Our Fight for the Forest
A testimonial by Bindia Bai and Subadra
In January the Forest Development Corporation officials came and hired some men from our village to work in the forest nearby. They said they wanted to cut some diseased trees and clear naturally felled wood, but after a couple of days we knew that the officials had bigger plans. The FDC men had started cutting healthy Sal trees as well, clearing a huge area of the forest. The village men refused to go on working. They remembered what had happened to the bamboo in the forest when we were children.
When the men returned and reported what was happening, all of the mitanins [women community leaders] and others from the village had a meeting. We women decided to go right then to the forest and stop the cutting. The men refused to go, and tried to stop us. They said they would be beaten up or put in jail if they protested against the cutting, and the same thing would happen to us. We told them “If anything bad happens, it happens to my body, not yours, so it’s my decision to make” and we went without them.
When we got to the place where the cutting was happening, there were about 50 FDC men there, but most of them ran away when they saw us. There were about 100 of us, and we were really angry, because we saw how many trees they had already cut. We snatched the saws and axes they had been using so they couldn’t resume work after we left and took them back to the village, hiding them in Bindia Bai’s house.
The next day the same official came to my [Bindia Bai’s] house and demanded the tools back. I refused and told him that it wasn’t my decision to make. We had all taken them together, so we had to decide together whether to give them back. I told him “you go around to the village and call everyone to a meeting at the Panchayat [village level government] and we can decide.” He gave up – I think he was embarrassed to go door to door in the heat asking for a meeting.
Thinking that there would surely be more trouble, some of us went to the police office to tell them that we had taken the tools and try to file a case against those cutting the trees. The police refused to help. They accused us of being Naxalites [members of a Maoist uprising in rural India]. They threatened to go fetch a woman policeman to strip off our clothes and beat us. But by then more of our friends had come to support us, so the police finally relented and took our letter asking to file the case.
On March 17th, I was walking by the home of the Sarpanj [elected village head] on my way back from another village. I saw him inside with another man I didn’t recognize, signing some papers. Thirty or forty women were working nearby on a small government project. I went and got them, and we came back to confront the Sarpanj and find out what was going on.
When they saw us they said, “It’s good that you’re here, you should sign this paper too,” but we could tell from their faces that they were nervous to see us. We told them to read the paper out loud. It was a contract authorizing the FDC to clear the forest for a teak plantation. We refused to sign, but he already had the Sarpanj’s signature, so he went to get on his motorcycle to leave. We surrounded his motorcycle, and somebody snatched the key. We demanded that he give us the signed paper. At first he refused, but when we told him we were going to drop a match into the gas tank, he relented and gave us the paper. We went back and gave the Sarpanj hell for trying to give away the rights to our livelihood.
The forest has been quiet since then, and next week we have a meeting where we hope to put forward our demands to the government officials. We won’t allow these trees to be cut. If they come back and try to clear more of the forest, we will cling to the trunks and tell them that they’ll have to cut us as well!
Sign up for E-News.
Tribal people dress much like other
rural Indians, and many have been
converted to Hinduism in an effort
to increase votes for the Hindu
nationalist party, but their
traditional way of life is very
different from that of the rest
of rural India.
Photo by Alex Stonehill.
Saving the Sal Trees
Direct Action in the Tribal Hills of Chhattisgarh
Chhattisgarh, INDIA--“Zindabad!” shouts Bindia Bai, pressing her hands together in greeting as she sits down on the hard-packed mud floor to meet with fellow village women in the sunny courtyard of her home. This revolutionary rallying cry meaning “victory” echoes throughout Batka Behra village and has been spreading across the remote tribal hills of Chhattisgarh state in recent months. A new movement challenging government corruption and resource cooption is building among these ancient people.
Bindia and other indigenous people in the tribal region of Koriya live largely in isolation from mainstream Indian society, and survive through hunting and gathering from the surrounding forests supplemented by small scale farming. Commonly referred to simply as “the tribals,” their way of life has long been considered backwards by outsiders. The communal nature and extreme isolation of their society have made them ready targets for exploitation.
Despite constitutional promises made in the interest of tribals to ensure food security and protection against land displacement, pervasive corruption and a lack of interest in their needs have compromised enforcement of these laws. Most of India’s tribals, who now make up roughly 8% of the total population, have seen their land and resources dwindle in recent generations.
“When we were children these forests were filled with bamboo plants which we used for weaving and tools,” says Bindia, describing the changes she’s seen in her lifetime, “but then the people from Birla Corporation [an Indian paper manufacturer] came and now there is no bamboo.”
The Forest Development Corporation (FDC – a for-profit department of the Indian government) arrived three months ago with intentions of clearing the land of old growth Sal trees in favor of a lucrative teak plantation, which would be useful as timber but would not support a viable ecosystem. But Bindia and fellow Batka Behra village women were determined that the Sal would not vanish as the bamboo had.
Tools confiscated by village women in
Batka Behra are still being kept under
lock and key in the house of the Deputy
Sarpanj.
Photo by Alex Stonehill.
Armed with only their chant of “Nari Shakti, Zindabad!” (Women’s Power, Victory!), over 100 women marched into the forest to confront the loggers. Recognizing that they were outnumbered, the loggers relinquished their tools to the angry women and fled. Those successfully confiscated tools remain locked away in the house of the Sarpanj – the elected village head – and to date the logging has not resumed.
The fight for the Sal forest is not the first political undertaking of Batka Behra’s women. They started organizing two years ago when coalitions insisted that a government doctor visit their village more often. They went on to protest price gouging by distributors of government subsidized rice, and then to advocate for a more nutritious lunch menu at the local government school. That campaign resulted in the statewide adoption of their new menu. These victories inspire pride in the women of Batka Behra, but it is the fight for the forest that will ultimately determine the fate of their lives and livelihoods.
“We get everything that we need to survive from the forest,” says Bindia, explaining the complexity of the tribals’ dependency on and relationship with the forest. “We get leaves and seeds and food and firewood. If the government cuts these trees and replants teak we won’t be able to get what we need to live.”
This crucial battle for control over their resources has galvanized many in the area, encouraging Koriyans from diverse tribes to work together. The esteem that the Batka Behra women are held in is evident when they inspire an impromptu community meeting at the site of an FDC clear cut, where tribal villagers face off with security guards posted to protect the fallow timber stacked along the roadside.
“The government will listen and hear them out,” says one FDC guard in response to the passionate shouting coming from the small knot of angry villagers that has gathered around him. “This is what the majority of people are saying and so I’m liking it.”
The Indian government has already felled many trees in
Koriya. Women like Bindia Bai (above) have
prevented their removal and sale.
Photo by Alex Stonehill.
But gaining the sympathy of the higher level officials behind the logging project won’t be so easy. In many cases the financial motivations for clearing the forest far outweigh any desire to protect the tribal way of life. The Sal trees that are being cut to make way for the plantation can fetch up to 10,000 rupees (about $250) each, and the Maoist Naxalite insurgency threatening this area provides both a motivation to establish a government presence in the forest, and a good excuse to suppress any resistance to such projects.
Despite these barriers, the women of Batka Behra remain determined to save the forest and have called a gathering of Koriyan communities and preservationists to meet with government representatives in an effort to permanently halt the logging. But even if these legal channels fail, the women of Batka Behra maintain that they will use any means necessary to protect their trees.
“First, when the men came to take the bamboo, we were even afraid of the motorcycles they rode in on and we ran away,” says Bindia, emphasizing how the bitterness of that past wrong fuels the current struggle. “Now we know we cannot afford to be afraid.”
© 2007 The Common Language Project
