Journal of Peasant Studies

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Journal of Peasant Studies

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Democracy, development and (Re-) visions of nature: Rural conflicts in the western Himalayas

To cite this Article: , 'Democracy, development and (Re-) visions of nature: Rural conflicts in the western Himalayas', Journal of Peasant Studies, 33:4, 678 - 706 xxxx:journal To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/03066150601119991 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150601119991

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Democracy, Development and (Re-) Visions of Nature: Rural Conflicts in the Western Himalayas ASHWINI CHHATRE and VASANT SABERWAL

This article explores the interacting politics of development and conservation and the contradiction between conservation and democracy through the specific experiences in the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP), India. Unravelling the connections between the local, regional, national and the global, in the sphere of politics, conservation, and development, we examine the context within which the specific conservation outcomes have evolved. We argue that centralized governance of nature – especially wildlife conservation – is incompatible with the exigencies of democracy. Secondly, we demonstrate that the locus of the problem is not opportunistic politics, but the particular science and ideology of conservation, which seeks to impose a culturally narrowly defined vision of nature on society at large. We suggest that the events in GHNP are representative of a widespread phenomenon, whereby rural communities adversely affected by conservation policies have exploited the exigencies of democratic politics to good effect, exhibiting an agency that is yet to be theorized adequately.

INTRODUCTION

In the summer and autumn of 1999, an unusual series of events occurred in and around the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) in the state of Ashwini Chhatre, Center for International Development, Harvard University, 79 JFK St, Cambridge MA 02140 USA. E-mail: [email protected]; Vasant Saberwal, Programme Officer, The Ford Foundation, New Delhi, India. E-mail: [email protected]. The authors would like to acknowledge the many ways in which residents of villages on the fringes of the Great Himalayan National Park have contributed to the research and thinking that informs this article. We are also grateful to Satya Prasanna and Sanjay Barnela for their collaboration on this project, and to Tom Brass for insightful comments that have greatly helped sharpen the argument presented here. The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.33, No.4, October 2006, pp.678–706 ISSN 0306-6150 print/1743-9361 online DOI: 10.1080/03066150601119991 ª 2006 Taylor & Francis


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Himachal Pradesh in northern India. During May, the park was declared closed to the thousands of rural inhabitants living on the western periphery, scattered over more than a hundred hamlets. Their use of resources from the 750 square kilometres of the park, primarily for the grazing of sheep and goats and the collection of medicinal plants for sale, was deemed to be detrimental to the conservation of the park’s biological diversity. That is to say, to the 30 species of mammals and over 200 species of birds, but particularly the globally endangered Western Tragopan.1 This action by the government of the state of Himachal Pradesh indicated that it had allocated priority to long-term ‘conservation’ of biological diversity over the shortterm ‘livelihood’ interests of the local rural population. However, in the same official notification, 10 km2 of area were excluded from the proposed expanse of the national park on the grounds of being ecologically insignificant. Conservationists and biologists who had been studying the park for many years denounced this claim about ecological insignificance, and pointed out that the area in question was one of the best habitats for the Western Tragopan in the whole park. They were also quick to link the exclusion of the small area to the proposed Parbati Hydroelectric Project, an 800-megawatt behemoth that was to be located in the area classified as ‘ecologically insignificant’. Since construction associated with the Parbati Hydroelectric Project would undoubtedly result in ecological disturbance, conservationists pointed out that, contrary to its stated aim, this proposal by the Himachal Pradesh government indicated that it prioritized ‘development’ over its longterm ‘conservation’ interest. In the course of the ensuing months, local rural populations mobilized themselves to lobby their political leadership, particularly their elected representatives to the State Legislative Assembly and the National Parliament, and forced them to ease restrictions imposed by the Forest Department on their entry into the national park. The representatives responded favourably, and compelled the administration to bend the rules and allow people access to the park. Conservationists cried foul once again, alleging a gross breach of the law, perpetrated by politicians, ostensibly with an eye on the national elections due in November 1999. Over the following years, local populations continued to enjoy de facto access to the park’s resources, by virtue of their influence on the political leadership, and the ability of the latter, in turn, to force the executive to ignore breaches of the law. Meanwhile, the Parbati Project has acquired ‘conditional environmental clearance’ from the central government of India, and construction work has commenced close to the national park. Conservationists have yet again characterized this behaviour of politicians as the failure to rise above partisan and petty political interests, and have


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called for stricter laws and autonomous implementation authorities to take care of India’s natural heritage. This article explores the contours of a widespread phenomenon exemplified by the experience in GHNP. Over the past two decades, social movements in the developing world have transformed the meaning of development, bringing human and environmental costs into clearer focus. Rural communities – through participation in the wider processes of political mobilization and democratization – have rejected labels of ‘backwardness’ to assert a cultural identity that entails a particular ‘way of being’ in the world. At the same time, the environmentalist movement in the metropolitan capitalist West has also accepted the positive role of such ‘indigenous’ identities in pushing environmental issues up the hierarchy of development discourse. The result has been a growing trend of policy interventions that allow a greater voice to local actors in defining the socio-economic parameters of what is a national conservation debate. People and Parks, Nature and Democracy These changes in the perception of the role of local communities in conservation and development have not been as evident in policies for nature conservation. Most developing countries follow the North American model of national parks that stipulates the necessity of having large contiguous natural areas without a human presence [Guha, 2003]. The displacement of local rural populations from such areas has faced strong opposition throughout the world [Brandon, Redford and Sanderson, 1998]. However, there has been very little attention to the actual dynamics of such opposition and its consequences for Nature. The GHNP experience provides just such a situation, where several strands of the debate around conservation and development intersect. Two issues are crucial to an understanding of the complex web of relationships that produced these specific outcomes in the case of the GHNP. The first is the antagonistic relationship between the politics of economic development and the politics of nature conservation. The two processes interact over time at multiple spatial and geopolitical scales, but affect outcomes at the local level. In the process, the letter of the law is interpreted variously and liberally to suit specific socio-economic interests. The gap between the law and its practice is thus both a reflection and also a consequence of the interaction between the politics of development and conservation. The ideological foundations of both share a common set of values – the greater common good – and are framed within a powerful development discourse. Moreover, the politics of both conservation and development are embedded in a long and rich history of relationships between different interests, and this history is often invoked by different



