Seeing red over green

On a rainy day last week, in a lovely forest in Gujarat that is under threat from Adivasi claimants...

On a rainy day last week, in a lovely forest in Gujarat that is under threat from Adivasi claimants, I heard of the latest storm over the nuclear deal. How bizarre, I thought, that the two worst things the Marxist parties did should combine to share a moment. Had Commissar Karat and his comrades not spent two years making dire threats and breathing malevolently down the Prime Minister8217;s neck, he would perhaps have been able to persuade the world and his own countrymen that India was making the most important foreign policy change since we invented non-alignment.

It would have been easier for the Prime Minister to explain that the deal was not just the best that India could hope for but that it goes beyond energy security and civilian nuclear know-how to change India8217;s position in the world. If you got swept away by the latest 8216;leak8217;, please reassure yourself that the deal allows India to give away very little to get a great deal. Commentators in the Western media constantly point this out. To give you just one comment from a recent issue of The Economist: 8220;The NSG was set up precisely to stop countries doing what India did to get a start in the bomb business: abusing technology and skills provided for civilian purposes. The group8217;s ban on trade with countries that break the non-proliferation rules has been the chief underpinning of the NPT regime. Waive the ban and the NSG will have little point. It should refuse to make an exception for India. And so should America8217;s Congress.8221; To this let me add that in my view no more proof is needed of the deal8217;s beneficial qualities than that India8217;s two most ardent ill-wishers China and Pakistan have been virulent opponents of the deal.

Let me return to my lovely forest in Gujarat to tell you about the irreparable harm that the Tribal Land Rights Bill is already beginning to do. The Marxists proudly acknowledge that it was they who forced the Sonia-Manmohan Government to make the law, giving Adivasis the right to forest land. It started being implemented from January this year without any noise from our usually noisy environmentalists. Never have they been more needed and never have they been more inexplicably silent.

The forest I speak of is called Ratan Mahal and is hidden away in a remote corner of one of Gujarat8217;s most backward regions, populated almost entirely by Adivasis. They are poor but not so poor that the mobile phone and dish TV and motorcycles have not arrived. In Dahod, I saw young Adivasi girls and boys taking computer courses. Modernity is spreading fast because of the 21st century8217;s technological tools and everyone agrees that the next generation will have given up primitive, rural life for better prospects in Gujarat8217;s booming cities. Before that, though, their parents would have succeeded in wiping out forests like Ratan Mahal because of the destructive, myopic law that the Marxists forced through. Why was there no opposition from the 8216;right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP8217;, you may be asking, and the short answer to that is that no political party dare oppose free gifts to the poor. And, the BJP8217;s record in Opposition has been so appalling that they have opposed the nuclear deal when they know and we know that had they been in government, they would have signed it.

The Ratan Mahal forest has two or three small Adivasi villages within its environs and technically, the new law was supposed to just protect the rights of those who are already cultivating forest land. This is not how things are working on the ground. Every Adivasi village in the area now has an 8216;agent8217; who is helping everyone acquire the rights to a portion of the forest as long as they are ready to pay for his services. At last count there were more than 50,000 claimants and if they all get the land they are asking for, there will be no Ratan Mahal forest left. Already, forest officials have to be on heightened vigil against Adivasis who come with tree-cutting machines that fell acres of forest land in hours. This helps them establish proof of cultivation.

This is not just the story of one forest but of thousands of forests across India. When we have finished distributing land to Adivasis, we will have no forests left and a mega environmental disaster on our hands. Meanwhile, young Adivasi children will be wearing jeans and T-shirts and working as computer programmers in Delhi and Mumbai and Leftist politicians will be scrounging around for other poor people to help in the denuded wasteland that rural India will have become.