land – mainly of agricultural land held under customary leases by Kurumar and Kurichyar – again led to extensive dispossession of the adivasis. Therefore, these traditional farming communities became agricultural labourers u nder the migrants (Prasad 2003). As a result, Wayanad’s adivasis are predominately landless labourers22 today, living in overcrowded colonies, with Adiyar, Paniyar, Kattunaikar and Urali Kurumar belonging to the poorest section of Wayanad’s society, most vulnerable to exploitation and structural violence (Indian Institute of Management 2006).

Today’s Forest Dwellers

According to the statistics of the Kerala forest department, Wayanad’s forestland is occupied by a total of 4,014 families, of whom 3,490 are tribal families.23 Therefore, 12.8% of Wayanad’s STS presently live on forestland. According to the recently published Scheduled Tribes Survey Report (STSR) (Government of Kerala 2011), 1,986 ST families (5.49%) in the district are landless tribal families, 7,001 families (19.37%) are holding less than five cents of land, and 17,300 families (47.86%) own less than 50 cents of land. The survey also reveals that 2,168 adivasi families occupy forestland without any ownership documents.24 Among them, 232 families hold less than five cents of land and 706 families possess more than one acre of forestland. One thousand three hundred and seventy four adivasi families hold forestland with possession certificates issued by the

25

FD before the introduction of the FRA. Consequently, the families living on forestland without ownership documents, and who are not considered as landless in the above survey, are the real benefi ciaries of FRA in the district.

The category of “other traditional forest dwellers” in Wayanad consists mainly of small-scale farmers of the Chetti community who had already settled inside the forest during the time of the British rule, and then later as part of the state’s “grow more food” programme. However, as a senior forest offi cer emphasised, Chettis could not claim their rights to land under the FRA, even though they fulfi lled the FRA’s provision of occupying forestland for at least three generations (FRA, Chapter 1, Section 2(o)). In Kerala, under the land reform tribunals of the 1970s, all disputed land claims had been settled. Therefore, if Chettis live on forestland today and do not have an ownership document for their land, their possession of land was not legalised during the land tribunals. Hence, according to the forest officials’ statement, their occupation is in fact illegal and thus their rights to land cannot be recognised by the FRA.

Overall, forest use by those members of the district’s adivasis who are truly “forest-dwelling scheduled tribes” had been very limited for decades. A strict enforcement of India’s forest laws through the FD took place from the late 1980s onwards.26 Particularly for adivasis living inside the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, access to forestland (for hunting,27 grazing of animals and collection of wood and minor forest produce) became extremely restricted. In the 1990s, due to the region’s severe and increasing human-wildlife confl ict (see also Madhusudan and Sankaran 2010), the FD established wildlife proof trenches, and later erected electric fencing. Therefore, forest dwellers could hardly enter the forest or use its resources for livelihood purposes: there was no cultivation possible beyond the forest’s physical demarcations and the additional fear of wildlife attacks prevented people from transgressing the fortified forest boundary. In areas of severe conflicts with wildlife, the Mullu Kurumar and Kattunaikar told us that they even stopped collecting fi rewood inside the forest for fear of being attacked by an elephant, wild boar, or buffalo. The adivasi settlements in these regions could not grow crops, nor could the terrain they occupied be extended further into forest land.28 As a result, the actual “area of occupation” of most forestdwelling adivasis, which was mapped and recorded in the bureaucratic FRA’s census, was only a few cents in size.

Left-Wing Attempts

At the time of implementing the FRA, the left-wing Government of Kerala (2006-11) was faced with long overdue promises to distribute land to landless adivasis. The state’s adivasis had been juridically marginalised in the long process of land reform which was implemented primarily through land tribunals in the 1970s. The Kerala Private Forests Vesting and A ssignment Act of 1971 had likewise only partly been realised to their advantage. Some of the vested forests taken over by the government were brought under “Tribal Rehabilitation Projects” which proved, however, to be quite unsuccessful. Subsequently, the Kerala Act 1975 (Restriction of Transfer of Land and Restoration of Alienated Lands) was enacted to address the issue of land alienation.29 Unfortunately, this Act has hardly been implemented. Besides that, it benefi ted only those adivasis, mostly (higher ranking) Kurichyar and Kurumar, who had possessed proper land records prior to their alienation. The Paniyar and Adiyar in particular were largely excluded from the benefits of land reforms in Kerala. Even though they were living on the landlords’ (janmam) land as bonded l abourers, they were not considered to be “tenants” in the land reforms Act and failed to claim the rights to the land on which they lived. Instead, many Paniyar and Adiyar families were chased away from the land owned by the then janmis and settled on the fringes of the forest and on revenue lands.

Both the 1971 and the 1975 Acts provided the legal basis for the commencement of the widespread adivasis’ struggles for land rights in the 1990s. The jathas (political rallies) were organised in different parts of Kerala, culminating in a 48-day sit-in strike (dharna) in front of the then Chief Minister A K Antony’s residence in Thiruvananthapuram, led by C K Janu’s Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS) (Steur 2009: 26). On 16 October 2001, the then United Democratic Front (UDF)-controlled government agreed to distribute fi ve acres of land to all landless adivasis in the state, to be implemented by December 2002. Politicised by Janu, and encouraged by the government’s promise to redistribute land, adivasis within the communist party founded the AKS, popularly known as the “tribal wing” of the CPI(M). They immediately took advantage of the political climate of the time and organised encroachments (stalam pidikam)30 on estate land with legally insecure titles, as well as on vested forestlands in various locations in Wayanad. Many AKS encroachments did not last long, as protesters were evicted from the squatted land soon after their arrival. Arrests notwithstanding, with the knowledge that they had nowhere else to turn, adivasis activists frequently re-encroached after their release, encouraged by the AKS. Often, adivasis claimed that the unbearable living conditions were the motivation behind their encroachments:

We did not even have a place to spit out. We did not have a place to bury our dead bodies; we buried them right next to our houses. We were suffering with 15 people in one single house. Because of that we came here and e ncroached on this land. Many went to jail, but we continue our struggle so at last we would get some land, one Paniyar woman recalled.31

However, more than a year later, the government’s agreement to hand out land had still not been acted upon. Subsequently, on 4 January 2003, led by Janu, more than 1,000 adivasis, predominantly Adiyar and Paniyar groups from Thirunelli, initiated a widely publicised and assertive encroachment inside the Muthanga Range of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary. After 45 days, police forces and armed FD officials brutally terminated the encroachment, an event that is bitterly remembered today as “the Muthanga incident” (Bijoy 1999; Bijoy and Raman 2003; Sreerekha 2010).

Three years after Muthanga, in 2006, the FRA was passed by the central government. Within the context of unsolved adivasi land issues, Kerala’s left parties, who were supporting the UPA government at that time, had strongly lobbied for an extension of the FRA’s cut-off date.32 By extending the date to 13 December 2005, the CPI(M) was hoping to use the FRA to finally be able to distribute some of the long-promised land, especially to the landless adivasis whose encroachments on (vested) forest had been supported by the communist AKS. Therefore, when the FRA’s implementation process started in Kerala in January 2008, the Left Democratic Front government had decided to give one acre of (forest) land to all landless “forest-dwelling scheduled tribes” under the FRA.33 However, when the scheduled tribes development department (STDD) started collecting applications from the eligible families as the fi rst step of implementation, protest from Wayanad’s environmentalists arose. The Wayanad Prakruthi Samrakshana Samithi (WPSS), a group of (mostly middle class) environmental activists in the region, working in close alliance with the FD on several issues, filed a petition praying for a stay order at the Kerala High Court and to suspend the proceedings. The u nlawful implementation of the Act, the environmentalists argued, would lead to a severe destruction of Wayanad’s ecologically fragile and dispersed forests. The Kerala High Court decided that, as stated in Chapter 3, Subsection (6) of the FRA, the distribution of land should be restricted to “the area under actual

o ccupation on the date of commencement of this Act” (Government of India 2006). Therefore, with the FRA’s central monitoring committee agreeing upon the court’s decision, it became clear that the FRA would not be the right means to solve the district’s adivasi issues.