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actors with regard to a specific case in order to suit their requirements. One major aspect of this history, for example, is the suspicion and sustained hostility of local populations towards the Forest Department [Guha, 1983; Guha and Gadgil, 1989]. This history colours all actions of the Forest Department, and puts it at a distinct disadvantage in local political negotiations. The second issue of importance to an understanding of the lessons taught by the GHNP experience is the troubled (not to say antagonistic) relationship between conservation and the imperatives of democracy. There is a large literature on the politics of conservation, particularly on questions of resistance and the successful undermining of state-sponsored exclusionary conservation programmes.2 However, there have been fewer attempts to explore how electoral politics influence – and ultimately undermine – the actual implementation of these potentially coercive programmes. Contemporary democracies are characterized by periodic elections, and the time horizons of political leaders and party political institutions are understandably constrained by this fact. The philosophical foundation of modern conservation discourse is informed by precisely the opposite consideration: the notion of intergenerational equity. This lack of alignment of time horizons, often posed by conservationists as an undesirable paradox, puts the imperatives of democracy squarely in contradiction with conservation objectives. Conservation, it is therefore suggested, should not be left to the whims of politicians influenced by shortterm objectives; much rather, decisions about this long-term process should be left to scientists and trained administrators. In practical terms, this demand requires that greater powers be vested in a central authority with less at stake in every local election or other political development [Terborgh, van Schaik, Davenport, and Rao, 2002]. Curiously, this demand is itself presented as a bargain by Indian conservationists – if only five per cent of the Indian landmass could be preserved in this manner, under the administration of an objective scientific community, the objectives of conservation would be adequately met [Rodgers and Panwar, 1988]. A spatial distribution of conservation areas and a centralized concentration of power accordingly represents a compromise between conservation and democracy. That is, a small – five per cent at the very least – fraction of the Indian landscape should be put outside the influence of democratic politics for ever. Examining the two issues outlined above – on the one hand the interrelationship between the politics of development and conservation, and on the other the contradiction between conservation and democracy – this article looks at the specific example of the Great Himalayan National Park. Disentangling the connections between the local, regional, national and the global, in the sphere of politics, conservation or development, we examine


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how and why the outcomes in GHNP took the form they did. We argue, first, that in this context a centralized rule of law is incompatible with the practicalities of democracy. Second, we demonstrate that the locus of the problem is not the politics of convenience and opportunism, but the particular science and ideology of conservation, which seeks to impose a narrowly defined cultural vision of nature on society at large, a vision that is not widely shared. We also suggest that the events in GHNP demonstrate the potential role for local level democratic institutions in renewed negotiations geared towards conservation-friendly and sustainable outcomes. The events in GHNP are, we argue, representative of a widespread phenomenon, whereby rural communities adversely affected by conservation policies have exploited the exigencies of democratic politics to good effect, exhibiting an agency that is yet to be theorized adequately. The institutions of democratic governance can play a significant role in rationalizing the distance between competing visions of Nature. Finally, it is stressed that the arena of politics, so abhorrent to most conservationists and scientists, provides the only terrain for the reconciliation of interests, long and short-term. The first section outlines the socio-economic context within which the above process has unfolded over the last three decades, and the second examines the story of Parbati and the Tragopan – emblematic representations of economic development and nature conservation – as it has played out in the Great Himalayan National Park over the last two-and-a-half decades. The next section locates the GHNP experience within larger national and international processes, while a concluding section looks at some implications arising from the contradictions in discourse about conservation, development and democracy. THE GHNP CONSERVATION AREA: A SOCIO-ECONOMIC PROFILE

The Great Himalayan National Park was established in 1984, following a survey conducted by an international team of scientists [Gaston, Hunter and Garson, 1981]. In the judgment of this survey team, this area was the most promising for the location of the national park being planned for the state of Himachal Pradesh, an opinion based on its low population density and the exceptional condition of the forests. The park is noted for harbouring one of only two protected populations of the Western Tragopan in the world (thought to number 1,600 animals in the wild), amongst four other pheasant species, sizeable, contiguous populations of Himalayan tahr and blue sheep, plus an endangered population of musk deer [Wildlife Institute of India, 1999]. Located in a relatively obscure part of the Kullu Valley, the Great Himalayan National Park comprised the upper catchments of four river



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valleys – the Sainj, Tirthan, Jiwanal and Parbati. The first three ultimately join and feed into the Beas River at the small town of Larji; the Parbati empties directly into the Beas, to the north of Larji (see Map 1). The GHNP is 754.5 km2 in area, and is bordered by the Tirthan Wildlife Sanctuary to the south. The Sainj Wildlife Sanctuary occupies a part of the catchment of the Sainj River. A 5 km-wide belt adjacent to the western boundaries of the GHNP is the eco-development zone, an area with 122 villages within which a variety of economic activities have been conducted during 1994-99. This combined area is known as the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area (GHNPCA), an area of 1171.0 km2 (see Map 1). The Kanawar Wildlife Sanctuary to the north-west, the Pin Parbati National Park to the north and north-east, and the Rupi Bhaba Wildlife Sanctuary lie to the east of the GHNPCA. Of these, the Pin Valley National Park, Rupi Bhaba Wildlife Sanctuary and the GHNPCA are contiguous, with a combined area of close to 2,800 km2. GHNP is also used by local rural communities for a variety of resources. Approximately 15,000 people live in a 5km-wide belt, ringing the western side of the GHNP border. All the rural families own and cultivate land outside the national park. For the most part, these are small parcels of land that provide subsistence for some portion of the year. A variety of subsistence products are collected from local forests (outside the designated national park), usufruct rights over which are clearly demarcated across villages. Cultivation of cash crops is restricted to the production of seeds for products such as garlic and other assorted fresh vegetables, owing to the difficulty of transporting perishable produce out from the region. The majority of the rural population depends on a variety of additional resources within GHNP to meet its annual income requirements, including the grazing of sheep and goats, the extraction of medicinal herbs to be sold to a burgeoning pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry, and the collection and sale of morel mushrooms, consumed in restaurants around the world. Villages are fairly homogeneous, both in terms of economic assets and interests, and there is a high level of interdependence that binds these rural communities. The level of literacy and education is much lower than the state average, though it has been increasing over the last decade. There is a temporal and spatial pattern to this use of resources within the GHNP. The sheep and goats are grazed in the sub-alpine forests and alpine meadows for seven months of the year; the winters are spent at lower elevations, where livestock is either stall-fed or grazed in village forests. For the seven months that the animals are on the move, they are grazed in specific, clearly defined grazing runs, based on customary rights that have been worked out over the course of many decades [Chhatre, 2003]. The wool of the animals tends to be used to meet family requirements, while the

MAP 1: GREAT HIMALAYAN NATIONAL PARK CONSERVATION AREA, HIMACHAL PRADESH Source: www.greathimalayannationalpark.com


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occasional animal is sold as meat on the hoof, eventually ending up in the meat shops up and down the Kullu Valley.3 Equally seasonal is the collection of morel mushrooms, which grow at the lower reaches of the GHNP forests and in the forests outside the park. The mushrooms are collected between late March and early May, depending on the amount of snow that falls in the winter as well as the timing of the snowmelt. Because of the easy accessibility of the mushrooms, all members of a rural family may go on collection trips. The mushrooms are dried in the village, and eventually sold to local traders in the small towns of the region, or to traders in the bigger towns in the Kullu Valley – Aut, Bhuntar and Kullu. In the past, guchhi, as the morel mushroom is commonly known, has sold for as much as Rs. 7,500 (US$170.00) per kg, a lot of money considering the meagre income generating opportunities in the region. It is also a major source of independent income for rural women. The collection of medicinal herbs is also highly lucrative. For the most part, these herbs are extracted from high altitudes, in the alpine meadows above 12,000 feet. It is hard work, and tends to be undertaken by the young men of the village, who might end up spending a week or more at these elevations. The collection takes place at various points during the summer. The combination of guchhi and medicinal herb sales contributes an average income of over Rs. 10,000 per family in villages around the park [Tandon, 1999]. It is likely that the reduced access to park resources is particularly important for the poorest strata among the rural populace, a point emphasized by Baviskar [2003], although there is little data to suggest a caste or class differentiated use of park resources. Gender differences are clear, as women rarely undertake long-distance grazing or medicinal plant collection activities. There exist clear usufruct rights for grazing in the territory now designated as GHNP, linking livestock from particular villages (and in some cases, even individual herders) to specific pastures inside the park. These rights date back to the first colonial forest settlement in the region in the late nineteenth century, which essentially codified existing practices into usufruct rights [Chhatre, 2003]. Since these tracts are above the tree line in the alpine zone, grazing by local people did not conflict highly with the primary politicaleconomic objective of the forest settlement – provisioning of timber for civil and military infrastructural demands – leading to a fairly liberal provision of rights. Medicinal plants were extracted in extremely limited quantities until the international market in cosmetics and herbal medicines increased demand, raising extraction levels from the late-1970s onwards. Usufruct rights to medicinal plants, especially for sale in the market, are less clear, since these were not documented for most villages during the forest settlement in the nineteenth century.


