TRIBAL HUNTING RIGHTS VS WILDLIFE PROTECTION LAWS

Relevance:

Sociology:

Tribal communities in India: Geographical spread. Colonial policies and tribes. Issues of integration and autonomy.

G.S paper II: Governance

Context

Forest rights in India reflect correlative duties of tribal communities to preserve wildlife and it is in consonance to the fundamental duty under Article 51 A(g)

Why in news?

Killing of over 200 wild animals in West Bengal’s Junglemahal forest area by the local tribal population. The animals were killed as part of the centuries-old annual hunting season observed by Adivasis known as Shikar Utsav. There are two opposing views on the issue — while one part supports it as a traditional customary ritual of indigenous people, others oppose it in the name of wildlife conservation and animal rights.

Detailed Analysis

Hunting has been a core part of human civilisation since the beginning. It became deeply embedded in human cultures along with agriculture, fishing and gathering. Some of the oldest cave paintings also depict scenes of hunting. Many of the Saharan Rock Art dating back to the Bubalus period between 10,000 BCE and 7,000 BCE, showcases several scenes of hunting and the relationship between humans and animals.

The same was followed by the British colonial masters of India. On a single day on December 25, 1911 during the visit of King George V, 39 tigers, 18 rhinoceroses, four bears and a leopard were killed in the Terai region of the Indo-Nepal border.

George Yule, a British civil servant, killed more than 400 tigers and Geoffrey Nightingale shot more than 300. Between 1875 and 1925, at least 50,000 tigers were slain in India according to estimates based on home department records.

Post-independence, the genuine need to protect India’s wildlife was realised and in 1952, the Indian Wildlife Board was constituted to centralise all rules and regulations relating to wildlife conservation in the country. One of the most landmark actions by the board was to accord the status of ‘Sanctuary’ / ‘National Park’ to the all erstwhile game reserves in the country.

In 1972, the stringent Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 was a major step towards wildlife conservation. The Act classified animals into different schedules based on the need for protection, and hunting of these species was outlawed and penalties were prescribed in case of violations.

This legislation played a major role in protecting India’s rich wildlife. But on the other hand, it rendered traditional hunting rights practised by many tribal communities illegal.

To hunt or not

The traditional right to hunt wild animals has been recognised by many legal systems across the globe. Australian courts and legislatures have recognised the native title rights of Torres Strait Islanders and Aboriginal Australians and have included the drowning of dugongs, harpooning of turtles and even killing the turtles with strong blows to their heads.

Some of these rights also include breaking the necks of mutton-bird chicks. Cruel as it appears, these customary hunting activities have been exempted from Australia’s Animal Care and Protection Act of 2001.

However, when we deal with the Indian laws, we have a different scenario. Section 3(l) of The Scheduled Tribes & Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 or Forest Rights Act (FRA) excludes the traditional right of hunting or trapping or extracting a part of the body of any species of wild animal. But the community right to hunt is prevalent in many tribal and traditional forest-dwelling communities.

The traditional community rights associated with hunting are not immune from the criticism that they draw from conservation perspectives.

For several tribal and other traditional forest-dwelling communities, reliance on a property-based framework instead of a regulatory one is significant to enforce their community rights to wildlife and forest resources.

• These communities cannot extend the horizon of their environmental prerogatives in a regulatory frame to attain the wide multitude of human-based and human-caused reasons for wildlife mortality.
• Many of these communities cannot even inertly rely on the legislative framework to protect and preserve their rights and interests in the regulatory frame.
• A wide range of existing literature on aboriginal forest and wildlife management will attest to this notion.
• The native conservation servitude associated with wildlife in and around the protected areas draws its genesis way back to the long history of their existence.
• The native right to such natural wildlife capital is ingrained in their way of life. The FRA 2006, during its adoption, has ascertained these facets quite boldly and it was not pacifically accepted by conservationists too.

However, with changing times, laws and their interpretations have also opined and opened the corridors of balancing arrangements, where the conflicting native rights of such communities and concerns of forest and wildlife conservationists do collide to finally come to a settlement.

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Tribes in India are different from similar groups around the world. They are not homogenous group and within themselves they are at various stages of integration with the larger society.

According to Andre Beteille, in India the encounters between tribe and civilization have taken place under historical conditions of a radically different sort. The co-existence of tribe and civilization and their mutual interaction go back to the beginnings of recorded history and earlier.

Tribes have existed at the margins of Hindu civilization from time immemorial and these margins have always been vogue, uncertain and fluctuating.

Hindu civilization acknowledged the distinction between tribe and caste in the distinction between two kinds of communities, Jana and jati, the one confined to the isolation of hills and forests, the other settled in villages and towns with a more elaborate division of labor.

• The transformation of tribes into castes has been documented by a large number of anthropologists and historians. The tribe as a mode of organization has always differed from the caste based mode of organization.
• But considered, as individual units tribes are not always easy to distinguish from castes particularly at the margins where the two modes of organization meet.
• There are over 700 scheduled tribes notified under Article 342 of the Constitution of India.
• According to the 2015-16 Annual Report of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs the population of the Scheduled Tribes in the country is 10.45 crore which as per 2011 census constitutes 8.6% of the total population.