‘They Want Us to Remain Homeless’: J&K's Gujjars, Bakerwals Fear Eviction Despite FRA |
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Rajouri (Jammu and Kashmir): It is a sunny but breezy day in Jammu’s Rajouri district. People are leaving for work, children are ready in their school uniforms, and groups of goat and sheep herders are preparing to take their cattle grazing.
Suddenly, tensions grip the border district when news spreads of dozens of homes belonging to Gujjar and Bakerwal families being demolished in Jammu’s Sidhra area.
The demolition on May 19 in Sidhra left at least 30 tribal families homeless, triggering allegations that vulnerable Muslim communities were being selectively targeted.
As per the 2011 Census, Scheduled Tribes comprised more than 14 lakh of the total 1.25 crore J&K population. These numbers would have changed, since no Census was conducted in 2021, after the 2019 move to bifurcate the state into two union territories. But it is this population that has been left in a legal lacunae, unable to claim their own homes.
While the marginalisation of tribal communities in J&K goes back decades, nomadic people have been facing an exacerbated level of harassment and eviction in recent times. J&K is home to 12 Scheduled Tribes, with the Gujjars and Bakerwals being the largest tribal groups in the majority of districts of J&K. These communities are concentrated in Doda, Poonch, Rajouri and Reasi districts of Jammu. Among this Scheduled Tribe population, a majority are Muslims.
J&K consists of 12 Scheduled Tribes, with the Gujjars and Bakerwals being the largest tribal groups, majorly concentrated in Doda, Poonch, Rajouri and Reasi districts of Jammu. Photo: Tarushi Aswani
In October 2019, barely two months after Article 370 and 35A were read down by the Narendra Modi government, the Union extended the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2007 to J&K. This Act was one of the 106 central laws which were made applicable to J&K. The law – known as the Forest Rights Act or FRA – is meant to insulate tribal groups from eviction from forest dwellings. It also legalises their rights such as access to water resources, pastures for cattle grazing, permission to undertake forest-based livelihoods and undertaking minor cultivation within forests.
Landless tribals assumed that they would now get to legally claim the rights they had been fighting for for decades. But the implementation of the law has not begun on the ground even after the passage of nearly seven years. Those who the law was meant to serve are caught between a tug of war between the local government and the LG’s administration.
On the ground, in Rajouri’s Plangarh for instance, the fight for the FRA means much more than simple access rights. Those living in Plangarh, a village dominated by Gujjars, feel that rights are easily granted on paper – but rarely delivered in person.
Demolition over democratic rights
In September 2021, Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha handed over individual and community rights certificates to people from the Gujjar, Bakerwal and Gaddi Sippi communities under the FRA at an event in Srinagar.
“That actually motivated many of us to apply. In 2021, several people from Thanamandi applied. We only got FRA in 2019, while other states had it decades before us. Even six years after it was applied to J&K, you can’t even say........