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The GHNP area has seen limited development in terms of the building of basic infrastructure, location of industries and large development projects. There are roads that pass through the various valleys of the region, which ensure that the people living in these valleys are relatively well connected to the outside world. There is however little ‘outside’ interest in the region, unlike the main Kullu Valley from which these smaller valleys branch off. And as a result there is practically no tourism. The presence of the GHNP has brought in a certain amount of construction, which can be seen in the form of guesthouses, two interpretation centres, nurseries of the Forest Department and numerous sign-boards announcing the park. But there are no major ‘developmental’ inputs in the form of massive employment for local communities. PARABLE OF PARBATI AND THE TRAGOPAN

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Himachal Pradesh in general and Kullu in particular – the province and district where GHNP is located – were on a rising development curve. During these decades Himachal Pradesh was building up its development infrastructure and offering attractive subsidies to investors in the tourism sector. At the same time, Kullu district was also beginning to reap the material benefits of agricultural production, particularly apples, which had witnessed an economic growth spurt through the mid-1960s. These two sectors were changing the economic profile of Kullu irreversibly [Government of Himachal Pradesh, 1985, 1993]. Most of this development was taking place along the vector defined by National Highway 21, running through the towns of Kullu and Manali, going on towards Ladakh. Because of the war with Pakistan in 1965, when road communication with Ladakh had been cut off, this new highway became important from a strategic viewpoint and was accorded corresponding priority [Coward, 2001]. The Politics of Regional Development Development was bringing in resources that were available for conversion into political capital, and two political leaders in Kullu district were locked in competition for this largesse. To some extent, Lal Chand Prarthi, senior Congress politician and representative from the assembly constituency of Kullu, was instrumental in securing development funds for the region. But there was obviously not enough for the two constituencies in the Kullu District – Kullu and Seraj. It is the latter region that today encompasses the Great Himalayan National Park. Dilaram Shabab, representative from the Seraj constituency, repeatedly characterized Seraj as being economically backward so as to attract development funds, but the strategic location of the



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Kullu area on the National Highway ensured that it continued to get preferential treatment in budgetary allocations.4 Since the commercial success of both tourism and agriculture was partly a function of road infrastructure, the Kullu development model was inapplicable to Seraj. In his search of development schemes for his constituency, Shabab proposed as a tourism project for Seraj the encouragement of fishing in the Tirthan river. He saw fishing as an alternative tourist attraction that required neither roads nor much of an infrastructure. All that was wanted was a good river, a quiet ambience, and – of course – fish. Unfortunately, the Tirthan River was seriously deficient in terms of the requisite fish species, particularly rainbow trout. Shabab believed that this was primarily due to the reckless fishing practices of the local population. As the local political representative, he persuaded the government to take action; in 1973, fishing in the Tirthan River was banned for two years, and civil defence personnel were deployed in order to protect the river. This marked the beginning of the exclusion – for conservation reasons – of local rural communities from access to the natural resources of the valley.5 In another development, a trout hatchery was established on the bank of the Tirthan River with Norwegian technical collaboration, the object being to release trout seedlings into the river. At roughly the same time, the Union government issued a communique´ exhorting the states to explore the possibility of constituting national parks. The Indian Wildlife Protection Act had been notified in the previous year, and Project Tiger was unfolding at the national level. The Indian State, it seemed, was discovering an ecological conscience under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Himachal Pradesh was one of the few provinces without a single national park. For long a part of the Punjab, Himachal had gained statehood only in 1971. Crippled by a period of uncertain political history in the post-independence era, the state of Himachal Pradesh was locked into the dominant development paradigm [Verma, 1995]. Having already invested politically in the fishing project, Shabab was the first to invoke the right of Seraj as the location of the first national park in the state, by virtue of its economic backwardness that needed development. In pursuit of the goal, an area of 83 km2 in the upper Tirthan valley was notified as an intended wildlife sanctuary in 1976, pending settlement procedures under the Wildlife Act [Singh, Kothari and Pande, 1990].6 Meanwhile, the Congress politician Lal Chand Prarthi had entered the fray and invoked the ‘rightful’ claims of the Manali area to national park status, on the more legitimate grounds of tourist attraction and wildlife protection. To resolve the issue, the Himachal Wildlife Project was launched in 1978, with the object of identifying the best location for the first national park in the state. A team of foreign and national experts surveyed several valleys in


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Himachal Pradesh for three years in order to identify sites with high wildlife conservation values. In what proved to be a partial realization of the case made by Shabab for Seraj, and an apparent political victory over Lal Chand Prarthi, in 1981 the team of scientists recommended the upper catchments of the Tirthan and Sainj rivers as the best site for the constitution of Himachal’s first national park [Gaston, Hunter and Garson, 1981]. This was another instance in the history of the park when science was deployed in order to settle a political issue. It is unlikely that the news brought much cheer to Shabab, especially since at the time he was suffering the consequences of political suicide. In an interview with the authors in August 2000, Shabab recalled – with bitterness – his sense of betrayal on losing the elections to the state assembly in 1977 and 1982. In his opinion, during the political campaign the opposition had used to maximum advantage the banning of rural inhabitants from fishing in the Tirthan river. The Seraji people, according to him, were too backward and simple to comprehend his ecological vision and forward-looking development plans. In the intervening two decades, the bitterness had lost none of its edge, but the realization of the political logic involved had become clear. The political downfall of Shabab began with the prevention of local fishing in 1973. Unable to translate his vision either into local idioms or into a demonstrable economic success, rural voters ejected Shabab from office on account of what he regarded as his ‘far-sighted’ ideas.7 In the Shadow of the Wildlife Protection Act It was in March 1984 that the upper catchment of Sainj and Tirthan rivers, an area of 620 km2, was constituted as an intended national park [Singh, Kothari and Pande, 1990]. The Great Himalayan National Park, as it was now known, was a showpiece for the Himachal Pradesh government. Indeed, as was apparent from its first nine years, the Forest Department was not interested in doing anything further, having put Himachal Pradesh on the conservation map of India. Notices were issued to the inhabitants of the four villages inside the park boundaries under the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act for the compulsory acquisition of revenue estates or private holdings. The District Administration persuaded the two villages in the Jiwanal valley – Kundar and Majhan – to relocate outside the park. Although required under the Wildlife Act, notices to invite claims for compensation were not issued until 1998. A management plan had been prepared and approved in 1987, making no reference to the pending formalities under the provisions of law [Sharma, 1987]. In 1991, Anthony Gaston and Peter Garson, two of the three scientists who had advanced the Himachal Wildlife Project and identified the location of the first national park for the state, returned to GHNP to assess changes in the



