Books

BEING ADIVASI: Existence, Entitlements, Exclusion edited by Abhay Flavian Xaxa and
G.N. Devy. Vintage (Penguin Random House), Delhi, 2021.

WHAT is it to be Adivasi? What is it to work, to resist, and to love as an Adivasi? What is the spark that burns bright despite all the exclusions and the violence? The image of Abhay Xaxa that comes to life through his poem, I am not your data, answers these questions, even as his untimely, unnecessary death leaves many more questions unanswered. Had 43-year old Abhay not died of a heart attack in March 2020, what might he have done to bring new life into Adivasi movements, to forge alliances between different sections of India’s struggling communities, especially Dalits and Adivasis, to show scholarship what it means to write from an Adivasi perspective? As he says in his poem, ‘I draw my own picture and invent my own grammar, I make my own tools to fight my own battle, For me, my people, my world and my Adivasi self!’

This book is part of a series commissioned by the Samruddha Bharat Foundation to further constitutional values like equality and fraternity and to provide solutions to urgent social issues for a general readership. Abhay had commissioned most of the essays before he passed on, and we owe a debt to the well known scholar G.N. Devy for bringing this book to completion. Perhaps there are few like Professor Devy who can understand that it is the voice and the silences that together constitute adivasi existence.

Thanks to the warm and perceptive essay on Abhay by Chitranga Choudhury and Aniket Aga, included in this volume, we get a glimpse of the various influences on Abhay. Born in a Jashpur village in Chhattisgarh, Abhay was a student activist and organizer from early on. In 2007, he won a Ford Foundation scholarship to do an MA at the University of Sussex and then returned to do a PhD in sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Abhay’s work with the Institute of Dalit Studies and the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights gave him a unique vantage point with which to bring together Dalit and Adivasi movements, a project that is essential to our times. For too long the struggles have remained separate or the Adivasi voice has been subsumed with the Dalit experience as the general concerns of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. In practice, there is much in common but they also have distinct concerns.

One set of essays in this volume – by N.C. Saxena, Virginius Xaxa, Meenakshi Natarajan, Kantilal Bhuria and Vikrant Bhuria – examines government policies and constitutional provisions and where they have fallen short. The Bhuria and Bhuria essay provides concrete suggestions on how institutions like the Tribes Advisory Council in each state and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes can be strengthened. Abhay Xaxa, drawing on his strengths in budget analysis, tells us how little the promises of the first Modi term have come to. The essay by Archana Prasad brings in the issue of class politics and proletarianization, a much-needed approach that is often missed out in the focus on identitarian politics. Shubhranshu Choudhary writes of bringing the media and communication to Adivasi areas by way of the remarkable CGNet Swara, which introduced simple technology that enabled people to communicate stories that the mainstream media was not interested in. Ajay Dandekar gives us the history of the Denotified Tribes – who because they are not counted within the rubric of either SC or ST are often missed out – and describes the sad fate of more recent policy interventions on this issue.

Vincent Ekka and Ghanshyam bring yet other insights to the volume – from within the Adivasi community’s traditions and strengths – whether indigenous governance structures or what Ghanshyam calls Indigenocracy.

Together, this volume is a very useful contemporary contribution, especially in policy terms, to the concerns of Adivasis, illuminating what it means to write as, with and about Adivasis.

Nandini Sundar

Teaches sociology at Delhi University

I AM NOT A SILENT SPECTATOR: Why Truth has Become So Bitter, Dissent So Intolerable, Justice So Out of Reach by Stan Swamy. Indian Social Institute, Bangalore, 2021.

THE book I am Not a Silent Spectator is a collection of essays that Father Stan Swamy put together in the last years of his life, at the behest of friends and colleagues who felt he should share his life story. That it would be published posthumously was not planned. Professor of Sociology, Nandini Sundar, wrote the Foreword to the book, which begins by saying that ‘Stan Swamy is one of the treasures of this country and one of my personal heroes’ (p. iv). Later, while being questioned by the National Investigation Agency, Swamy is asked if he knows Nandini Sundar and he replies that, ‘What attracted me to her was her strenuous and persevering efforts to get justice for Adivasis of Bastar district in Chhattisgarh’ (p. 85). It is the quest for justice, for the most part for Jharkhand’s Adivasis, that occupied the past three decades of Swamy’s life, a journey that he narrates in the book’s eleven chapters. These are followed by chapter 12, a transcript of his interrogation by the NIA, chapter 13, which gives his subsequent thoughts and resolutions, and chapter 14, a compilation of letters and poems sent to his Jesuit confrères while he was incarcerated.

In the first chapter Swamy takes the reader back to the national Emergency in 1975. Swamy had just taken charge of the Indian Social Institute Training Centre. He and his colleagues summarized, translated into local languages, photocopied and distributed to activists in Bangalore the philosophy of Paulo Freire espoused in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. On the demand of students that they be taught Marxism, Swamy began to teach Social Analysis. A vignette tells the tale of a small village where Swamy and his associates made the tenant farmers aware of their rights; the Deputy Commissioner of Bangalore district came to personally supervise the redistribution of farmland. However, the landlords pulled strings leading the High Court to rule against the tenants, and the DC was quickly transferred, while local church authorities objected to Swamy’s work. Perhaps this was one of Swamy’s earliest first-hand experiences of the system letting down the neediest? Swamy writes about the training programme he developed and the trainings he gave in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and among Dalits in Tamil Nadu and Adivasis in central India.

Chapter Two takes us to the next stage of Swamy’s journey: his arrival in Jharkhand around the year 1990. Another vignette impresses on us, as it did him, the ingenuity of the Adivasi mind that has yet to separate, as mainstream ‘civilized’ societies the globe over have, humankind from the animal kingdom: while picking mangoes from the tree in their courtyard, the family with which Swamy was staying deliberately left some fruits for the birds. The chapter begins to narrate the structural violence experienced by Jharkhand’s Adivasis, many of whom have been forcibly displaced in the name of national development. Swamy introduces the study he and his colleagues conducted on undertrials in Jharkhand’s prisons: 97% of the interviewed Under-Trials were found to have not committed the crimes they were accused of. In late 2017 Swamy filed a PIL against the Government of Jharkhand in the state’s High Court. Moving back and forth in time and space, Swamy narrates the betrayal meted out on villagers protesting against the Koel-Karo dam project shortly after Jharkhand’s formation, the reasons for the out-migration of young Adivasis, and a successful instance of people’s mobilization against a corporate land grab.

The laws and policies that are supposed to secure the rights and welfare of Adivasis in India are outlined in Chapter Three. Swamy briefly outlines the history of Adivasis’ deprivation, dividing India’s post-Independence period into 1950-1975, which he summarizes as ‘From Ethnicity to Developmentalism’, and 1975 onwards, summarized as ‘From Developmentalism to Regionalism’ (p. 17). The creation of Jharkhand in 2000 failed in its promise to improve the lives of its people, and to Swamy, Jharkhand’s Adivasis/Moolvasis/Dalits need to ‘emerge as a strong united force to assert their rights… not just to survive but to thrive…’ (p. 18). Nine constitutional and legal protections afforded to Adivasis by the state are listed in turn, highlighting their shortcomings: the 5th Schedule of the Indian Constitution, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act 1989, Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996, Samatha Judgement of the Supreme Court 1997, Forest Rights Act 2006, Land Acquisition Act 2013, the judgement of the Supreme Court that ‘owner of the land is also the owner of sub-soil minerals’ (p. 29), resolutions of the UN to which India is a signatory, and Supreme Court rulings regarding membership of a person in a banned organisation. These protections were central to Swamy’s work in Jharkhand; his commentary on each of them shows how far removed practice is from the legal ideal.

Chapter Four, ‘The early morning knock’, describes how at 6 am on 28 August 2018 Swamy came to discover that he was a suspect in the Bhima-Koregaon case in Pune. On this same day, he writes, eleven other activists in different parts of the country were arrested, with nine of them going to Pune jail and two managing to get bail. He was to remain ‘a suspect’ (p. 36) for the time-being. The second raid on Swamy, on 12 June 2019, was led by the Assistant Police Commissioner of Pune. Swamy narrates his experience, one that he must have only been too familiar with from his work with Adivasi undertrials. In the second raid they took away the hard disk from his computer. He gives a second-hand account of the events at Bhima-Koregaon on the 1 January 2018. Swamy felt that the real reason for which he was implicated in these cases ‘might be… the PIL I filed in the High Court of Jharkhand on behalf of thousands of Under-Trial Prisoners (UTPs) languishing in the jails of Jharkhand’ (pp. 40-41). He narrates how he had become co-convenor of the Persecuted Prisoners Solidarity Committee, a body that he and other concerned activists and lawyers convened in 2015. The Maharashtra police, he writes, claimed to believe that this and two other organizations were frontal organizations of the Maoists.

The saga of undertrial prisoners is the theme of Chapter Five. Here Swamy highlights the way in which media reports have normalized in the minds of the public the incarceration of rural youth under the guise of them being ‘naxal-suspects’. The study Swamy initiated and guided, introduced in chapter two, is detailed, as is the pain and suffering these incarcerations inflict upon the families and loved ones of the accused and imprisoned. Chapter Six is itself a vignette, based on a month-long study tour to Hong Kong and China in 1989. The chain of Swamy’s watch broke while he was in Hong Kong and he was unable to get it fixed; however while in southern China a young woman in a watch shop quickly fixed it for him and then refused payment, because, she said, he was their guest. To Swamy, Hong Kong embodied ‘the true face of capitalism’ whereas in ‘Guang Shou’ city, he had caught a ‘glimpse of socialism’ (pp. 49-50).

Chapter Seven narrates the story of attempts by an auxiliary of Punjab State Electricity Board, called PANEM Co., to extract coal from Pachuada Panchayat of Pakur district, Jharkhand, in 2000. The government of the newly formed state had entered into a MoU with the company in contravention of several acts designed to protect the well-being of local residents. Along with a group of activists, the head of the panchayat petitioned the High Court with a PIL. However, the High Court passed its verdict in favour of the company. The villagers then approached the Supreme Court, which ordered the company to provide adequate compensation and rehabilitation to the affected. In 2015 the Supreme Court deemed illegal over 200 companies, including PANEM Co., ordering their closure. PANEM Co. walked away, leaving the affected with nothing but a ruined landscape to show for their fifteen years of struggle. Swamy terms this ‘Development replaced by destitution!’ (p. 54).

The Forest Rights Act 2006 is the subject of Chapter Eight. Compared with 41 lakh applications at the national level, in Jharkhand 30,000 petitions were submitted by Adivasi households to claim ownership of forest land that they inhabit and cultivate. Similar to the proportion at the national level, about one-half of the applications were rejected. In early 2019 the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of all the rejected applicants. However, following an outcry, it requested all state governments to report on their implementation of the FRA. At the end of the chapter Swamy questions ‘romantic ecological initiatives’ that seek to displace Adivasi communities in the name of protecting wild animals.

Chapter Nine covers the topic of Pathalgadi. Though an age-old practice, the Pathalgadi movement, according to Swamy, began in the mid-2000s when Munda villages started inscribing on stone slabs (pathals) the powers of the Gram Sabha as per the 5th Schedule of the Constitution and the PESA Act 1996. From around 2015 this movement picked up and spread beyond the Mundas to other tribes, and beyond Jharkhand to Chhattisgarh and Odisha. As a result, writes Swamy, state governments became jittery, and paramilitary and police forces were sent to villages, the movement conveniently branded as ‘Maoist inspired’ (p. 62). Three FIRs were filed: against 11,200 unnamed villagers, 109 named persons including village leaders, and 20 intellectuals/artists/writers/activists, Swamy included. The Jharkhand police raided Swamy’s room in late October 2019, taking away his few possessions: a cupboard, a table, three chairs, and a mattress-cum-pillow. They left only his bare cot.

Migration of Adivasi and Dalit youth is discussed in Chapter Ten. Three trends are outlined: young Adivasi women migrating to metropolitan cities, entire families to the northern states to work on construction sites or in brick-kilns, and the recent exodus of Adivasi/Dalit youth to the southern states to work as casual or contract labourers. Swamy believes that these migrations are the result of both deepening poverty in rural areas and high levels of state repression towards those resisting displacement and dispossession. He summarizes the findings of an article written by colleagues: migrant youth are deprived of benefits, exploited, vulnerable to accidents and death, victims of xenophobia, some may become bonded labourers, and some girls are trafficked and sent to brothels. In person and through his writing, Swamy inspires people to make efforts to ensure that the human, constitutional and labour rights of Adivasi and Dalit migrant youth are respected.

