In Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests (2024), author and environmental lawyer Arpitha Kodiveri draws from her many years working with forest dwellers in India, who have been oppressed, divided and exploited in the name of conservation, yet hold the key to reforming forest law in India.

Her warnings are varied and plentiful—about the state of legal education in this regard, the flawed operations of the Forest Department, the absurdly broad reaching legislation that fails to account for the specificity and complexity of claims to the forest, and more. And her call to action is clear—it is imperative to have a movement in environmental law that tackles these issues and changes the biased principles that underlie and divide conservation efforts in India, in order to face the climate crisis and all that the Anthropocene brings.

The following is an excerpt from the chapter, “The Divisions within: Dalit Exclusion in India’s Forest Laws,” published with permission from the publisher, Yoda Press. It analyses the effects of the failure to recognise the rights of Dalit forest dwellers under current Indian forest laws, and the reasons behind the crisis.

The Divisions within: Dalit Exclusion in India’s Forest Laws

As an environmental lawyer, or more accurately, an upper-caste environmental lawyer in India, I was led to believe that the forest rights and experiences of historical injustice within forests were restricted to Scheduled Tribes alone. This perception was based on a constrained narrative of historical injustice that even the FRA reflects, one in which stewardship can be entrusted to the Scheduled Tribes who are recognised by the law and the state as being culturally attuned to conservation. In effect, this narrative excludes others from that role, among them Dalit forest dwellers.¹ Indeed, the social movement and legal mobilisation that led to the FRA in 2006 did not seriously consider the challenges of Dalit exclusion, with the issue only now emerging in a fragmented manner as environmental and climate movements in India start to use law and legislation as tools to achieve progressive climate action. The experience of Dalit exclusion within the FRA is an example of how a narrow framing of environmental injustice in law can create new conflicts on the ground and negate the potential of the law to address other forms of injustice.

I bore witness to caste-based exclusion in India’s forests when working in the Sariska Tiger Reserve. Deep within the reserve, the local pastoral Gujjar community was busy identifying and revitalising sacred sites called Dev Bannis. The process included the introduction of Hindu elements: an idol of Hanuman, the presence of a local saint, saffron flags adorning the entrance of the site. At a sacred site one day, I saw a young boy avoid entering it, preferring merely to watch the proceedings from outside. I asked a local Gujjar man, Nannakram, why the young boy did this. Slightly hesitant, he responded, ‘He comes from a Dalit family. They are not allowed inside these sacred sites.’ It was the first of many encounters where Dalit exclusion became apparent to me within the forested stretches of India, and within India’s forest laws.²

To better understand the question of Dalit exclusion in India’s forests, and why the question of caste was unaddressed in the drafting of the FRA, in 2015 I decided to study how Dalit communities were using the FRA in densely forested regions such as Kandhamal in Odisha and Sonbhadra in Uttar Pradesh. My intention was not to pit the injustices faced by Adivasi communities against those faced by Dalit communities in forest areas, but to understand the realities of Dalit exclusion and how the law enabled it. Before I set out to do my fieldwork, I spoke with many who were actively part of the forest rights movement to better understand the notion of historical injustice and its relationship with Dalit communities. A common narrative emerged, whereby the rights of Dalit communities were seen as an issue of the plains, and thus an injustice that came to be geographically defined and constrained such that it could not overflow into the thickness of the forests and the hills. My fieldwork then revealed contradictory narratives about how the FRA had been framed in such a way that it divided communities by recognising the historical injustice directed at Scheduled Tribes but excluding the other forest dwellers, the Dalits among them. The reality on the ground proved to be a shared history among Adivasi and Dalit forest dwellers of exclusion, marginalisation and exploitation within the forests.

The FRA had been devised on the basis of carefully carving out who could access these rights, which was further based on a particular narrative of the historical injustice faced by the Adivasi communities. Mukul Sharma, in his work on caste and the environment, has eloquently unpacked how this understanding of historical injustice forms part of a larger narration of eco-casteism.³ He recounts how earlier work by Gadgil and Guha recognised caste as an essential part of India’s social structure that made it ecologically sound; that is, the caste system provided a social structure for using resources more sustainably.⁴ Eco-casteism as a framework is deeply entrenched in the discourse on environmental justice and climate justice. So how do we interrupt this and create a more inclusive understanding of climate justice and law?