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park’s ecology following the 1984 notification. Their report highlighted an intensification of the conservation value of the park, especially as regards increased numbers of large mammal wildlife below an altitude of 3,100 metres above mean sea level. At the same time, the report pointed to what it termed a continuing and increasing abuse of the park by local rural people using it for livestock grazing and medicinal plant collection, thereby endangering the precious biological diversity protected by the park [Gaston and Garson, 1992]. The Rise of Ecodevelopment In the meantime, events had gathered pace at the national and state levels. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Nanda Devi and the Valley of Flowers National Parks had been closed to local rural populations; herders and villagers had also been relocated from the Gir, Ranthambhor and Kanha National Parks [Rangarajan, 2001]. In 1984, forests were taken from the portfolio of the Ministry of Agriculture and allocated to a new Ministry of Environment and Forests, set up centrally by the Indian state. At the local state level, a separate wildlife wing was constituted within the Forest Departments and entrusted with the responsibility of managing protected areas. In 1982, two years before the initial notification of GHNP, nine peasants had been killed in an incident when police opened fire on villagers protesting against exclusion in Keoladeo-Ghana National Park in the state of Rajasthan [Lewis, 2003]. Local rural populations and protected areas were increasingly coming into direct conflict, raising the human costs of conservation [Singh, 1997]. By the beginning of the 1990s, conservationists were being forced to account for these human costs. At the international level, Integrated Conservation and Development Projects were being implemented in South-east Asia and Latin America, in an attempt to reconcile conservation objectives with local economic activity, an approach which found a direct echo in the Indian situation [McShane and Newby, 2003; Pandey and Wells, 1997]. The idea of ecodevelopment, meaning different things to different people, emerged in response to this crisis in Indian conservation. ‘Ecodevelopment’ envisaged the ‘participation’ of local rural communities in planning and implementing development programmes designed to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, their dependence on natural resources that required protection [World Bank, 1996]. By the early 1990s, work had started in New Delhi for preparing detailed proposals for a few sites, for submission to the World Bank [Mehta, Mehta, Palhan, Sankaran, Singh, Uppal, and Vania, 1993]. Anticipating an Ecodevelopment Project, the Government of India included two protected areas within a larger World Bank project, to act as pilots for later versions. These were Great Himalayan National Park,


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Himachal Pradesh, and Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu [World Bank, 1994].8 Echoes of Narmada The progress of these two pilot projects was smooth until they encountered an obstacle, in the form of opposition from the World Bank. In September 1992, in a drama being played out in the Narmada valley in central India, the World Bank asked for details of the rural population affected by the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada river, plus an assurance regarding the voluntary resettlement of such people, as a condition for continued financial support to the dam. Working with a deadline, the government of Madhya Pradesh undertook the task in characteristic fashion, that is, with policemen and guns. In what was a period of intense repression in the Narmada valley, the state cracked down heavily on the anti-dam movement. The repression culminated in January 1993 with police opening fire on protesting tribals. Amidst a global outcry against the abuse of human rights and the oppression of indigenous peoples, the World Bank was forced to withdraw support for the project in March 1993 [Baviskar, 1995; Wade, 1997]. When the ecodevelopment pilot projects were being negotiated at around the same time, the World Bank was still feeling embarrassed by the Narmada debacle. Not wishing to experience further humiliation, the World Bank was unwilling to countenance an infringement of its Operational Directives on Indigenous Peoples as well as those on Involuntary Displacement. Whilst all was clear on other fronts, GHNP had four villages inside its boundaries, which would have to be relocated once the park was fully notified under the Wildlife Act. Two of these villages – Kundar and Majhan – had almost moved out, waiting for formal titles to the new lands they had been occupying for the last few years. The inhabitants of the other two – Shakti and Maror – were more reticent and undecided in their responses. However, the desultory attitude of the local bureaucracy and a grassroots suspicion of bureaucratic agendas ensured that ultimately these two villages refused to relocate. The precedent of the Narmada valley and the presence of the World Bank ensured that the villages could not simply be evicted. With time running out for the finalization of the project, the government turned to the last resort – a legal sleight of hand. In June 1994, in deference to the wishes of the World Bank that rural populations unwilling to relocate should not be displaced involuntarily, the state government renotified the national park with new boundaries and carved out an area of 90 km2 surrounding the two recalcitrant villages, to be constituted as Sainj Wildlife Sanctuary. Since the Wildlife Protection Act allowed villages to remain inside sanctuaries but not within national parks, the vexatious problem of involuntary displacement was avoided.9 For nine



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years, from 1984 to 1993, local rural inhabitants were unaware of the legal significance of their proximity to the national park, and no attempt was made to correct that anomaly. With the exception of compulsory acquisition of agricultural holdings, no legal proceedings were initiated under the Wildlife Act. The law came into play only because its provisions were preventing the flow of World Bank funding for the park. For the local rural population, the national park was a development mirage that promised much but delivered little. With the arrival of the ecodevelopment money, however, cracks began to appear in the façade. The inauguration of project attracted the attention of local NGOs, who began discussions with villagers about the implications of the Wildlife Act. Until early 1995, local rural inhabitants were unaware of the provisions of the Wildlife Act and the meaning of a national park. Nobody – bureaucrat, politician or scientist – had made efforts to explain the unpalatable provisions of the law to any section of the affected rural population. As a consequence of NGO awareness initiatives, protests erupted around the national park in the spring of 1995 against future exclusion from the park [Baviskar, 2003]. In a meeting held in Neuli, the park director was manhandled and roughed up by local women, demanding the truth. The truth, the director insisted, was that the park would not extinguish the rights of local people and the ecodevelopment project was the best thing to have happened to the region.10 This quasi-official position – delinking ecodevelopment activities and eventual termination of usufruct rights – was maintained for the remaining four years of the project. Although junior staff of the Forest Department became aware of the legal inevitability that usufruct rights would terminate, they continued to advance the official line, thereby avoiding the unpalatable task of informing those affected. As ecodevelopment funds were spent, largely as political patronage, focus shifted from the Wildlife Act to the corruption in Ecodevelopment Project implementation [Baviskar, 1999]. Villages were split on the subject of which hamlet should get the money and for what. Contending factions in the village of Shrikot clashed in an atmosphere of rising tension in early 1996, leading to police action and criminal cases. With most of the work being sub-contracted, political networks became involved in the apportioning of project resources. Through an active connivance of the park authorities and local politicians, the Wildlife Protection Act was successfully kept at bay. PARBATI, PARBATI EVERYWHERE

In early 1998, the state government of Himachal Pradesh signed an agreement with the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation to construct