The short final chapter provides a first-hand account of how Swamy lived his last one and a half years outside of jail. In late June 2019 he travelled to Bangalore and then on to different places in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, where he met and talked with migrants. He impressed upon his friends and comrades the importance of meeting to talk with migrants. Swamy then details the content of two Facebook posts he made related to the Pathalgadi movement, for which the state government filed a FIR against him in mid-2018. In late 2019, while he was in the South, the police suddenly decided to arrest him and declared him an ‘absconder’, ‘evading arrest’ (p. 76). He calls the raiding of his residence and confiscation of his few pieces of furniture ‘the last blow’, whereas he describes as ‘a ray of light’ the taking office of the new state government two months later, which in its first cabinet meeting decided to withdraw all cases related to the Pathalgadi movement. Though the Bhima-Koregaon case was haunting him, true to his character, Swamy expresses his worry for the families of the others who have been accused, and for all the people they would no longer be able to serve. Swamy ends by expressing his faith that the courts would expose the truth.

I last met Father Stan Swamy at Bagaicha in March 2020, while I was visiting friends in Ranchi. He appeared strikingly weak and vulnerable, though nevertheless cheerful and relaxed. Later, during his incarceration, I thought of him often. The final chapters of the book confirmed my suspicion that Swamy continued his life’s work of serving the poor and deprived until his very end. The Indian government would have done well to heed the age-old adage, ‘Don’t kill the messenger’. Their treatment of Swamy has brought him and his work international recognition: all the world’s largest media outlets reported on the unjust death of India’s ‘oldest political prisoner’, and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed dismay at the way the Indian government had treated him. Stan Swamy, one can say, is now a thorn firmly lodged in the side of the forces that seek private profit at the cost of people’s well-being.

The book ends with an Epilogue. Here Swamy writes not about the Catholic Church’s official view of life after death but of the belief system of Adivasis, in which departed spirits come back to their near and dear ones. There’s no doubt that Swamy’s work will be continued, and that Swamy’s spirit will inspire activists for decades to come; because as they say, ‘you can kill a man, but not an idea’.

Joe Hill

Social scientist and
organic vegetable grower, Bonn

HOW FORESTS THINK: Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013.

How Forests Think emerged from Eduardo’s conversations with Runa people in the forests of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, who speak Quichua. The extraordinary ethnography in the five chapters of this book draw upon insights predominantly from the work of Charles Pierce to grasp the subtle nuances of these people’s Quichua understanding of their environment. What is missing is what we usually expect from an ethnography – a description of Runa social structure, which would have anchored this work firmly in the lives of the people and their wider social context. Instead, this book is full of insightful discourses on a wide variety of themes such as semiosis and the living sign, notions of self, language, death, anthropology, dreams, icons, life representations. These discourses raise important questions regarding the relation between academic ways of thinking and how Runa think. For instance, are their insights used (as evidence) to affirm the theoretical insights of academic thinking or is there a reciprocal conversation between them?

This question concerns ‘thinking’ as a mode of ‘othering’. For more than two hundred years, whatever is not capable of thinking with reason has been ‘othered’. This includes all or most indigenous peoples and all
non-human living beings across the world. In this mode of othering, thinking and reason are undifferentiated, as if where there is thinking there must be reason. Conversely where there is no reason there can be no thinking. From this standpoint, the phrase ‘forests think’ transfers a human activity (thinking) to the non-human entity ‘forests’ as if forests were human beings. Such personification or anthropomorphism is prevalent throughout folk lore and literature.

My reading of this book has therefore focused on discovering to what extent ‘how forests think’ counters ‘thinking as a way othering’, as a contribution to decolonizing the mind that holds on to ‘thinking’ as a mode of othering. In this regard, it is worth considering that for over two hundred years we have witnessed how deeply integrated the human habit of colonizing other human beings is with human colonizing of other living and non-living beings’ habitats on the one hand, and with ‘thinking as a way othering’ on the other. For this reason, without undoing ‘thinking as a way of othering’ it may not be possible to pursue decolonization holistically.

