Tomorrow, Thiruvananthapuram will witness a protest march to the Kerala Legislative Assembly  by those who feel that the recommendations of the report of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel (WGEEP 2011), popularly known as the Gadgil Committee Report, submitted to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in August 2011, and published recently following an order from the Central Information Commission, must be implemented. Kerala is one the states affected deeply by the recommendations of the report. Please join the march from the Secretariat Gate in Thiruvananthapuram at 11 AM.

The tumultuous public discussion that literally erupted in Kerala on the wake of its publication continues to evoke strong and deeply polarized sentiments, leaving many of us who distrust polarization befuddled. It is common knowledge that Kerala, the high land, mid-land and the coast alike, are at the brink of ecological devastation. Nevertheless some of the questions raised in this debate by intellectuals who warn against romanticizing the Gadgil Committee report call for deeper introspection. For example, in an article published in the Mathrubhumi Weekly (5 January 2014), T T Sreekumar argues that the report does not engage sufficiently with the political agendas of radical redistribution of land resources raised by the dalit-adivasi land struggles of Kerala and in fact in some parts seems to ignore the political economy of landlessness in favour of apolitical conservation. He accuses those who condemned the joint protests of the CPM and the Catholic Church on behalf of the affected people of trying to isolate the highland farmers, render their genuine grievances invisible, deny them the democratic right to voice their views, and paint them in villain’s colours. He calls for widespread discussions in which farmers’ voices are fully audible. This interesting piece would urge one to wonder if one should really join tomorrow’s protest or not.

I thought about it, and despite many questions, decided to join tomorrow’s march. My views have changed considerably since the early days, as I read more.Over the past few days, I have been trying to weigh various views and facts to clear my head about this. It is very difficult to think carefully in such an awful din all around but I want to try to think aloud. In fact I am just asking a few questions, raising a few points, in the hope that collective reflection will bring greater clarity. I must emphasize that all that I say here is utterly tentative — I am not clear and would be grateful for rigorous, clarifying discussion.

First, there is the argument that the Gadgil Committee report is suspect because it was never translated in Malayalam or circulated either by the authors or the government. I am not really convinced by this because there seem to be clear indications that the government would have liked to keep this report away from public gaze entirely and let it die quietly — though I have of course no hard evidence. It was submitted to the MoEF in August 2011. It was published in May 2013 only because of RTI action and an order of the Central Information Commission. Dr V S Vijayan, one of the members of the committee, mentioned in an interview to Rediff.com that they did wish to circulate the report, they were denied permission and even copies. He also condemned the government’s laxity towards providing translations of the report. So it appears, unlike some suggestions to the contrary, that the government was really in no tearing hurry to implement the report. It was very unlikely, it now seems to me, considering the fact that Jairam Ramesh, much criticized for allegedly ‘blocking growth’, was shifted from the ministry of environment in July 2011. As far as the question of the non-availability of translation is concerned,T. Peter, the leader of the independent fish worker’s movement in Kerala, remarked to me that during the struggle for coastal zonal regulations, that the translations of the expert committee report was made available to them only under tremendous pressure from the fish workers’ movement.  I am in no position at the moment to compare the two, but this question does bother me: was there no similar pressure from Adivasi movements or farmers’ organizations for translation of this report from the time of its submission to its publication? If not, why? Perhaps no one thought it would be taken seriously or even see daylight?

Secondly, it has been pointed out that the report is technical, academic, and does not include the viewpoints of farmers. There is also the hint that its scientific credentials are strictly tentative, relying upon currently accepted, not absolute, concepts. This is true, but that’s what an expert committee report would look like. As for the tentativeness of its intellectual tools, that’s all one can expect from science, for sure, not absolute truth and importantly, when I read the report and read beyond  what circulates in the Malayalam public sphere discussions, I felt that the members of the committee did not project the report as guaranteed absolute truth. V S Vijayan, in the interview mentioned above, clarified that they had wanted to put up their draft report for discussion on the internet for a month, collect inputs, and incorporate them into the final draft to submit but this proposal was turned down. He says that they were providing the scientific inputs alone for democratic discussion and decision-making — this does not imply necessarily that those inputs are infallible.

It is of course true that none of this happened — instead belligerent war-cries rent the air and misconceptions spread like wildfire. I hold the reaction of the catholic church and the political parties to be primarily responsible for this unbelievably vitiated mood and unquenchable mutual hostility. It is true, as T T Sreekumar pointed out, that the farmers were vilified by some supporters of the Gadgil Committee Report, but the reverse was equally true. The recommendations of the report were grotesquely misrepresented — and let us not forget, the most powerful elements in formal politics were on the side of the ‘farmers’. We had no time to think at all who these people were, the ‘farmers’ that the church had decided to protect. V J Varghese, who has done excellent research on the Syrian Christian migration to Malabar, pointed out to me that the descendents of the generation of the poor who desperately sought refuge from poverty in the hills in the 20th century, have been steadily leaving agriculture, abandoning their villages, unable to cope with the vagaries of the market and climate change. The Adivasi farmers have of course been long stripped of their land and their dignity in multiple ways. The large planters are of course an interest-group in their own right with deep pockets, who do not need the romantic-moral cloak of being ‘farmers’.

