1st Edition

At the Crossroads of Rights Forest Struggles and Human Rights in Postcolonial India

Edited By Rahul Ranjan Copyright 2022
    136 Pages
    by Routledge

    136 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book demonstrates synergies and distils hard-earned lessons of human and forest rights struggles to inform the ongoing debates on environmental human rights. It highlights the ongoing struggles of the communities in postcolonial India that are confronted with the most brutal and unprecedented assault on their economic and sociocultural rights – often led by the political establishment.

    The contributions in this edited volume present multiple narratives of these struggles, theoretical inquiries into a diversity of political imaginations, and the intertwined changes in the legal and biophysical landscapes. These contributions speak to some of the most important contemporary debates within the human rights community that stands in the crossroads with rights of Indigenous Peoples and other members of subaltern groups.

    This volume will be of great value to scholars, students, and researchers interested in human rights politics, power, forest governance, and environmental movements in postcolonial India.

    The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.

    Preface

    Rahul Ranjan

    Introduction – Echoes from the woods: at the crossroads of forest struggles and human rights in postcolonial India

    Rahul Ranjan and Prakash Kashwan

    1. State, forest and Adivasis at crossroads: Netarhat field firing range and contestations over rights

    Anjana Singh

    2. Our rights are carved in stone: the case of the Pathalgadi movement in Simdega, Jharkhand

    Eva Davidsdottir

    3. Excluded Areas as the limit of the political: the murky boundaries of Scheduled Areas in India

    Shaunna Rodrigues

    4. Our land is banked: forest rights, consent and the invention of a legal exception as land banks

    Arpitha Kodiveri

    5. (Un)Doing rights: Adivasi participation in governance discourses in an area of civil unrest in India

    Gunjan Wadhwa

    6. The UN declaration on the rights of peasants, national policies, and forestland rights of India’s Adivasis

    Prakash Kashwan, Ishan Kukreti and Rahul Ranjan

    Biography

    Rahul Ranjan is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of International Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. He is working on the Riverine Rights project funded by the Research Council of Norway. Prior to this, he worked as the Social Media Coordinator at the Human Rights Research Network in London. He was awarded his PhD in 2020 from the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK.