Environmentalism from Below by Ashley Dawson

Author:Ashley Dawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

CHAPTER 4

AGAINST FORTRESS CONSERVATION

Goanburah Kealing went out one morning to catch some cows that had wandered past the edge of his village. He never returned. Kealing, a young man of the Karbi tribe indigenous to the province of Assam in eastern India, was shot dead by guards from the Kaziranga National Park, on the edge of which his village is located. Guards in Kaziranga maintain a shoot-on-sight policy against local people, whom they accuse of seeking to poach the park’s wildlife. The BBC reported in 2017 that over the two previous decades, 106 people had been killed by park guards; only one guard had died in encounters with purported poachers during that time.1

The park’s anti-poaching policies have sparked repeated protests in Assam. For example, Pranab Doley and Soneswar Narah, activists with the Jeepal Krishak Shramik Sangha, a group that works for the rights of Indigenous people living in and around the Kaziranga National Park, were detained for weeks by the police after claiming publicly that shootings in the park amounted to a form of extrajudicial killing.2 The Jeepal Krishak Shramik Sangha had staged a protest shortly before Doley and Narah’s arrest in response to the announcement of plans to recruit ninety men to the Assam Forest Protection Force, a specialized armed force controlled by the national park’s management.3 In addition to decrying extrajudicial killings, Doley and Narah’s group argued that park guards should be recruited from communities living close to the national park. The group also demanded compensation for community members killed by guards and by animals in the park.

Few tourists who visit the Kaziranga National Park are aware of these local protests against park policies. For these predominantly Western visitors, and for the mainstream wildlife conservation organizations who fund combat training for park guards as part of their efforts to stamp out poaching, the park is a roaring success. Kaziranga is blessed with abundant numbers of elephants and water buffalo. It has some of the highest tiger concentrations of any park in India. Most famous, though, is the park’s population of Great Indian One-Horned Rhinos. On the brink of extinction a century ago, the rhino population in the park now stands at roughly 2,400. In the early 2010s, a spate of killings of these rhinos sparked alarm among park managers and political officials.

But efforts to conserve the park’s population of rhinos are motivated not just by love of animals: tourist visits to Kaziranga bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Indian government annually, and also constitute a major source of revenue for local hotels, restaurants, guides, and tourist agencies. The park is big business, and threats to its wildlife are taken very seriously by local politicians—as is underlined by the Assam government’s recent announcement that it intends to deploy police commandos to the park to intercept poachers.4

Killings by park guards are not the only threat Kaziranga poses to local people. In 2020, the Assam government approved an expansion plan for the park. The announcement stated that the 3,000-hectare expansion would come from removal of “encroachments” on park land.

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