Editorial 1 : One person, one vote, one value
Context: Along with addressing quantitative dilution of vote value, the next Delimitation Commission needs to address qualitative dilution so that minorities are represented more adequately.
Introduction
- Political equality in liberal democracies is not only about equality of opportunity to participate in the political decision-making process, but also about carrying a vote value that is equal to that of other members of the community.
Dilution of Right to vote.
- According to the legal scholar Pamela S. Karlan, the right to vote can be diluted quantitatively and qualitatively by redrawing the boundaries of the constituency in an electoral system.
- Quantitative dilution happens when votes receive unequal weight due to huge deviations in the population among the constituencies.
- Qualitative dilution happens when a voter’s chance of electing a representative of their choice is reduced due to gerrymandering (redrawing of boundaries to favour a candidate/party).
- Thus, delimitation of constituencies plays a major role in strengthening or weakening democracy.
Constitutional Safeguards available in respect of dilution
- Articles 81 and 170 of Constitution state that the ratio of the population for the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assembly constituencies shall be the same as far as practicable.
- Article 327 empowers Parliament to make laws related to the delimitation of constituencies, which cannot be questioned in a court of law. Based on this, the government forms an independent delimitation commission headed by a retired Supreme Court judge to avoid qualitative dilution.
- Articles 330 and 332 guarantee reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) in Parliament and State Legislative Assemblies, which need to be kept in mind during delimitation.
- Delimitation of constituencies needs to be carried out regularly based on the decennial Census to maintain equality of the vote value as far as practicable.
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Delimitation commission
- Delimitation literally means the act or process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies in a country or a province having a legislative body.
- The job of delimitation is assigned to a high-power body. Such a body is known as Delimitation Commission or a Boundary Commission.
- The Delimitation Commission in India is a high-power body whose orders have the force of law and cannot be called in question before any court.
- These orders come into force on a date to be specified by the President of India in this behalf. The copies of its orders are laid before the House of the People and the State Legislative Assembly concerned, but no modifications are permissible therein by them.
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Constitution of Delimitation commission
- The government has constituted four delimitation commissions so far: in 1952, 1962, 1972 and 2002.
- The first delimitation order in 1956 identified 86 constituencies as two-member constituencies, which was abolished by the Two Member Constituencies (Abolition) Act, 1961.
- The second delimitation order in 1967 increased the number of Lok Sabha seats from 494 to 522 and State Assembly seats from 3,102 to 3,563.
- The third delimitation order of 1976 increased the number of Lok Sabha and State Assembly constituencies to 543 and 3,997, respectively.
- Due to the fear of more imbalance of representation, the 42nd Amendment Act in 1976 froze the population figure of the 1971 Census for delimitation until after the 2001 Census.
- The Delimitation Act of 2002 did not give power to the Delimitation Commission to increase the number of seats but said that the boundaries within the existing constituencies should be readjusted.
- The Commission allowed up to 10% variation in the parity principle; yet around 17 parliamentary constituencies and many more Assembly constituencies violated this so that each representative could represent more people.
- But the fourth Delimitation Commission was able to reassign reserved constituencies, which increased the number of seats for SCs from 79 to 84 and STs from 41 to 47 based on the increase in population. The moratorium was extended until the first Census after 2026 for any further increase in the number of seats.
Dilution of vote value
- The population of Rajasthan, Haryana, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Gujarat has increased by more than 125% between 1971 and 2011, whereas the population of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Goa, and Odisha has increased by less than 100% due to stricter population control measures.
- This also reveals a huge variation in the value of vote for a people between States. For example, in U.P., an MP on average represents around 2.53 million people, whereas in Tamil Nadu, an MP represents on average around 1.84 million people, a quantitative dilution.
Qualitative dilution, sidelining the vote of minorities.
- The qualitative dilution of vote value parity can be used as a tool to sideline or make insignificant the votes of minorities. This can happen in three ways.
- The first is cracking, where areas dominated by minorities are divided into different constituencies.
- The second is stacking, where the minority population is submerged within constituencies where others are the majority.
- And the third is packing, where minorities are packed within a few constituencies; their strength is weakened everywhere else.
Highlighted by National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution and the Sachar Committee Report
- The qualitative dilution of vote value was highlighted in the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution and the Sachar Committee Report: in a majority of the seats reserved for SCs by the Delimitation Commission (1972-76), the population of Muslims was more than 50% and also higher than the SC population.
- And constituencies which had a large SC population, and a lower Muslim population were declared unreserved. This has a major impact on the number of Muslim representatives in Parliament. At present, the share of Muslims MPs in Parliament is only around 4.42%, whereas the Muslim population is 14.2%.
Conclusion
- Delimitation cannot be postponed further as it will lead to more deviation in the population-representation ratio. At the same time, the interests of the southern States have to be protected as their representation in Parliament might weaken due to more seats being assigned to States with a higher population growth.
- Along with addressing quantitative dilution of vote value, the next Delimitation Commission needs to address qualitative dilution so that minorities are represented more adequately.
Editorial 2 : An uphill struggle to grow the Forest Rights Act
Context: Political opportunism, forester resistance and bureaucratic apathy have affected the Act which seeks to create a more democratic structure of forest governance.
Introduction
- On December 18, 2006, the Rajya Sabha endorsed the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, enacted by the Lok Sabha.
- This Act, commonly known as the Forest Rights Act, or FRA, marks a watershed in India’s socio-environmental legislation, as it attempts to put an end to the long-drawn conflict over supposed forest encroachments.
- Simultaneously, it seeks to create a much more democratic, bottom-up forest governance.
History
- Prior to colonialism, local communities enjoyed customary rights over forests in their vicinity or even a large region. Even when kings or chieftains claimed (say) hunting rights in certain forests, local communities continued to enjoy all other forest benefits.
- The colonial takeover of India’s forests, however, resulted in a massive disruption of these traditions.
Historical injustices and exploitation: Colonialism
- Based on the false idea of ‘eminent domain’ (that the ruler always owns all property), the 1878 (colonial) Indian Forest Act was passed, and the takeover of India’s forests began.
- The Imperial Forest Department was established to harvest and transform the forest to maximise timber and revenue and was also tasked with protecting ‘state’ property against local communities, now deemed trespassers.
- The injustices imposed by this colonial forest policy took multiple forms.
- First, now that forests were seen as primarily a timber resource, shifting cultivation was banned.
- Second, the so-called survey and settlement of agricultural lands was incomplete and biased in favour of the state.
- Third, simultaneously, to ensure labour for forestry operations, ‘forest villages’ were created, wherein forest land was leased for agriculture to (mostly Adivasi) households in return for compulsory (virtually bonded) labour.
- Fourth, since forests were now state property, all access to forest produce was limited, temporary and chargeable, and always at the mercy of the forest bureaucracy that was armed with police powers. Any concessions to local livelihood needs were termed ‘privileges’ that could be modified or withdrawn any time.
- Fifth, even where access was permitted, the local community had no right to manage the forest, as the state logged valuable forests and made heavily used forest de facto open access.
Matters only worsened post-Independence.
- In the hurry to assimilate princely States and zamindari estates into the Union, their forest areas were declared state property without proper inquiry into who was residing in them. Legitimate residents and cultivators became ‘encroachers’ overnight.
- Later, forest lands were leased out under the ‘Grow More Food’ campaign and other initiatives to meet the needs of a growing population but were never ‘regularised’.
- Communities displaced by dams were not given alternative lands and ended up ‘encroaching’ forest land elsewhere. And, forest exploitation continued as in colonial times, but in the name of national interest.
- The Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 and the Forest (Conservation) Act 1980 (FCA), again conceived within the framework of eminent domain, became the forms of injustice.
- Lakhs of communities were forcibly resettled when creating sanctuaries and national parks. And in ‘diverting’ forests for development projects, neither were the views or consent of local communities taken into consideration, nor, in spite of imposing hefty Net Present Value fees on the project, were the local communities compensated for the impact on their livelihoods.
