Opinion Latest amendment to Wildlife Protection Act continues the tendency to foster criminalisation in the garb of conservation

The need for criminal laws to further the aim of wildlife conservation has remained unchallenged since its conception. From regulating hunting to prohibiting it completely and the creation of ‘Protected Areas (PA)’ where conservation can be undertaken without the interference of local forest-dwelling communities, the control of state and the forest department on forests — and the casteist underpinnings of conservation — would not have been possible without criminal law. The recent move to increase penalties by four times for general violations (from Rs 25,000 to Rs 100,000) and from Rs 10,000 to Rs. 25,000 for animals receiving the most protection should raise questions about the nature of the WPA’s policing framework.

An upcoming study by the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project (CPA Project) examined arrest records, FIRs, offence records of the police and forest department in Madhya Pradesh to uncover this impact. The research reveals that persons from oppressed Scheduled Tribe communities and other forest-dwelling groups constitute the majority of accused in wildlife-related crimes. The forest department uses the threat of criminalisation to force cooperation from these communities. It has also devised a system of using community members as informants and draws on their loyalty by employing them on a daily wage basis. Cases filed under the WPA did not pertain solely to the comparatively serious offence of hunting: Collecting wood, honey, and mushrooms formed the bulk of prosecution in PAs. Over 95 per cent of the cases filed by the Forest Department are still pending.

Hunting offences, by and large, pertained to Schedule III and IV animals such as the wild boars – they receive lesser protection than animals like tigers. Around 17.47 of the “hunting” offence between 2016-2020 pertained to elephants. Only one in the five animals most hunted belonged to Schedule I — the peacock. Surprisingly, eight per cent of the cases related to fishing — only certain species of fish are under Schedule 1. A whopping 133 cases pertaining to fishing (incorrectly classified as Schedule V species) were filed in the last decade in MP.

Forest rights, individual and collective, as part of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) were put in place to correct the injustice meted out by forest governance laws. These rights recognised forest-dependent livelihoods. But in inviolate PAs, making the FRA subservient to the WPA, thereby impeding its implementation. In our fieldwork, we noticed that while individual forest rights in buffer zones of the Kanha National Park were recognised, the same cannot be said of collective rights over the use of forest resources, fishing, and protecting forest resources. Fishing, an important part of subsistence for tribal communities, has come to be regularly criminalised as part of the WPA. The occurrence of such infringements in PAs made the offence punishable by three to seven years.

In a case documented by the CPA Project, five men were apprehended by a Range Officer and Beat guards as they sat across a fire with fish they had caught from the nearby river. The fish amounted to less than 500 grams. But they were accused of causing damage to a wildlife habitat under a host of WPA provisions. The case against them was filed in 2016 and is still pending in the courts. Meanwhile, one of the accused persons has passed away.

The case illustrates the heft of the forest department’s discretionary powers of investigation and prosecution. Criminal cases filed by the department are rarely compounded — in cases that have such a provision — since they are meant to create a “deterrent effect”. They instil fear in communities. Such fear is crucial in the way in which the department mediates governance in protected areas rarely. The law under WPA must take cognisance of such a system of governance — if forest rights claims have not yet been recognised, livelihood-related activities cannot be a cause for criminalisation. The regressive policing allowed by the WPA and other forest legislation has attenuated the FRA’s beneficial scope — any further amendments must take stock of wrongful cases (such as in the case of fishing) and resultant criminal prosecution.

The writers are with the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project