In what follows, I chronicle creative and subversive legal interpretations by forest-dwelling communities so as to realise a more inclusive application of forest law. These subversive interpretations can inspire the shaping of future forest and climate law.

Are Dalits Visible in India’s Environmental Struggles?

The Dalit experience in environmental struggles remains little documented, even, as Gail Omvedt argues, invisibilised.⁵ The Dalit experience in forests is similar. In my interviews with Dalit forest dwellers, they commonly asked how it was that their demand for rights was not seen as legitimate when they had been experiencing similar forms of injustice to others living in forest areas. Mukul Sharma talks about how the participation of Dalits in environmental movements is obscured by subsuming them under categories like ‘peasants’, ‘local communities’ and ‘farmers’, when the reality is that Dalit communities have contributed to a variety of environmental struggles, from those involving big dams to others.⁶ Dalit forest-dwelling communities are the unseen stewards of forests, invisibilised both by environmental movements and environmental law.

When I asked one forest rights activist about the issue of Dalit rights in forests, she exclaimed, ‘Well, the injustices of the plains need to be addressed. They are then pushed into the hills, escaping the plains, and how can their claims of injustice be addressed in forests now?’ This idea that Dalits are legitimate claimants of injustice in the plains but not the forests is something many activists echo. Perhaps this has emerged from efforts by forest rights activists to fold the multiple claims of injustice into one—a challenging task, as experiences of injustice vary in the forests.

The pressure to legally recognise a singular aspect of injustice in forest areas also has roots in the ecological realm. The inclusion of the Dalit forest dwellers’ claim to land within the OTFD category may lead to the increased fragmentation of forest land. The use of the FRA to correct the failed land-redistribution efforts of the government stands, yet the question that remained unanswered as I interviewed Dalit communities within Scheduled Areas, who are seen as outsiders usurping land belonging to Adivasis, is how the law designed these inequities by privileging the claims of certain communities to rights and denying others.

In the development of environmental law, the question of caste has arisen to an extent when the law has grappled with issues of atrocities and land rights, but never when issues like forest rights or pollution have been tabled. Omvedt, in her work on the Chilika Lake, Odisha, conservation success story, shows how even a struggle that was claimed to represent a Dalit environmental movement excluded the region’s Dalit community—the Hadis. This community is still unable to access fishing rights, which are exercised by the Scheduled Castes.⁷

Dalit forest dwellers are often collectively referred to as the Mahad Satyagraha, after an important episode in the Dalit environmental law struggle. The Mahad Satyagraha was a march led by Dr BR Ambedkar in 1927 to access water from a public water tank in Mahad, in Maharashtra. The judgment in the case, handed down in 1935, is salient as the legal argument concerned how a village water tank identified by the Bombay land revenue code as public was claimed to be private by the local upper caste on the basis of custom. But the court ruled that custom could not prevent access to a public resource like water tanks.⁸ The Dalit forest dwellers I interviewed recounted how exclusion from access to forests was also an expression of untouchability, given the law had come to understand the forest as a commons under certain conditions. As a I spoke to them, it became clear to me that there exists a Dalit environmental jurisprudence that has to be brought to the fore to inform the future of forest and climate law, the Mahad judgment being just one such example.

During the framing of the exploitative colonial forest policy in the nineteenth century, Jotiba Phule, a famed social reformer and anti-caste thinker, attacked the policy on the grounds that it furthered the exploitation of communities dependent on agriculture, and spoke to how the authoritarian forest governance embedded in these laws marginalised the farmer and their right to graze.⁹ There has always been a Dalit critique of exploitative forest laws, as my interviews with Dalit forest dwellers made evident; it is just that they have never been front and centre in shaping the contours of defiant citizenship practice.¹⁰