Green Peace Shattered

They both stand for people and planet earth’s survival. Yet, circumstances have driven a wedge between the Bombay Environmental Action Group (beag) and Nivara Hakk Samiti (nhs). The bone of contention for these friends-turned-foes being the Borivili National Park (bnp) in Mumbai. Strange though it may sound, both the organisations in their fight for justice and egalitarianism are pitted against one another. While the beag has staked its all in upholding the cause of the tribals inhabiting the Borivili forest, the nhs is hell-bent on securing the rights of slum-dwellers who have been forced by an abjectly objective situation to encroach upon the park.

The consequence has been bitter acrimony and in the process the two sides have ended up putting at stake the fate of 300,000 slum-dwellers on the periphery of the forest and more importantly 2,500 families of Warli tribals (comprising 45 per cent of the Adivasi population). Besides, of course, the Kokanas, Katkaris, Malhars, Kolis, Dhodis and Dublas who have been living inside the forest for decades if not for centuries. Manik Rama Sapte, whose family tree goes back 500 years, is one of the many examples.

The bnp was designated a reserve forest in 1983. It has taken less than two decades for the city to come home to tribals like Sapte. Slums abut the bnp and the Bombay High Court in a sweeping order last month, encompassing the Adivasis, ordered their eviction.

To add insult to injury, Sapte and his fellow tribals have been asked by the forest department to pay Rs 7,000 as expenses towards being rehabilitated. Sapte was outraged. On behalf of all the tribals and aided by the Shramik Mukti Andolan (sma), he filed an intervention application before the high court on March 22, expressing his anguish that the 15,000 tribal households should be asked to quit what has been their traditional home and source of income long before the seven islands of Bombay were gifted in dowry by the Portuguese to King Charles II of England three centuries ago.

As the islands were joined together and much land was reclaimed from the sea as well as the nearby villages, the city came into conflict with the tribals’ habitat. Says sma’s Vithal Lad: "The Adivasis did not come to Bombay. Bombay went to the tribals." Lad is a co-petitioner in the case. He asks in broken English: "From here where they will go?"

It is a serious dilemma and one that should concern the government as well. For, these tribals have known no other home and, along with other Adivasis elsewhere, are constitutionally empowered to live off the forests which they do not deplete but help preserve, in their own interest. Avers the sma: "They are neither slum-dwellers, nor are they encroachers and trespassers. They have no dwelling or native place other than the forest which has been theirs for so many centuries. And till today they haven’t experienced migration." In other words, they would simply die if evicted. This is not one of those top-of-the-hat statements but is based on rigorous study and scientific inquiry which had been conducted on the Indian tribals by British anthropologist Verrier Elwin. So, when Lad says, "You might as well send them to Kerala or Kashmir as Kalyan. They will die anywhere. They can live only within the forest," he is basically arguing this well-known formulation.

The story of tribal conflict with the urban environment goes back to 1957 when the predominantly tribal Thane district was bifurcated to carve out the Bombay suburban district, leaving 20 of their 56 hamlets in Thane and 36 inside the bnp, and some (like Ravanpada, so named because the tribals here worship Ravana as a god) in the entertainment zone which has a tiger safari in the reserved forest area. As a result of urban settlements pushing their way into the jungles (which provide for 90 per cent of Mumbai’s green cover), there have been incidents of leopards boarding empty best buses at the jungle terminus and stretching out on the long back seat, unnoticed by humans - later frightened out of their wits as the animal sat up and roared when the bus began to move.

But while the passengers might have abandoned the bus, the city did not give up its claim on the jungle - it receives much of its water supply from the two lakes inside the bnp. This is one of the reasons why the beag filed a petition in the Bombay High Court which on May 7, 1997, passed an order for the demolition of the hutments edging the park and not the the Adivasi homes within it. The then Shiv Sena-bjp coalition government should have obliged with alternative housing and infrastructure and livelihood to the people. Now there is a Congress-ncp government in place, but it too has been unable to resolve the problem and is, therefore, caught in the crossfire between the nhs, whose president is Shabana Azmi, and the beag, led by Debi Goenka. Says Bittu Sahgal, editor of Sanctuary magazine and member of the Maharashtra Wildlife Advisory Board: "In the three years since that high court order, I am afraid neither the past nor the current government has displayed the political will to solve the problem. They have thought only to put their interests before the people to win some cheap votes. As a result, the poor slum-dwellers and the forest have suffered."

So has the relationship between the nhs and the beag, which began on the same side in 1997, coming together to identify rehabilitation procedures for the slum-dwellers. Sahgal, now playing peacemaker between the two, describes them both as "good organisations forced by an apathetic government to fight with each other rather than together against the common enemy". The adversary being the government, the politician and the slumlord, though not necessarily in that order. But now such is the antipathy between the two that noted architect P.K. Das, associated with the nhs since its inception in 1981, minces no words in describing the environmental activists as anti-people. Says Das: "They are ignorant about any human issues and they are looking at environment without people. Environmental activism today is totally elitist."

"Not true," retorts Sahgal. "The nhs people are completely off the wall and are behaving irresponsibly. The easiest thing to do is to accuse environment activists as anti-people. But why blame each other? Has anyone thought of what would happen to Bombay if even one lake inside the bnp which has sweet water is polluted and destroyed? If there are two consecutive monsoon failures, the city will have to be evacuated in 48 hours." But the nhs argues that bnp’s Adivasis are bootleggers and illicit fellers of trees who rent out their houses to outsiders and that they are not living off the forest but seeking jobs in the city.

So who brought the city to them anyway, queries the sma, which is now pinning its hopes on the Supreme Court, even as Adivasis await the high court’s ruling on their application. According to Lad, evicting these Adivasis from their traditional homes would only open up the forests to the nefarious networks of poachers, timber smugglers, land mafia contractors and middlemen. Today, they help the forest department control these activities, even as they live off its produce. "They live because of the forest and the forest lives because of them. Each needs the other." There is no dilemma in the tribal mind, at least, about who belongs to whom and where. Clearly, they belong together.