Abstract
Anand P. Vaidya’s Future of the Forest is a multi-sited and multi-scalar ethnography of the making, implementation and partial unravelling of India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA) from 2006. Across an introduction and five main chapters, Vaidya traces the historical process that created conducive conditions of possibility for India’s forest dwellers to stake legal claims to the forest, a process that culminated in the drafting and subsequent contested and uneven implementation of the FRA across India, including in Vaidya’s study villages of Govindnagar and Ramnagar in central India. The analysis moves deftly across scales, from government-level debates and corporate lobbying in Delhi, to groups of networked and vocal forest rights activists constantly on the move, and down to the village-level struggles over the meanings and implications of the FRA in specific contexts. The book is written in an accessible and jargon-free language and offers important insights not only into the social life of the FRA but also into the dynamics of popular mobilization around land and law in contemporary India.
The introduction sets up what Vaidya calls ‘the problem of the forest’, that is, the problem of the extension of property to a group of people, namely forest dwellers, whose presence had been defined by an absence of property rights. Historically, property claims made by Dalit, Adivasi and many low-caste forest dwellers had in practice failed time and again, irrespective of the passage of laws and the issuing of deeds that, in letter if not in spirit, held out the promise of such rights. In light of this despondent historical experience, it is striking how, in just a few years, the FRA had set in motion one of the largest rearrangements of property relations in independent Indian history, effecting significant changes to the lives of millions of India’s forest dwellers and the land they lived on.
The struggle for the FRA is contextualized in the introduction through an engagement with a broad literature on property, dispossession, authority, law-making and collective action. This literature is very competently woven together into a compelling framework. A key argument made in the introduction, and which is persuasively substantiated throughout the book, is that collective action is dialectically linked to law-making. As Vaidya puts it, ‘the law [FRA] was a product of collective action, and the answers that have been provided to the problem of the forest have been delivered through collective action’ (p. 7). Indeed, Vaidya reminds us via critical legal scholarship that the meaning of legal texts—including texts as short as the nine-page FRA—is never fixed, but rather open to a multitude of competing readings whose persuasiveness is always shaped through the collective action of variously positioned collectivities. At the same time, the social life of law enables and even encourages the formation of new collectivities that may stake new collective claims in and through law.
Chapter 1 maps the historical relationship between the state and the forest, with a particular emphasis on what Srirupa Roy (2024) in a recent book has called ‘the long Emergency’, a period that commenced with the annulment of democracy in 1975, and which would be formative for the subsequent evolution of Indian democracy right up to the present moment. In the spirit of conjunctural analysis, the chapter identifies three broader processes in post-Emergency India that have combined to create conducive conditions for forest dwellers to stake legal claims to the forest: the movement of radical left-wing activists into India’s forest belt; the increasing importance of forest resources to capitalist accumulation that led to widespread dispossession and displacement from the forest; and a new role for the Indian judiciary that increasingly came to speak in the name of the public will and which, through the instrument of public interest litigation, ‘formed a new link between the law and social movements’ (p. 46).
Chapter 2 proceeds to analyse how the movement for the FRA emerged from this conjuncture. The discussion of the contentious drafting of the FRA and the strategic use of ‘word traps’ by its drafters is particularly illuminating. Word traps are linguistic devices that covertly smuggle certain narratives and meanings into the law without immediately being seen to do so. The preamble to the FRA contains one such powerful word trap, namely the morally charged narrative of the ‘historical injustice’ inflicted on India’s forest dwellers and the law’s intention of correcting this. Through such word traps, the narratives of the forest rights movement subtly made their way into the law itself. Not only did this create spaces for interpreting the meaning of the law in ways that aligned with the claims of the movement, but it also enabled further collective mobilization around the law among forest-dwelling communities, including in the villages of Govindnagar and Ramnagar. These are in focus in Chapters 3 and 4, which trace the arrival of the FRA via two organizations, the Banwasi Seva Ashram and the Sangathan. Representing very different caste coalitions and political visions, these organizations brought the FRA to life through collective action in radically different ways and for radically different and irreconcilable purposes. Chapter 3 analyses how the FRA first arrives in the villages via stories and rumours, enabling it to be interpreted in a variety of ways and enlisted in competing political projects, including one that fused Adivasi and Dalit politics in novel ways through the narrative of a shared experience of historical injustice, as articulated in the FRA’s preamble. This chapter also contains an interesting discussion—albeit very brief—of the gendered dynamics of collective mobilization around law and its emancipatory potential. Chapter 4, in contrast, traces the subsequent splintering of the new solidarities forged around the question of rights to land and forest, as the socially embedded logics of caste, patronage and hierarchy reassert themselves.
Chapter 5 offers an insightful analysis of the assault on the FRA from above. Within just a few years of its implementation, and with millions of forest dwellers claiming land rights, representatives of large Indian companies and their corporate lobbyists had come to see the FRA as a considerable threat to accumulation itself. In the media, they loudly blamed the FRA for having ushered in a reign of green terror that slowed down accumulation on a national scale, threatening the national economy and damaging India’s GDP growth considerably. In this, they were increasingly supported by the country’s political and economic elites, who ultimately succeeded in weakening the FRA. In this way, the demands of capital, mediated through the collective action of corporate representatives, successfully reshaped the FRA and considerably restricted the terms of substantive citizenship that forest dwellers were able to claim. As the book’s short conclusion alludes to, this scenario has continued and even worsened under the current government, even if the admirable perseverance of the Ramnagar villagers offers a glimmer of hope in dark times.
At 161 not-too-densely written pages, Future of the Forest is a short book, and there are areas of discussion that could fruitfully have been elaborated further. The discussion of the relationship between property, authority, citizenship and legal regimes in Chapter 1 might, for example, in my view, have been further sharpened by engaging with the pioneering work of Christian Lund (2016, 2024) on these topics. There are also strong thematic resonances between the ethnographic account in Chapters 3 and 4 and a larger body of sociological and anthropological work on social movements in India—which (full disclosure!) includes my own (Nielsen, 2015, 2018; Nielsen & Nilsen, 2015)—that has similarly analysed the workings of caste, gender, patronage and leadership within and across movements centred on land and law. The book’s contributions to this field would have been more explicit had this wider literature been alluded to. Chapter 2 also offers a timely reminder of how rapidly Indian democracy has regressed since the birth of the FRA under the UPA government. As Vaidya mentions, the influential National Advisory Council (NAC) comprising activists and academics was set up in 2004 by the UPA to shepherd through progressive legislation that would recast welfare measures as rights to be claimed in the spirit of substantive citizenship. Only 20 years have passed, but an institution such as the NAC is now wholly unthinkable under the current dispensation. The incumbent prime minister neither asks for nor wants advice, and certainly not from a collective that he would see as culturally alienated leftists at best, and as seditious anti-nationalists at worst. The Modi government prefers to stress the patriotic duty of citizens towards the nation-state rather than their rights vis-à-vis the same and has—as the conclusion briefly mentions—done much to undermine the entire rights-based framework put in place by the UPA. This raises uncomfortable and complicated questions about the extent to which rights-based legislation such as the FRA can still function as starting points for a progressive and counterhegemonic social movement project. And if so, what social forces and collectivities would drive such mobilization and through what means? Given the book’s brief conclusion, such questions could usefully have been confronted at greater length here.
Future of the Forest is, nonetheless, a genuine pleasure to read. It is written with a keen ethnographic sensibility and commitment to the struggles of India’s forest-dwelling communities while at the same time offering a generative approach to the relationship between law and collective action in the context of struggles over land and forests that is likely to influence future research on these issues in India as well as elsewhere.