accused them of violating the Indian Forest Act (IFA) 1971: encroaching forest land, growing flowers, vegetables and pulses after damaging a plantation and illegally changing the character of the land.
None of the villagers read or speak English. They sent a photo of the notice over whatsapp to an activist of the Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity.
The notice, said experts, was an apparent effort to pit one law against the other: the IFA against the FRA.
On 15 March 2024, the gram sabha filed a case before the Calcutta High Court.
Othering Of Other Traditional Forest Dwellers
One of the features for creation of “other traditional forest dwellers” category in the FRA is the condition that claimants not from a scheduled tribe must show that they have been primarily residing in or dependent on forest land for livelihood reasons for, as we said before, three generations.
Each generation is counted as 25 years, with those generations beginning before 13 December 2005.
This puts the burden of proof on non-Adivasi communities who depend on forest land. Proving that three generations have depended thus on forest land is nearly impossible because preserving such old papers is not common practice in these communities, and the government has not provided documents from their records.
In later guidelines and amendments to the FRA, the union government made clear that non-scheduled tribe claimants need not prove residence on forest land or that they exercised forest rights for 75 years without interruption.
The West Bengal government has not been enthusiastic in implementing the law or assisting villagers with government records. This makes it impossible for claimants to successfully know or make claims under the FRA.
The FRA clearly requires the sub-divisional level committee to provide forest and revenue maps and electoral rolls and publicise the law, but no such information was ever offered to the people of Bahadarpur-Arbolda.
They were on their own.
The Verdict
On 16 April 2024, Justice Sabysaschi Bhattacharya of the Calcutta High said the claims and documents submitted by the villagers proved they had been farming the land for three generations.
The people of Bahadarpur-Arbolda, he ruled, qualified to be considered as “other traditional forest dwellers” as per the forest rights act. Justice Bhattacharya said the notice was “bad” in law, “since no prior notice of hearing or opportunity of presenting any representation was given”.
He noted that it was unfair since it did not “disclose the exact addresses of its addressees to meaningfully enable them to make representations or claim a right of hearing before the authorities”. The judgement said that “in such blanket and sweeping manner, the rights of the forest dwellers cannot be taken away in a fell swoop”.
Justice Bhattacharya restrained the State from “taking any action for eviction of the forest dwellers” until “process” under the FRA’s rule 12A was not completed in the area.
This rule does not allow the government to reject or modify an incomplete gram sabha application seeking forest rights but send it back if it is.
As Justice Bhattacharya said at one point, the petitioners were lucky to have retained possession of khajna dakhila documents—meaning tax records, land papers issues by the zamindar to tenants, based on which they paid taxes— from 1930 that showed how three generations of the 113 families depended on the Palashgachi forests.
The case throws up the questions that affect other traditional forest dwellers nationwide: should the government provide records to assist their claims? If legacy information, such as the voter list of 1952, is made public by the Government of West Bengal, why can the State not make public zamindari documents or earlier surveys to villagers struggling to make a living?
“There is a very poor understanding conceptually of the OTFD (other traditional forest dwellers) category, and this affects the implementation of FRA,” said Tushar Dash, an independent researcher and consultant on forest rights.
“As a result vulnerable communities across the country, such as the pastoralists, denotified tribes, Adivasis of a state who have not been given scheduled-tribe status, fisherfolk etc. suffer,” said Dash.
Dash said governments “wrongfully demanded” that such forest dwellers produce documentary evidence that is “completely out of context with their history and forest dependence”.
“Even if they manage to produce that,” said Dash, “the largest proportion of rejection of claims happens in their case.”
Back in Bahadarpur-Arbolda, Shukhbashi Rajowar, a farmer in her 60s, said in evident excitement that she had planted saag (spinach) and jhinge (ridge gourd) on the forest land she and her family have farmed for nearly a century.
This time she had no fear.
“I started to clear the land, as soon as I heard of the good news from the villagers,” said Shukhbashi Rajowar, with her friend Kamla Rajowar by her side. Both women have been at the forefront of the struggle to gain legal rights over their land.
Asked what they would do if the forest department stopped them again, both said, almost in unison, “We will fight again.”
(Mrinalini Paul is a Phd researcher at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.)
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