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a hydro-electric project on the Parbati river. The exigencies of the Parbati Hydroelectric Project forever changed the contours of debate about the GHNP. The hydroelectric power generating capacity of rivers in Himachal Pradesh had long been on the political agenda, and a number of such projects had gone ahead in the post-colonial period, adding up to a total capacity in excess of 4,000 megawatts by the mid-1990s [Government of Himachal Pradesh, 1993]. In response to the growing criticism of large dams on account of their human and environmental costs, the focus in the state has slowly shifted, not towards smaller structures as demanded by that critique, but towards a new technology categorized as ‘run-of-the-river’. Despite an absence of evaluations regarding its human and environmental impact, this solution is proclaimed as a state-of-the-art green alternative to archaic largedam technology. Accordingly, with the exception of the Kol dam, all major hydroelectric projects under construction in Himachal Pradesh are of the runof-the-river variety [Government of Himachal Pradesh, 1997]. The Parbati Project is itself a prime example of this alternative technological solution. The government of Himachal Pradesh has announced publicly its objective of harnessing the estimated 20,000 megawatts capacity of rivers in the region, with the intention of making it into a ‘hydroelectric state’. After agriculture in the 1980s and tourism in the 1990s, it is the turn of hydroelectric power to be in the vanguard of development. To this end, several programmes are already being implemented. The Nathpa-Jakhri project on the Sutlej, for example, will produce 2,500 megawatts through a 27 km tunnel. Other projects under construction include Chamera Phase II and Chamera Phase III on the river Ravi, the Larji Project on the river Beas, the Sanjay Vidyut Pariyojana Project on the river Rupi, and the Baspa Project on the river Baspa. In addition, the state government has identified more than 300 sites for small hydroelectric projects, 44 in Kullu district alone [Government of Himachal Pradesh, undated]. Memoranda of Understanding had been signed with private companies for 39 of these by the year 2000, with assurances from the state government in terms of assistance with the preparation of reports necessary to obtain environmental clearances [Coward, 2001]. All of these, when completed, would double the generation capacity of Himachal Pradesh and bring precious revenue from the sale of electricity. Although when compared to the old-dam technology, the number of rural inhabitants displaced by these combined generating projects is indeed small, other aspects of the new technology nevertheless remain problematic.11 The Politics and Economics of Conservation Unable to finance most of these projects and burdened with a bankrupt State Electricity Board, the Himachal Pradesh government explored other methods of realizing its development plans. The saviour of the Parbati Project came in



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the shape of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), and in November 1998 the state government signed a memorandum of understanding with NHPC for the Parbati Project on a build/operate/lease and transfer basis. Regardless of the fact that the state would not get any revenue from the project for the next few years, the government proclaimed its achievement in getting the project started, drawing a contrast with the failure of previous governments to do even this. With this agreement, the onus of removing the hurdles in the path of the project – namely, the Wildlife Protection Act – fell on the state government. The most obvious option would have been to do away with the park itself, as a previous government had done in the case of the Darlaghat Sanctuary, scrapped in 1992 to make way for limestone mining and a cement plant. However, the state government could not simply ‘denotify’ the park or the desired part thereof, for several reasons. To begin with, such a move would result in the termination of ecodevelopment funds provided by the World Bank. Moreover, the Supreme Court of India had handed down a number of pro-environment judgments recently, and the Himachal Pradesh government was unwilling to risk a confrontation with the Indian judiciary. Over the last two decades, state governments in India have found it easy to declare the constitution of new national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, supported in this by conservation interest groups. But they have found it difficult to renege on even one of them so as to make way for development projects, owing to opposition from national and international conservation organizations with access to the media. Consequently, state governments are now extremely wary, not only of denotifying areas but also of notifying new areas as national parks and sanctuaries. A less risky course of action was to work with the relevant sections of the Wildlife Act, and to redraw the boundaries in the final notification. In a parallel development, the Chief Wildlife Warden (the highest wildliferelated official in the state) made an official submission to the Settlement Officer that the area around Kundar and Majhan was ‘insignificant on floral, faunal, ecological, and geomorphological grounds’ and thus could be deleted from the park.12 That such a view was contradicted by available scientific evidence notwithstanding, neither the Settlement Officer nor the Chief Wildlife Warden had jurisdiction to pronounce judgment on the ‘floral, faunal, ecological, and geomorphological’ worth of the park, let alone the 10 km2 in question. The law required the Settlement Officer only to inquire into existing rights and obtain these for the park, failing which he was obliged to exclude the area from the park boundaries. This scientific investigation into the small (but now extremely important) area of the park was being carried out in preparation for the deletion of that area from the final notification. In what proved to be a twofold strategy, the lack both of scientific worth and of


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success in eliminating the usufruct rights of two villages were cited as the reasons for deleting 10.5 km2 from the park in the final settlement award and notification [Nangia, Kumar and Rathore, 1999]. In order to excise the desired area, it was necessary for the Settlement Officer in Kullu, the district headquarters, to go through the motions of the due process of law for the rest of the villages as well. Over the next four months, local leaders of various political affiliations mobilized villagers to petition the authorities. In almost every instance, the villagers were assured (this time by officials of the District Administration), their interests would be safeguarded and that their usufruct rights would continue. While the rural inhabitants had earlier doubted similar statements made by forest officials, the reassuring presence of the Deputy Commissioner, the Sub Divisional Magistrate, and several other Administration Officers, dispelled their fears. As the Settlement Officer, the Deputy Commissioner of Kullu issued separate final notifications for the Sainj and Tirthan Wildlife Sanctuaries late in April, 1999.13 Perhaps these two documents alone explain the politics of conservation, as conducted in Himachal Pradesh. The Wildlife Act stipulates that limited use of the resources of a wildlife sanctuary may be permitted, provided that such use is beneficial to the overall conservation value of the sanctuary in question. Such an exception has to be made by the Chief Wildlife Warden of the state, and under no circumstances is it to be considered a right. In other words, if ever such a concession were granted by the state, it would be a privilege, liable to be withdrawn at any moment in the larger interests of conservation. Clearly, the Settlement Officer has no locus standi vis-a`-vis such powers. In a palpable transgression of his authority, the Settlement Officer declared, in the case of Sainj and Tirthan Sanctuaries, that all rights shall continue as before. Even more startling was the reasoning offered for the decision. It was ostensibly done to mitigate the adverse impact of the upcoming final notification of the park, where, to his lasting regret, such allowance may not be made. Shortly thereafter, as promised in the sanctuary notifications, the final notification for GHNP was also issued in May, 1999, along with the compensation award. Under the Wildlife Protection Act, local rural inhabitants could no longer access the park as usual. RESISTANCE AND NEGOTIATION

The formal notification was slow in percolating down to the villages, but the lower bureaucracy quickly relayed news about the closure of the park. Almost simultaneously, the Forest Department renewed the campaign to rid the GHNP of all human presence, freshly armed with the final notification. During the summer and autumn of 1999, some graziers were fined as park