A Controversial Mission: Implementing the FRA in Wayanad

As mentioned previously, the implementation of the FRA was a huge bureaucratic project. The Rules to the FRA elaborately specify the process of determining and distributing rights. To monitor the implementation, the state government was r equested to form a subdivisional level committee (SDLC), a district level committee and a state level monitoring committee (SLMC).34 The tribal welfare department was appointed as the nodal agency to coordinate the implementation process. Thus, in Wayanad, it was mainly the Tribal Department’s lower offi cials, TEOs and tribal promoters, who had the role of “translating” and “interpreting” the Act for villagers and communities living on forestland. Additionally, however, party members of the AKS, as well as adivasi activists and NGO employees, were important intermediators between the government institutions, implementing the Act, and the local communities.

Initially, in compliance with the rules of the FRA, special grama sabhas were held in the presence of the panchayat

secretary, the TEO, and tribal promoters. Through these grama sabhas, the forest rights committees (FRCs) were to be formed and the record of forest rights to be prepared. Soon, however, for the involved officials, it became apparent that it was impossible to articulate tribal interests through the FRCs formed by the wardlevel grama sabhas. “Adivasis simply did not show up in the meetings”, the Integrated Tribal Development Programme (ITDP) officer remarked, while speaking about the difficulties her department faced during the implementation process. The participation of adivasis in grama sabhas has been generally very limited. The meetings were dominated by “mainstream” society (Christians, Muslims, Hindus), discouraging adivasi participation through cultural means of exclusion. Contrary to the anticipation of the policymakers, there were no single-community, scheduled tribe-panchayats in Kerala – moreover, as stated earlier, adivasis are heterogeneous, have hierarchical relationships among each other, and live today as minority groups in panchayats.

So to strengthen adivasi participation in determining their rights and in decision-making processes, the ITDP decided to create FRCs through ooru koottam, separate grama sabhas in their settlements, under the leadership of tribal promoters.35 Nevertheless, many members of ooru koottam we interviewed stated that they had not been properly informed about the new law or about their role in the implementation process. In most adivasi hamlets and colonies, people were neither aware of their rights, nor did they know that special FRCs existed. Some thought of the FRA as just another (unfulfi lled) government order to distribute land among landless adivasis.

Adivasi encounters with the local state proliferated during the implementation process. The state’s interactions with the adivasis represent a micro-sociology which is part of the picture of the FRA’s limited impact in Kerala. To handle the FRA’s enormous bureaucratic effort, the Kerala’s survey department initiated Bhoomi Keralam (literally “the land of Kerala”), a special programme for “the completion of survey of forestland in 12 districts of

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the state to allot land to the tribal families under the FRA”.36 The Bhoomi Keralam teams conducted the survey with the support of tribal promoters and a few members of FRCs. They demarcated the land, verified the claims, and sketched the area and plot for each applicant. Frequently, however, people had no idea what the busy officials were doing in their settlements. As one older Kattunaikar woman described the survey procedures in her colony:

Many outsiders came here, rushed through the colony; they were very busy, they asked our name and made measurements; they did not tell us what it was for. We did not question them because they are padippulla sarummar37 (educated people).38

For foresters and forest rangers on duty to support the survey team by pointing out localities and identifying the potential beneficiaries, conducting the census was a strenuous process as well. Foresters complained about the adivasis’ lack of a stationary lifestyle. Especially members of the Kattunaikar and Urali Kurumar frequently visit and live with relatives in other colonies of Wayanad or the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Sometimes, family members were not present when the survey was conducted; hence, the foresters argued that their possessions could not be recorded and they received no land under the FRA.

