Uttar Pradesh: The Tharu community's legal battle for forest rights
The northern Indian state has arbitrarily denied land rights granted under the Forest Rights Act of 2006. The legal process has reached a stalemate, but the case of the village of Kajaria has reignited the debate over the slow implementation of the regulations and the broken promises to indigenous peoples, for whom forests are not only a source of subsistence but also the basis of their identity.
Allahabad (AsiaNews) – The Tharu community's battle for recognition of their rights to Uttar Pradesh's forests has reached a new stalemate.
After years of appeals and postponements, the petition filed by the leaders of Kajaria, a village in Lakhimpur Kheri district, is still pending before the Allahabad High Court.
The hearing scheduled for 13 October was not held due to the early closure of the session, and the next date will not be set until after the Indian festival of Diwali, 20 October.
The appeal challenges the "arbitrary and mechanical" denial by which the State of Uttar Pradesh denied the community the rights provided under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006, a law that recognises and protects the land and subsistence rights of indigenous Adivasi peoples and traditional forest dwellers.
The Tharu are an indigenous people historically settled in the forested areas on the border between India and Nepal. Officially recognised as a Scheduled Tribe in 1967, the Tharu of Uttar Pradesh have lived for generations in villages like Kajaria, where the forest represents a vital resource and a key element of identity.
Government documents from the 1970s and 1980s attest that the area was permanently inhabited by the community, and that the village obtained the status of a revenue village (a small administrative unit in India, historically established for the assessment and collection of taxes on agricultural land) without excluding collective use rights to forest land.
The dispute began in 2013, when the Kajaria Gram Sabha (the village assembly established by the FRA) approved the Tharu's claims for recognition of their Community Forest Resource Rights, which include the collection of firewood, grazing livestock, and the collection of materials for domestic use.
The documentation was forwarded to the Sub-Divisional Level Committee (SDLC) and then to the District Level Committee (DLC), which is responsible for formally granting community rights to forest lands and resources.
The authorities put off their decision for years, raising technical objections and restrictive interpretations of the law. Only in December 2020 did the SDLC approve the claims, forwarding them to the district level. Three months later, in March 2021, the DLC rejected the entire file, citing the same reasons used for other indigenous villages in the area.
According to the claimants, the rejection was decided without consulting the local community, violating the procedure established by law.
The decision, they argue, was based on "extraneous and irrelevant" arguments, such as the fact that the village received benefits from government programmes or already had a recognised administrative status, factors that do not affect the right to use the forests guaranteed by the FRA.
The failure to grant rights is not just a bureaucratic problem. The Tharu report constant threats and harassment from forest authorities, and even false criminal complaints when they attempt to carry out daily activities such as collecting firewood or grazing livestock.
The state's failure to respond, since it has not yet filed its defence motion more than a month after the previous hearing, highlights the structural difficulties in implementing the Forest Rights Act.
Nearly 20 years after its enactment, the law continues to face bureaucratic resistance and the persistent tendency of forest authorities to view local communities as "illegal occupiers" rather than land custodians.
Organisations such as Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) and the All India Union of Forest Working Peoples (AIUFWP) have been following similar cases for years, speaking out against a pattern of exclusion that deprives forest communities of livelihoods and autonomy.
The case of the Tharu people of Kajaria, who are waiting for a new hearing, has thus become a symbol of the gap between the formal recognition of rights and their effective implementation.
The community hopes that the Court will restore not only the rule of law, but also the promise of justice that the Indian Parliament enshrined in 2006, when it first recognised that the forest also belongs to its inhabitants.
INDIAN MANDALA IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO INDIA. WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE IT EVERY FRIDAY? TO SUBSCRIBE, CLICK HERE.
.png)
11/01/2022 16:49