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officials intimidated local people with threats of prosecution under the Wildlife Protection Act. These actions of the park officials elicited a string of protests by villagers around GHNP, not least because graziers were only herding animals belonging to many rural households, most of which maintain a few sheep and goats that are collectively grazed in the park. Therefore, the fines imposed potentially affected every peasant household if the threat of closure was indeed carried out. Since an equally high proportion of the rural population undertook the collection of medicinal plants, and as the legal status of that activity was even less secure than grazing (which was protected by clear usufruct rights), most villagers in the vicinity of GHNP were anxious about their livelihoods and participated in the protests. Villagers responded by enlisting the support of their political representatives – Maheshwar Singh, Member of Parliament, and Karan Singh, Member of the State Legislative Assembly – to persuade the Forest Department to relent. The spontaneous show of dissent and the prospect of a breakdown in ‘law and order’ prompted the state government to hold back on the implementation of the law. The notification came at the beginning of summer, when use of the park by local inhabitants was at its annual peak, and they took the order and its threat very seriously. Petitioning politicians against bureaucrats, villagers rose in protest against the closure, and were joined by local politicians, all putting pressure on the park director. Refusing to back down, the latter responded by confiscating ‘illegally’ collected mushrooms from a few villagers. Political representatives of the ruling party (Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP) became involved in the struggle as a result of escalating tension in the area. The settlement proceedings were of paramount importance for the future of the Parbati Project, and the director – a conservation enthusiast – was perceived as jeopardizing the whole enterprise. In two large meetings held in the affected villages by the Settlement Officer, a new project for ‘biomass regeneration’ was offered as the reward for compliance, and grazing rights to alternative pastures were promised.14 Although village elders and NGO representatives present at the two meetings insisted on clarification about these undertakings, the answers – as in the case of the 1995 protests – were equivocal. The Struggle over Usufruct Rights The inability of the state to enforce new restrictions on resource use is not confined to the GHNP, or even to Himachal Pradesh. The obvious success of local resistance by rural inhabitants has been a characteristic feature of political relations, both in Kullu and in other parts of Himachal Pradesh [Saberwal, 1999; Chhatre, 2003]. While the interests of the political leadership in the Parbati Project were paramount, there was obviously no desire to alienate their constituents. In a best-case scenario, the local rural


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population would be allowed to go inside the park, the Parbati Project would go ahead, and the park would also be notified to keep the conservationists and the World Bank happy. The obstacle to this political outcome was the final notification of the park that allowed the Forest Department to prevent the entry of villagers. Once again, the political leadership had to resort to the amenable and reliable Settlement Officer. In a contrite admission of fault, he issued a letter on 1 September 1999, allowing the use of the park by usufruct rightholders till such time that they received their full compensation. Once again, in sharp contrast to the indeterminacy that characterized the settlement proceedings, copies of the letter in Hindi and English were not only pasted all over the area but were paraded by villagers when confronted by forest guards in the national park. But the letter merely signalled a confusion about usufruct rights: who has them? Almost everyone in the area – peasants, livestock owners, traders – was claiming usufruct rights in the summer of 1999 on strictly customary grounds. Their argument was that they had been using the park resources since time immemorial, and the state had no business questioning the legitimacy of their claims. Resentment turned to anger when the first instalment of the compensation was paid in September of 1999, since the final notification included a list of only 314 households entitled to receive cash payment, the rest being covered by an all-encompassing project for ‘biomass regeneration’ to offset the loss of grazing rights. Realizing that compensation in this case was tantamount to recognition of their usufruct rights, protesting villagers besieged the politicians and bureaucrats once again, this time for compensation. The issue split the community of customary right-holders, with one side arguing for the rejection of any/all compensation offered in exchange for forgoing usufruct rights. In a parallel development, the Forest Department had frozen export permits for medicinal plants – official licenses mandatory for transporting medicinal plants out of an area – putting the traders in a quandary. Medicinal plants are big business in Kullu, with estimates of family earnings varying between 10,000 and 17,000 rupees a month [Tandon, 1999]. This is a large sum for a population with few alternative sources of cash incomes. Equally, traders were loath to give up a profitable business merely on the instruction of the Forest Department. Once again, they lobbied politicians for assistance, bringing pressure to bear on the director to ease the restrictions. The Forest Department was unable to prevent the entry of the rural populace into the park during 1999, and local inhabitants have also been successful in gaining access to the park since then. Construction for the Parbati Project has also continued apace, and the immigration of a huge labour force for the Project has put an additional economic burden on forests at the periphery of the park. The uncertainty of tenure introduced by the (non-) closure of the park has added an element of urgency to the harvesting



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of medicinal plants by locals, and most of the trade in the valuable species has gone underground. Graziers, after tentative forays in 1999, have resumed the pre-notification practice of herding livestock. Park officials occasionally confiscate medicinal plants collected inside the park or fine graziers, but such actions have only contributed to increasing the costs of using park resources. With periodic elections to the national parliament, state legislature, or the village councils, political leaders of either party (Congress and the BJP) are always willing to come to the support of local rural inhabitants protesting against the Forest Department. DEMOCRACY, DEVELOPMENT AND CONSERVATION

The main lessons taught by the GHNP experience are to be found in the political juxtaposition of discourses about conservation and economic development in a context where the latter is dominant. Ironically, conservation was introduced into the GHNP as part of this dominant discourse: beginning with Dilaram Shabab in 1973, the list of politicians who presented the GHNP as a development project is very long indeed. This is because no local or state politician would dare talk of conservation as implied in the Wildlife Act. Hence the obstacles confronting a project based on the notion of reducing dependence on the park through the provision of alternative incomes. Given that the loss of access to the park antagonized its rural inhabitants, any politician dependent on their electoral support was understandably wary of pursuing this course. The parameters of the conservation debate were accordingly locked into place from the moment Shabab unveiled his idea of the national park as a form of development. In an important sense, the struggles in and about the GHNP are an accurate reflection of the politics of conservation and development as played out in India over the last three decades. This is a history that has a direct bearing on the outcome of the situation in GHNP. Currently, more than 12 per cent of the geographical area of the state of Himachal Pradesh is protected under the Wildlife Act. Most of this area has long been used by local rural populations, and continues to be so, with codified property rights therein for at least the last century. If the provisions of the Wildlife Act were to be followed strictly, an unacceptably high number of rural livelihoods would be negatively affected, a price too high for any politician seeking public office. Through the rest of the country, the situation is similar; an estimated three million people would be displaced if the provisions of the Wildlife Act were to be applied literally to all Protected Areas in India, obviously not a price about to be paid merely in the interests of intergenerational equity [Saberwal, Rangarajan and Kothari, 2000]. Why then do these hundreds of wildlife sanctuaries and national parks even exist? To understand this contradictory


