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In January, the Maharashtra forest department arrested Ajit Pardhi, a member of the Pardhi community. At the end of the month, on January 29, the Madhya Pradesh forest department wrote to all wildlife circles and forest officials in the state, noting that Pardhi was “a notorious tiger hunter” who had been “absconding for 11 years”.
The letter made broad statements about the Pardhi community, a denotified tribe that was once classified as “criminal” under colonial laws that are now repealed. The letter stated that the department had learnt that members of the community were active in various parts of the state: specifically, in the seven forest circles of Narmadapuram, Siwani, Chindhwada, Betul, Bhopal, Jabalpur and Balaghat.
“Keeping in view the criminal record of such communities,” the letter said, forest officials were to engage in “intense patrolling and surveillance of them”.
The letter instructed forest departments to carry out this surveillance in four ways: searching settlements of the communities with dog squads; conducting inquiries in the settlements; surveilling those who sold products such as medicinal herbs, food articles, plastic items and bedsheets; and recording their names, addresses, and Aadhaar card details, to be submitted to the state’s “tiger strike force”, which would integrate the information into a database.
Legal experts fear that the directions recall decades-old injustices wreaked on the around 200 communities labelled “born criminals” in colonial times under the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. Under this law, the communities were subjected to intense police surveillance and witnessed rights violations for years, until 1952, when the law was repealed.
“The alert’s mindset and approach resonates with the intent of the Criminal Tribes Act. They are using methods of surveillance which are the same as the British used,” said Tushar Dash, an independent forest rights researcher. “It’s very disturbing. It shows how a structure of violence and criminalisation is created, targeting communities in the name of being criminal tribes.”
On the ground, the impacts of the alert are already visible. “In the last two months, there have been increased cases of raids by the forest department and police,” said Sheshraj Sisodia, who lives in Harda district and works with denotified tribes as a staffer of the NGO Muskan.
“Those who had long-pending cases of hunting dating back to 25 and 50 years ago, the forest department and police have picked them up on the suspicion that they are continuing to hunt, and those left on bail have been arrested again,” he added. “There is an atmosphere of fear.”
Forest communities historically targeted
Legal researchers are particularly concerned about the implications of the circular for forest communities like Pardhis given that, historically, they have been disproportionately accused in wildlife offences.
In cases where the forest department “does not know how an animal has died, forest communities would become easy targets for offences to be registered”, said Mrinalini Ravindranath, research head and lawyer with the Bhopal-based Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project.
Ravindranath herself has come across such cases. For instance, as part of their work, members of CPA Project interviewed a man accused of poaching a tiger. “But, he told us that it was a case where the tiger was already found dead in the forest,” Ravindranath said.
Experts like Ravindranath fear that the new alert could lead to further criminalisation of oppressed communities. CPA Project studied 34 first information reports pertaining to hunting and other related offences filed in 38 districts of the state between 2016 and 2020. In these offences, 61% of the accused belonged to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Denotified Tribes. The researchers also examined more than 1,400 “records of offences” registered by the state’s forest department in this same period, and found that close to 78% of the accused belonged to an oppressed class category.
Particularly striking was the finding that many of these arrests were wrongful, especially in cases involving the hunting of wild pigs. The report noted that 14.5% of all hunting cases recorded in FIRs pertained to instances of “fanda lagakar marna”, or deaths that resulted after the animals got stuck in barbed-wire fencing when they attempted to enter crop fields. “Though this fencing was an act of self-defence, this triggers criminal prosecution as a hunting offence,” the report noted. It added that “a fair share of accidental deaths are flagged as hunting”.
Sisodia pointed out that similar wrongful accusations occur in cases involving other animals, such as partridges. “Patridges are very important culturally to the Pardhi community,” he said. He explained that while the community earlier hunted them, the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 made this illegal. “So now, many keep them domesticated in their home compounds,” he explained. “But the forest department does a lot of inquiries and questioning to them on the suspicion that they are keeping them with the aim of hunting them.”
The report also raised concerns about procedural flaws in investigations of hunting cases. Around 41% of the cases, for instance, did not mention what method of hunting the accused was alleged to have engaged in. Further, in several cases, authorities filed cases of hunting without seizing any weapons, “a practice that is not procedurally sound”, the report noted. Moreover, it observed that there was no standard practice for delineating the sites of alleged crimes and that descriptions of the sites were largely vague – for instance, the names of villages would be mentioned without any details about their location relative to forests.
“Because of this practice, there is no way to know where the offence occurred,” the report said.
Despite these flaws, Ravindranath said, members of forest communities are held without bail for long periods, and cases remain pending for years.
Against Supreme Court directions
Dash argued that the new alert violated the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, both of which seek to decriminalise forest communities by recognising and recording their rights to occupy, access, and manage forest land.
Further, he said, the alert was also in violation of Supreme Court directions. He was referring to a 2024 case from Delhi that dealt with ways in which police surveilled denotified tribes. While hearing the matter, the Supreme Court observed that “Police diaries are maintained selectively of individuals belonging to Vimukta Jatis, based solely on caste bias, a somewhat similar manner as happened in colonial times.” It then directed all state governments to take preventive measures to safeguard such communities from prejudicial treatment.
“There is no legal basis to this alert of excessive surveillance,” said Ravindranath.
Experts argue that the forest department’s prejudice against these communities is evident from the letter’s reference to “hunting communities” and “wandering tribes” with a “criminal record”, terms usually used to refer to Pardhi, Banjara and Kanjar communities.
Such language has also appeared in other government documents, such as the Wildlife Crime Investigation handbook, prepared in 2013 by the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. In a portion laying out instructions to forest officials for procedures to follow while conducting searches and seizures of poached animals, the document suggests that “in the settlements of the poachers/wildlife criminals, especially that of wandering tribes like Parthis and Bawarias, freshly filled up diggings in and around such settlements should be dug and searched; as they have the tendency to hide wildlife articles and other valuables in such places”.
Ravindranath noted that while the forest department keeps an account of who habitual offenders are, “this kind of surveillance that the alert speaks of is not common for forest officials to do”. She added that such directions lead to a law-enforcement process against a community that “revolves around the logic of them being hardened criminals, or almost like addicted to crime”.
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