Against ‘Historical Injustice’: Studying the Implementation of the Forest Rights Act (2006) in Post-Colonial Eastern India

The Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) has different trajectories in the Global North vis-à-vis the Global South. While in the United States, the movement for environmental justice has been associated with the collaboration of students, Marxist unions, BIPOC identity groups and environmentalists, in the global south the movement for social justice and the movement for environmental conservation have not always gone hand-in-hand, especially with the middle-class environmentalists clashing with the urban poor and the forest-dependent Adivasi (Scheduled Tribes) communities on the issue of conservation. However, across the global south, the issue of environmental justice is increasingly associated with the politics of identity particularly among the indigenous communities to whom politics for environmental justice often include assertions over reclaiming alienated landscapes like forests, hills, or lakes. The Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006, is an important intervention by the Indian government, aimed to address the ‘historical injustice’ faced by the forest-dwelling Scheduled Tribe communities since the state appropriation of forestland in the colonial period. The current paper has studied how multiple identity groups, NGOs and other political organisations have converged in the Ajodhya Pahar hill range of eastern India to demand proper implementation of FRA (2006) since the announcement of a new pumped storage project in the area. Based on ethnographic observations, the paper has tried to understand how EJM in Ajodhya Pahar could be studied in terms of particular landscapes becoming political based on the contested claims of customary rights and identity assertions, and how such politicization has strengthened the movement for FRA (2006).