Hindrances to the FRA’s effective implementation were also exacerbated by interdepartmental conflicts. According to the ITDP officer, Wayanad’s tribal development department (TDD) received 6,937 FRA applications, among which 4,698 were eligible to receive land without any objection under the FRA. Out of this 1,146 applications were rejected as pertaining to people living on revenue land. By November 2011, 4,331 land claims under the Act had already been settled, with 3,141 hectares of forestland distributed to STS. The rest of the applications were still being processed. Many claims under the FRA, the ITDP explained, could not be settled due to disputes with the FD. Frequently, officials of the TDD in

In our conversations with higher offi cials of the FD in Wayanad, they expressed their deep concern about the ecological impact the FRA would have on the fragile ecosystem of the region. Like our interlocutors of Wayanad’s environmentalist group WPSS, the forest offi cers were afraid that the FRA would bring severe destruction to this “biodiversity hotspot” in the Western Ghats. They argued that Wayanad’s forests, harbouring a unique flora and fauna,39 including many endemic and endangered species, such as the largest remaining wild elephant population in south Asia (Sukumar 2003), could not cope with any further disturbance by humans. Therefore, many representatives of the FD understood it as their “occupational duty” to protect the region’s remaining forests from additional damage and human interference, and thus, to defend and guard its territory. In their discourses, some were well aware of the contradiction that the main causes for Wayanad’s forest destruction had been the (British and Indian) FD’s extraction and profi t-oriented management logic itself. Some of the critically-minded, higher forest offi cials pointed at the insincerity of the FD in promoting so-called “ecotourism”40 and permitting “drive-through” jeep tours (Münster and Münster 2012) into the core areas of the wildlife sanctuary, while at the same time strongly advocating the need for establishing a humanfree (adivasi-free) wildlife zone though “fortress conservation” and the implementation of a “voluntary human relocation” project (Kerala Forest and Wildlife Department 2003) for communities living inside “critical wildlife areas”.

Who Profi ted?

According to the official records, in October 2011, after a four-year-long implementation process, all “forest dwelling scheduled tribes” in the Wayanad district received a FRA land possession certificate, at least for the land upon which their houses stand. The 367 applications, however, are still being processed. The official data available on the FRA’s implementation were the SDLC reports, which were handed over, after the completion of the FRA’s land survey, to the district collector for issuing the FRA’s land possession certifi cates. We obtained access to the SDLC reports by fi ling an RTI41 application to the subcollector in Mananthavady, Wayanad.

Out of the 4,331 families who received land documents under the FRA, 41 are Adiyar, 1,013 Kattunaikar, 279 Kurichyar, 324 Mullu Kurumar, 821 Urali Kurumar and 773 are Paniyar families, not including the recipients living on AKS encroachment sites and project lands, where we could not identify the community they belonged to.42 Among those few who received the largest area of land under the FRA are three Kattunaikar families who were granted possession rights for four hectares of land in Aranamala forest, in the Meppadi range of the south Wayanad forest division. Furthermore, there are only six families who received more than three hectares of land, among them fi ve Kattunaikar families and one Mullu Kurumar family. Accordingly, more than 76% of the total beneficiaries received less than one acre of land. The proportion of individual families who received less than 50 cents of land is more than 57%. Four hundred and seventy Paniyar, 22 Adiyar, 548 Kattunaikar, 69 Mullu Kurumar, 46 Kurichyar and 421 Urali Kurumar families received less than 50 cents of land (Table 1). The 285 families living on encroachment sites or project land received less than 50 cents of land. In brief, the land distributed u nder the FRA will have little impact on people’s livelihoods.

Table 1: Adivasi Landholdings in Wayanad – Community-wise

Wayanad held the FD responsible for the Mixed 750 222.33 549.39 0.30 0.733

unsatisfactory implementation of the Mullu Kurumar 324 173.80 429.45 0.54 1.325

FRA, accusing them of not cooperating Urali Kurumar 821 194.00 479.38 0.24 0.584 in the FRA’s implementation process. Paniyar 773 176.98 437.33 0.23 0.566

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