Holistic decolonization questions human beings’ monopoly of thinking. It asks, if ‘forests think’ then ‘what is called thinking’? Is there a notion of ‘thinking’ freed from the clutches of ‘reason’? Is there a necessary relation between thinking and reason? Is it possible to decouple ‘thinking’ from ‘reason’? Is thinking freed from reason encompassing and inclusive of thinking with reason?

I prefer a non-linear reading of Kohn’s work, to understand its significance in relation to works in philosophy, plant neurology, botany, biology and forestry for example, so as to contribute to a deeper understanding. In recent times, Iain McGilchrist1 and Antonio Damasio2 among others have shown that the coupling of thinking and reason reflects coordination of the left and right hemispheres of the brain,3 in which memory plays a pivotal complementary role by systemically integrating emotional content with concepts, categories, propositions, judgements. It is reflexive to learn, correct, and incorporate learnings into habit. Damage to any of the three (the two hemispheres plus memory) on account of aging or accident impacts coordination. Since thinking is a function of brain activity, this presupposes a mind deeply embedded in memory.
All of this shapes one’s mode of being in the world, from what we conceive as ‘intelligence’ to the contours of imagination.

In his lectures on What is called Thinking?4 the philosopher Heidegger argues that thinking is a gift that has very little to do with currents and graphic curves of brain matter. He argues, ‘thought has the gift of thinking back’. Memory is the gathering of thought, since it holds what ‘must be thought about’ and ‘inclines us to towards it’. His deliberations on the way the gift of thinking dwells in recalling and gathering memory frees thinking from the captivity of reflexivity – from ‘systemic’ concepts and representational ideas. He argues that these block the way towards grasping memory as the gift of thinking, and thinking as a gift of memory, of greatest significance in the shaping of being human.

This approach delinks thinking from brain matter (from functions of the left and right hemispheres), and decouples thinking from reason (ideas, concepts and representational ideas). However, it does not decouple thinking from human beings. That is to say, thinking remains ‘the’ activity that defines humans. Eduardo Kohn argues for a more inclusive notion of memory by decoupling it from human beings. He learns from the Runa people about the ‘play of remembering and forgetting as unique and central to life: any lineage of living organisms – plants or animals’ is a ‘selective remembering of previous fits to the environment’.

Kohn learns that all living beings are living signs that ‘bring expectations of regularity’. (p 76) Memory, he suggests, is semiosis. ‘Signs don’t come from the mind. Rather, it is the other way round. What we call mind, or self, is a product of semiosis.’ (p. 34) ‘Signs are more than things…. They don’t squarely reside in sounds, events, or words. Nor are they exactly in the bodies or even mind. They can’t be located in this way because they are ongoing relational processes. Semiosis is the name for this living sign process through which one thought gives rise to another, which in turn give rise to another, which in turn gives rise to another, and so on, into the potential future.’ (p. 33) This suggests the gift of memory is more than just human beings thinking back. It’s integral to the semiosis of memory and forgetting, discernible in all living beings with or without brains.

This resonates with what botanist Stefano Mancuso and biologist Rupert Sheldrake say. In Mancuso’s words, ‘It isn’t too difficult to imagine that intelligence is not the product of one single organ but that it is inherent in life, whether there is a brain or not.’ Regarding ‘Memories without a brain’ he says, ‘All plants are capable of learning from experience and therefore have memorization mechanisms. If you submit a plant, for example an olive tree, to a stress such as drought or salinity, it will respond by implementing the necessary modifications to its anatomy and metabolism to ensure its survival. Nothing unusual in that, right? If, after a certain amount of time, we submit the same plant to the exact stimulus, perhaps with an even stronger intensity, we notice something that is surprising only on the surface: this time, the plant responds more effectively to the stress than it did the first time. It has learnt its lesson...’ 5

Rupert Sheldrake expresses something similar: ‘In the 1980s neuroscientists discovered that when animals watched other animals doing something, for example a monkey peeling a banana, changes in the motor part of their brains mirrored those in the brain of animals they were watching. These responses were described in terms of ‘mirror neurons’. But this term is misleading if it suggests a special kind of nerve. This is better thought of as a kind of a resonance. In fact, Vittorio Gallese, one of the discoverers of the mirror neuron refers to the imitation of movements or actions by another individual as “resonance behaviour”.’6

Resonance between the works of Sheldrake, Mancuso and Kohn involves semiosis that prepares the ground to decommission the exclusivity of thinking with a brain, to explore intersubjectivity with non-human living beings – between human beings, plants and animals, ‘free of the clutches of reason’.