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situation, and the dilemma posed for conservation by the democratic process itself, it is crucial to focus on the international origins of and national political function served by the Wildlife Act. The National and International Context As Prime Minister Indira Gandhi consolidated her power at the centre during the early 1970s, she directed the attention of her government to the increasing global importance of conservation issues. Since this was a period in national politics when conservation was equated with ‘being civilized’, Indira Gandhi sought to portray India as possessing an ecological vision. This she did by the enactment of the Wildlife (Protection) Act in 1972 and inauguration of the celebrated Project Tiger in 1973. The decade of the 1970s also witnessed the rise of conservationists in the public sphere, in terms of their proximity to centres of national political power. Figures such as Salim Ali and Sundarlal Bahuguna talked of direct access to Indira Gandhi, and outlined their vision of conservation in India. There were of course differences between Salim Ali and Bahuguna as to what conservation entailed, but the Indian urban middle-class audience evinced a growing respect for conservation issues generally, regardless of ideological and policy disagreements [Greenough, 2003; Rangarajan, 1996, 2001; Lewis, 2003]. The national political climate was equally receptive to this discourse. The Congress Party controlled legislatures in most states of the country, and with power wholly centralized around Indira Gandhi, its political leadership at the national, state and lower levels competed to do her bidding. Most of the Protected Areas in India were constituted in two periods, 1973–78 and again 1980–84, during the peak of her control over the state machinery [Rangarajan, 2001]. It was politically advantageous to be seen as a conservationist at the sub-national level; the more Protected Areas one could claim credit for, the better the prospects for attracting the attention of national leaders, particularly Indira Gandhi. This was the national political background in which most conservation areas were demarcated. And the resulting conservation discourse, devoid of a human element, was what Dilaram Shabab and Lal Chand Prarthi encountered in Kullu when advocating the location of the first national park of Himachal Pradesh. Despite the enactment of tough legislation and the formal establishment of areas devoted to preserving wildlife, the commitment of Congress to conservation is problematic. By the late 1990s, very few of India’s Protected Areas had been finally notified, and there were only a handful of national parks from which rural populations had been evicted – Kanha and Gir being perhaps the best-known instances. Despite its political strength throughout the 1970s and 1980s, therefore, Congress had not in fact attempted to enforce its potentially unpopular environmental legislation. It had enacted



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ordinances, thereby calling attention to its environmental credentials, but had not enforced the law. Doing so would necessarily have exacted a high political price in the form of electoral losses. It was only in 1996, when the World Wildlife Fund petitioned the Supreme Court, that state governments were forced to pay closer attention to existing legislation. For the most part, they have declined forcibly to evict people from protected areas, because of the electoral consequences [Saberwal, Rangarajan and Kothari, 2000]. By the early 1990s, even as greater bilateral funding became available for conservation projects, the environmental costs of developmental project underwent politicization. In India the prime mover was the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement), a grassroots mobilization against submergence of land by the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the river Narmada. From 1987 onwards, the movement changed the contours of national debate and raised the issues of conservation and human costs of development. The international audience of the movement made it politically imperative that the issues be incorporated into conservation practice. Thus, the specific idea of ecodevelopment was proposed and implemented in the Indian context. Conservationists made common cause with social-cost-activists, in that both criticized the environmental and ecological impact of big development projects, but the specifically human costs were not amenable to resolution. In the event, the political leadership kept the conservationists at bay in the name of human costs and allowed large development interests – such as mining, logging, power projects, and dam construction – to enter conservation areas on the grounds of development. The law proved to be flexible in accommodating these interests.15 Who is to blame? Although politicians are culpable of ignoring conservation issues, and have routinely used state power in order to subvert environmental agendas, conservationists are equally to blame for the current impasse. They have been satisfied for the most part with mere notifications of intent. But why? The explanation lies in the recognition that large-scale development interests pose a greater threat to conservation areas than small-scale activity such as peasant economy, livestock herding and petty trading. The ‘middle level’ (or ‘lesser of two evils’) strategy followed by conservationists – a location that is constituted as a national park or sanctuary remains in suspended animation pending the procedures required for the final notification and full closure – makes it more difficult for large development interests to penetrate and establish themselves in these rural areas. It is easier to obtain support from a domestic urban middle-class audience against a development project if the latter is situated in a Protected Area. With that protection against large-scale development in place, the task of removing the small-scale economic pressure


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of peasants, herders and petty traders can be spread out over several years – a tacit admission that small-scale pressures are not as destructive as large-scale developmental ones vis-a`-vis conservation objectives. This explains why most Protected Areas in India remain suspended in this ‘middle level’ strategy. When grassroots rural protests became threatening, therefore, both politicians and bureaucrats turned on the conservationists, blaming them for problems caused by the park and its wildlife. In his interview with us during August 2000, Shabab maintained that all he had in mind when he suggested a national park was a small area called Rolla-Bhandar in the Tirthan valley. Happy with the earlier Tirthan Sanctuary of 83 km2, the huge spread of 754 km2 was according to him completely unjustified and antipeople. This, he insisted, was never his idea of a national park. Around the same time, Maheshwar Singh – local Member of Legislative Assembly in the 1980s and Member of Parliament from 1998 onwards – blamed the Forest Department for the situation. According to him, the eviction of local rural inhabitants would have been justified only if alternative provision – part of the ecodevelopment project – had already been in place. In his view, ‘the people didn’t want to go into the park but were forced to because they had no alternative’. He was of the opinion that, until alternatives were made available, the GHNP should not be closed to the local rural population.16 Part of the blame lies with the conservationists, and in particular their failure to address the concerns of the local rural population affected by the closure, sharing their perspective only with a distant audience. This cost them not just the 10.6 km2 in 1999 but the 754.4 km2 in 2000 as well, and brought in its train additional consequences. Invoking the precedent of the allowance made in the case of the Sainj and Tirthan Sanctuaries, the state government has notified the rest of the sanctuaries in Himachal Pradesh along the same lines. All customary usufruct rights shall continue in all of them, a` la GHNP. Even worse from the conservationist view was that the successful carving out of 10.6 km2 from the GHNP for the Parbati Project has opened up the possibilities for similar developments elsewhere: in Rupi-Bhaba Sanctuary for the Sanjay Vidyut Hydroelectric Project and in the Sangla Sanctuary for the Baspa Hydroelectric Project. Significantly, the proposed Larsen and Toubro Cement Plant is located inside the Bandli Sanctuary. And this is the news from Himachal Pradesh alone. The story is the same all over India, with development interests increasingly encroaching upon conservation areas. Thus the events in GHNP may well be a portent of things to come. CONCLUDING COMMENTS

The 1990s witnessed a dramatic increase in the visibility of social and indigenous movements in the developing world, and the evolution of the



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environmentalist cause in the West can be linked to the iconic status conferred as a result on ‘indigenous’ identities [Martins, 2003: 325]. Social movements in Latin America and South Asia have transformed the development debate, bringing with them a new focus on human and environmental costs of economic growth, and weaving conservation into the tapestry of development discourse [Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997]. Whereas most aspects of development policy and practice in the so-called Third World seem to have embraced this turn towards a ‘nature-friendly’ premodern identity as the locus of action, the conservation of nature – mainly through the constitution of large geographical areas from which human presence is excluded – has scarcely been affected. Hardline conservationists insist that the only way to ‘save’ the biological endowment of mankind is to protect it from the people [Brandon, Redford and Sanderson, 1998; Terborgh, van Schaik, Davenport and Rao, 2002]. Isolated successful examples of wildlife and nature protection in multiple-use areas with rural community involvement – such as in Southern African countries [Hulme and Murphree, 1999] – are dismissed as important but ancillary to the main problem of human pressures leading to declining nature and wildlife [Terborgh and Western, 1999]. As a result of social mobilization, local communities are increasingly challenging their exclusion from lands and resources in the name of nature. Even the fragile dalliance between conservation organizations in the West and indigenous groups in Latin America is crumbling, as local development priorities conflict with the objective of conservation [Chapin, 2004]. The ideological conjunction of ‘indigenous’ and ‘nature’ is premised on the perceived impact of indigenous populations – low density, low levels of technology, and low intensity of resource extraction – and is rapidly breaking down as previously marginalized rural communities participate in the process of democratic mobilization [Holt, 2005]. The spread and institutionalization of democratic politics in the developing world over the last two decades is only now beginning to translate into a better representation of rural populations in conservation and development policy. Therefore, even as communities pursue claims to land and natural resources by redefining development and their place in nature, the model of nature conservation based on the exclusion of humans from areas deemed scientifically worthy of protection is coming into conflict with an increasingly assertive rural population. The primary contradiction is between divergent visions of conservation held by different actors. The central issue that prevents dialogue is the insistence of the conservationists on the universal inverse relationship between humans and nature that has effectively translated into a demand for nature sans humanity. This notion acts as the single most important barrier to