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Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA)
- The Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA), which was passed in 2006, acknowledges the rights of traditional forest dwellers (OTFD) and tribal communities that live in forests (FDST) to the forest resources that these communities rely on for a range of needs, such as housing, livelihood, and other sociocultural requirements.
- It acknowledges and grants the FDST and OTFD, who have been living in these forests for many generations, their rights to the forest.
- It guarantees the FDST and OTFD's means of subsistence and food security while fortifying the forest conservation regime.
- The process of identifying the kind and scope of the individual forest rights (IFR), community forest rights (CFR), or both that may be granted to FDST and OTFD may be started by the Gram Sabha.
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Significance of Forest Rights Act
- The FRA is remarkable because it first of all acknowledges these historical (colonial) injustices and their continuation post-Independence. Redress then takes three broad forms.
- The issue of so-called ‘encroachments’ is addressed through recognising individual forest rights (IFRs) to continue habitation and cultivation or other activities that existed before December 2005.
- Forest villages are to be converted into revenue villages after full rights recognition.
- The issue of access and control is addressed by recognising the rights of village communities to access and use forests and to own and sell minor forest produce, and, most importantly, to manage forests within their customary boundaries, including in sanctuaries and national parks.
- This is the most far-reaching provision in the FRA, as it ensures decentralised forest governance, linking management authority and responsibility to community rights.
- Finally, the Act lays down a democratic procedure for identifying whether and where wildlife conservation may require curtailing or extinguishing community rights.
- Simultaneously, having community rights over a forest translates ipso facto into the community having a say in, if not veto over, any diversion of that forest and a right to compensation if diverted.
- This right was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the Niyamgiri case, and although the Forest Conservation Rules 2022 and FCA Amendment 2023 seek to bypass this right, States can still put in place such consent mechanisms.
Distortions in implementation
- Unfortunately, the politicians in most States focused solely on individual rights and projected the Act as an ‘encroachment regularisation’ scheme.
- But even the recognition of IFRs was done rather shabbily, compromised by Forest Department resistance, the apathy and ignorance of other departments, and misuse of technology.
- Claimants were put through enormous hardship during claim-filing, subjected to faulty and non-transparent rejections and (equally important) arbitrary partial recognition (thereby getting tagged as ‘approved’ claims).
- Imposing absurd digital processes in areas with poor connectivity and literacy, such as the VanMitra software in Madhya Pradesh, is just a continuation of injustice. Even the open-and-shut case of ‘forest villages’ has not been addressed in most States.
- But the biggest lacuna in FRA implementation is the extremely slow and incomplete recognition of community rights to access and manage forests (loosely, community forest rights or CFRs).
- The (still colonially structured) forest bureaucracy is vehemently opposed to these rights, as it stands to lose its zamindari: our estimates show that 70%-90% of the forests in central India should be under CFRs.
- Maharashtra, Odisha, and, more recently, Chhattisgarh, are the only States to recognise CFRs substantially. But only Maharashtra has enabled their activation by de-nationalising minor forest produce, at least in Scheduled Areas, resulting in at least a thousand villages managing their own forests.
- Even here, illegal non-recognition of community rights in densely forested potential mining areas has led to protest and unrest.
- The non-recognition of community rights is convenient to the hardline conservationists and the development lobby alike: communities in Protected Areas are then precariously placed and easy targets for ‘voluntary rehabilitation’, and forests can be handed over for mining or dams without community consent.
Fathom the FRA’s intent.
- As political regimes change and the memory of the struggle that led to the passage of this Act fades, calls for shutting down the FRA’s implementation have emerged.
- Simultaneously, some States have talked of ‘saturating’ rights recognition in mission mode. However, as examples from Chhattisgarh show, mission mode implementation invariably plays into the hands of the Forest Department, leading to distorted rights recognition and reinstatement of technocratic control.
Conclusion
- Unless political leaders, bureaucrats and environmentalists all appreciate the spirit and the intent of the FRA, the historical injustices will remain unaddressed, forest governance will remain highly undemocratic, and the enormous potential for community-led forest conservation and sustainable livelihoods will remain unrealised.