But  I am not yet ready however to claim that these ‘farmers’ who are neither the descendents of the first settlers still farming the land nor the adivasi farmers who have been robbed do not exist  — because we simply don’t have good evidence to believe so, hence the dilemma! Is it the case that at least a section of the second generation of the early settlers are still dependent on farming as their primary source of income? Or do they look upon land as a resource to raise loans for the purchase of technical education by which they may move out of agriculture altogether? Whatever be the case, it is entirely plausible that these people are deeply worried and thus prone to agitation. However, is it possible to say that in both of these possible scenarios people have the same stake in the land? Can they be equally be represented as ‘farmers’? Indeed, Varghese also mentioned to me that much land in the hill districts of Keralais now owned or used by predatory capitalists from the mid-lands and coast who have also been passing off as ‘farmers’. To buy the church’s story would be to let this cloak be. Nevertheless we need to know urgently who the farmers are, who have a primary stake on the land there, not just in the question of its market value but also in that of its long-term survival and sustainability. It is they who can raise serious questions to the report, and whose views must be urgently taken on board.It is my belief that their voices remain inaudible in the anti-Nature hysteria whipped up by the  Church and indeed, given the terms of discourse that the church has chosen to adopt, their voices may never be audible in it.

I am also not really sure if the land distribution agenda of the adivasis and dalits is at complete odds with the spirit of the Gadgil Committee Report. Though Sreekumar is perhaps right to say that it does not engage with it seriously enough. For I do remember during the Chengara land struggle, how the occupants stressed their commitment to sustainable farming. Friends in the Dalit Human Rights Movement have also emphasized many times over their commitment to live lives that do not reduce the land to a dead resource. However, I think Sreekumar is right when he says that these orientations must not be assumed but allowed to emerge through appropriate democratic forums of discussion. Also, I have my doubts about the dangers he identifies to land rights once the proposed EFLs  come into being– these dangers are popping up ever-more frequently irrespective of the status assigned to the land and call for a long protracted struggle. The people likely to be most affected are often not unaware of this impending fight. In my ongoing fieldwork in a fishing village on the Trivandrum coast, people showed me possession deeds in which it is stated that the deed-holder must be ready to be evicted without compensation if the government decided to acquire the land! This village is very close to the upcoming Vizhinjam port. T. Peter pointed out to me that these were unconnected to the declaration of the CRZ; it was just the connivance of the local bureaucrats which would happen irrespective of the CRZ.The possessors of these documents themselves are aware of the danger but seemed quite unshaken when I asked them. “Before, we didn’t even have a piece of paper,” one of them told me. “Now we have one, and it is something around which we can fight for our full title-deeds.”

My only serious disagreement with Sreekumar’s piece is with the reference to the history of migration to the hill districts he makes. While it is true that people were driven there by want and political persecution in the 1930s, this is not the whole story right up to the 1970s. The Malabar migration from the late 40s was definitely a hard one but surely one that was celebrated by communists, the government, and the church alike, as a solution to the food crisis. Indeed, while the small farmers of that generation were poor and suffered tremendous hardship, they received tremendous support from both the church and the communists (the hypocrisy of the Hindu right was apparent then as it is now, since they criticized the migrants while seeking to promote Hindu migrants to tribal lands!). Indeed, in the anti-eviction struggles, it was the adivasis who were reduced to a voiceless minority, depicted as anti-development and useless to the Nation, unlike the settlers who were producers of foreign exchange. Pointing to the fact that the settlers were, once, poor and desperate, does not make the critical scrutiny of the current practices of their descendents (if the present ‘farmers’ are really so) invalid.

Also, it may be true that the earliest generation of migrants at least were driven there by the tyrants who controlled the midlands and the coast, but that does not allow us to say that the present inhabitants of the coast and midland should not be critical .  At this point, I want to ask: suppose X accuses Y of having done serious damage to some public cause. If Y responds by raising a counter accusation — that X has indeed harmed the public cause perhaps not now but in other places and times — does that render X’s accusation invalid? It is true that many supporters of the Gadgil Committee Report did make insensitive and undemocratic statements about the opponents; it may also be true that they are involved, structurally at least, in the destruction of the environment in the midlands and coast. Does that however render their critique of the environmental destruction of the highlands invalid? Is this not a version of the tu quoque fallacy? One may perhaps use it as a strategy to evoke a sense of shame in X, but is it good enough as an argument?  Probably to avoid tu quoque, it is necessary to weigh the criticism advanced, respond appropriately, and then demand that double standards be removed, if a case can be effectively made for it?  And probably my ignorance, but is it not the case that upstream environmental destruction may wreak greater havoc in both the long and short runs, and to larger populations?

It has also been asked that if we can really trust the Indian government, which has all but surrendered to crony capitalism and the mining lobbies, to protect our environment. Yes, this is a dilemma indeed but I wonder if it is wise to treat the government as a monolith. Is it the case that we can trust nobody at all? EAS Sarma, former secretary of the Government of India who protested against the setting up of the Kasturirangan working group to evaluate the Gadgil Committee Report, wrote to Jayanti Natarajan that he has requested her to “set up a similar expert committee to evaluate the threats to the Eastern Ghats. Perhaps, sensing opposition from your colleagues who are clearly in league with the crony capitalist promoters of industry, you have preferred not responding to my appeal”. And despite all its failings, why do we still appeal to the Indian government? Surely because we are certain that it will not shift permanently to the USA? Some research on human development in the district of Kottayam in Kerala reveals that nearly one-fifth of the house- properties there are left largely unused as they belong to NRIs, many of who are citizens of the US or other wealthy western countries, who probably have little material stake in Kerala. Communities in the hill districts are also increasingly transnational, from whatever meager research available to us, and it quite possible that the wealthy ‘farmers’ there have strong transnational connections or are aiming for them.  So who  should we strategically pressurize to ensure our ecological survival?  Again, my point is not that all ‘farmers’ are thus: indeed, there must be farmers in these districts who do have a strong stake in both the long term sustainability and the market value of the land there, and I do hope their voices rise above the cacophony produced by the Church, the vested interests who may be presently midland and coastal people after all, and the political classes.

For this,  the discussion on the Gadgil Committee Report must continue and tomorrow’s march is vital that way.