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any conversation between democracy and conservation. First, it conflates widely different impacts under the same category – dams and mines are just as abhorrent as grazing and collection of medicinal plants. Second, it precludes any variation in conservation outcomes as a function of local context. There is no room for differential treatment, such as the classification of GHNP as an exception. The impact of such conceptual inflexibility is easy to see. In 1984, there were just four villages and less than 100 families residing inside GHNP. Most users of the park lived on the periphery, and the impact of their activities inside was restricted to a few months in the summer. The park is bounded by high mountain ranges on three sides and is accessible only from the southeast, making it easy to regulate the use of the park. However, there was no de jure flexibility within the law to allow rural populations the capacity to use resources inside the park. This was only possible under its shadow, in the state of suspended animation between constitution and final notification, without recourse to any institutional space for negotiating a formal middle ground. If the 15 years since 1984 had been utilized to build local institutions that regulated human pressure while allowing for negotiation, it might have been possible to arrive at better outcomes. In other words, if the process of negotiation had been open and inclusive and situated at the local level, it would have been possible to channel the purchase that local populations have on the political leadership towards more conservation-friendly outcomes. Both these processes – evolving local institutions for regulating human use and channelling political capital towards conservation – were possible within the ecodevelopment experiment. But the opportunity was lost without the willingness to differentiate between industrial and human impacts on nature. Accordingly, the contradiction between conservation objectives and the imperatives of democracy is a consequence of the inappropriateness of the particular ideology of conservation that refuses to allow variation in conservation outcomes. We have argued that in the case of GHNP it is not possible to enforce a law that is continually being reinterpreted in local contexts and has, as a result, lost much of its legitimacy. On the other hand, the political capital mobilized by local rural communities has been successfully translated into positive, if not conservation-friendly, outcomes. This points to the vibrancy of democratic institutions and the possibility of their deployment towards conservation goals, if only the actors – local rural communities in this case – could be provided with sufficient institutional incentives within an open and inclusive political process. We suggest that, even though this involves accepting variability in conservation outcomes, the net result ironically would be a movement towards more effective conservation practices.



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NOTES 1 The Western Tragopan is a brilliantly-coloured pheasant endemic to the western Himalayas, and currently occurs in only two national parks, one in India (GHNP) and another in Pakistan. Its population is estimated to be less than 1,600 individuals in the wild, and its habitat is considered to be under serious threat. 2 See for example Guha [1989], Peluso [1992; 1993], Neumann [1992; 1998] and Fletcher [2001]. 3 Variations on this theme exist in most other parts of the state. Herding and cultivation intersect in complex and mutually complimentary practices, often involving the movement of thousands of sheep and goats over many hundreds of kilometres. In a state with few opportunities in industry, and with relatively small landholdings, herding – migratory or otherwise – is a critical source of additional income for the vast majority of the population. 4 This account is based on interviews with political leaders and junior bureaucrats who were active in the region during the period, including two long in-depth discussions with Dilaram Shabab in 2000 and 2001. 5 The exclusion of local communities began much earlier, in 1866, with the initial demarcation of reserves for timber. However, for the meaning attributed to conservation in the late twentieth century, 1973 was the first instance of exclusion for protection of ‘nature’, even if only for developmental purposes [Chhatre, 2003]. 6 The Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act stipulates a complicated legal procedure for the constitution of National Parks and wildlife sanctuaries. Under the provisions of the Act, the State government has to issue a Notification of Intent, describing the area to be protected. Subsequently, further notifications have to be issued for the acquisition of property rights in the notified area and claims for compensation. Any area can be finally notified as a national park or a sanctuary only after all these procedures have been completed within the limitations specified in the Act. 7 This is, of course, how Dilaram Shabab views the events. His defeat in 1977, at least partly, could be attributed to the state-wide decimation of the Congress Party, a phenomenon that has been explained as voter retribution for the excesses of the national emergency. 8 For details of experiences with other eco-development sites in India, see World Bank [1996], Karlsson [1997], and Mahanty [2002a; 2002b; 2003]. 9 This did not in any way mean that procedures under the Wildlife Act were completed or even commenced. The ‘downgrading’ of the area from national park to wildlife sanctuary status allowed the villages to stay inside, thus preventing the infringement of World Bank’s operational Guidelines on Involuntary Resettlement. 10 One of the authors participated in the information campaign in 1995 as a member of an NGO coalition and witnessed most of the events between November 1994 and July 1996. 11 The most worrisome element of the run-of-the-river technology is the ubiquitous tunnel. By its own logic, the superiority of the technology lies in creating a viable head through water transportation rather than storage. By implication, a project’s viability is subject to the possibility of creating a sufficient head with the minimum possible transportation. It is only in the mountains that the tunnel-length/head ratio would be favourable, where water has to be transported through the mountains, by blasting head-race tunnels. And this is where the Parbati Project encountered the Wildlife Protection Act. The viability of the project is critically dependent on the water from the Jiwa river. This is to be tapped by diverting the water through a weir at Majhan village, located inside the park. Within the overall design, the weir on Jiwa river cannot be below Majhan, the site being determined by the gradient required for the water to get to the top of the powerhouse. There was no question of permission under the Wildlife Act for carrying out blasting and construction activity for the Parbati Project. The national park, at least the part of it critical to the Parbati Project, had to go. 12 The sequence of events in and around GHNP is also provided in greater detail in Kumar Rathore and Nangia [1999], as part of the final report of the Forestry Research Education and Extension Project – Conservation of Biodiversity [Wildlife Institute of India, 1999].


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13 Since the GHNP conservation area is comprised of three different entities, each had to be notified separately under the law. 14 ‘Biomass regeneration’ involved allocating a large sum of money (amount to be decided later) to be spent by village communities to improve biomass production on public lands outside the national park, therefore reducing the pressure on park resources. There was no indication of where the money would come from. 15 This is an essentialist narrative of a very complex political process that loses out on a lot of grain and texture of the specific ideological interactions between the strands represented by the NBA, conservationists, state power and the World Bank. However, we believe that the generalizations hold true for our argument. 16 Maheshwar Singh was the prime mover behind the Parbati Project, situated as it was in his constituency. He was a strong critic of the Wildlife Act, exhorting the Settlement Officer to do his bidding and having him removed when he refused to comply.

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