As PM pays ‘lip service’ to Adivasis’ cause, govt goes ‘full throttle’ to deny them justice: Cong

PTI, Nov 15, 2024, 9:42 AM IST

The Congress on Friday accused the Centre of going “full throttle” on attempts to deny Adivasis justice and said the Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan (DAJGUA) was a “full mockery” of the Forest Rights Act, illustrating the government’s hypocrisy.

The Opposition party also claimed that DAJGUA, in “typical Manuvadi fashion”, only sees these communities as forest-dwelling ‘vanvasis’ who are ‘labhaartis’ (beneficiaries), rather than political and economic actors in their own right.

Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh said today is the 150th birth anniversary of ‘Dharti Aaba Bhagwan Birsa Munda’, one of the greatest sons of India and a fierce advocate of self-governance and social justice.

“The non-biological PM is in Jamui, Bihar paying lip service to the cause of the Adivasis on this occasion, even as his Government goes full throttle on attempts to deny Adivasis justice,” Ramesh alleged in a statement.

“The Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan (DAJGUA) – named after Bhagwan Birsa Munda, but a full mockery of the Forest Rights Act- illustrates this hypocrisy,” he said.

Ramesh said the Forest Rights Act ( FRA 2006) passed by the Manmohan Singh’s government was a revolutionary law and it transferred power and authority over forests from the forest department to the gram sabha.

In another departure from precedent, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs was empowered as the nodal authority to implement the law, he pointed out.

The FRA empowered the Adivasi community and Gram Sabhas to govern and manage forests as a major reform to ensure democratic governance of forests, Ramesh said.

“After the revolution, however, came Narendra Modi’s counter-revolution.

DAJGUA fundamentally undoes this historic law and the democratic reform in forest governance,” he claimed.

Ramesh said it dilutes the authority of Ministry of Tribal Affairs by giving authority to the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change in the implementation of FRA.

Rather than empower the FRA’s statutory bodies – namely the gram sabha, the sub-divisional committee, the district level committee, and the state level monitoring committee – DAJGUA has created a vast parallel institutional mechanism of FRA cells at the district and sub-divisional levels and arming them with large funds and contractual staff, he pointed out.

They are directly under the centralised bureaucratic control of Ministry of Tribal Affairs and State Tribal Welfare Departments, and lack accountability to the FRA’s statutory bodies.

DAJGUA empanels and engages technical agencies/domain experts /corporate NGOs for the FRA implementation and CFR management activities of the gram sabhas by the State Tribal Welfare Departments, he said.

Ramesh argued that these FRA cells are to take over what the FRA statutory bodies are required to do by law, leaving these statutory bodies to be appendages to these FRA Cells, nominal bodies reduced to carrying out the biddings of these FRA cells, he said.

“This has been done without attention to the economic and social sensitivities involved, even as a massive budget has been allocated for this (Rs. 1 lakh for the technical agencies for each CFR). For example, in Madhya Pradesh, the BJP government engaged the Maharashtra Knowledge Company Limited (MKCL) to create the VanMiTRA app, which made the transparent process of submitting FRA claims into an obscure, online process that technical operators took charge of,” he said.

Three lakh claims were rejected as a result, he added.

Adivasi groups are justifiably worried about the same happening at a large scale due to the engagement of such tech agencies, Ramesh said.

The forest department has now been allowed to be a part of the gram sabha’s own committee for management of community forest resources, a direct violation of the FRA, Ramesh said.

“The FRA was enacted for empowering Adivasi and forest-dwelling communities to govern and manage their resources. DAJGUA, in typical Manuvadi fashion, only sees these communities as forest-dwelling vanvasis who are labhaartis, rather than political and economic actors in their own right,” he alleged.

As captured in the Adivasi Sankalp unveiled by Rahul Gandhi during the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Nandurbar, Maharashtra on the 12th of March, 2024, the Congress is committed to the honest and fair implementation of the FRA, Ramesh asserted.

“It is part of our guarantees to the people in both Jharkhand and Maharashtra and will continue to be a priority for upcoming assembly and parliamentary elections,” he stressed.