With Kohn’s discussion of semiosis, the absolute otherness of non-human living beings is mitigated. He argues that non-human living beings’ refusal to be conceptualized makes ‘self-similarity knowable’. It shows there exists such a thing as ‘being itself’ in all its singularity (p.86). This emerges from Runa awareness of both inside and outside points of view, and constitutes ‘multinatural persectivalism’ (p.97). It ‘makes available something about life “itself”, and captures something about the logic of the thoughts of the forest. It captures the feeling of being alive to this living logic in moments of its emergence. It captures, in short, what it feels like to think.’ (pp. 97-98)

Kohn sees this as an attribute of an ambiguous space, described by Runa in the term mashti, meaning approximately ‘what’s-its-name’. (p. 104). He does not discuss this any further. But his expression ‘what it feels like to think’ can be read as a response to the question ‘What is called thinking?’ To ask ‘What does it feel like to think?’ moves us beyond the terse question ‘what is called thinking?’ to understand that thinking can only be intelligible in terms of what it feels like to think. The ambiguity in this formulation is a concomitant of the refusal to rigid conceptualisation, since it allows space for an awareness of inside and outside points of views. It is this larger awareness that allows us to know ‘what it feels like to think’.

This feeling-awareness co-constitutes the self of the forest, its ‘being itself’ in all its singularity, refusing conceptualization. Its form is intelligible in its dissolution. All of this is the consequence of accepting gracefully the absolute otherness of non-human nature, and not forcing conceptualization onto it.

Returning to the questions asked at the beginning of this essay, the response to our question ‘If “forests think” then what is called thinking?’ is that thinking needs to be understood in terms of what it feels like think. To our question ‘Is it possible to decouple “thinking” from “reason”?’ the response is yes, this happens when the mind is at home with the refusal of non-human nature to be conceptualized.

Kohn is not concerned with exploring whether there is a necessary relation between thinking and reason, or whether thinking freed from reason encompass thinking with reason. He does not explore if ‘what it feels like to think’ of ‘what’s-its-name’ and of ‘being itself’ is an aspect of the inter-subjectivity between non-human living beings - between plant and plant, or between animals and plants. Is not the refusal to be conceptualized and named, the ambiguity of ‘being itself’ and the sense of ‘what it feels like to think’, vital to this inter-subjectivity?

In this regard, it is worth looking at Richard Grant’s conversation with German Forester Peter Wohlleben, a tree whisperer. ‘Wohlleben takes me to two massive beech trees growing next to each other. He points up at their skeletal winter crowns, which appear careful not to encroach into each other’s space. “These two are old friends,” he says. “They are very considerate in sharing the sunlight, and their root systems are closely connected. In cases like this, when one dies, the other usually dies soon afterward, because they are dependent on each other.’ 7

How did he know the intimacy between the two massive beech trees growing next to each other? Whispering is a mode of communicating presence. Whispers are soft sounds to be uttered and received in most intimate relations, quiet communication between quiet beings.

I cannot speak for Peter Wohlleben. However, I can share my understanding. He heard the whispers between the two big beech trees, because he is attuned to trees. His own book, The Secret Network of Nature,8 is testimony to this attunement.

This poses the question: is there a more inclusive, holistic understanding of thinking wherein thinking embedded in the brain is only one kind of thinking? Should we be clearing the ground to explore thinking amongst living beings that do not have a brain? Memory here is not the ‘gift of looking back’ and thinking. It is not the ability to memorize facts and figures and not to forget. A more holistic understanding of memory resonates the presence of other living beings. The inclusive mind enhances the potential embedded in the togetherness of human and non-human nature.

Indigenous voices across the world have indicated that mainstream knowledge systems are biased towards promoting anthropocentric intelligence. How Forests Think enriches the tradition of anthropology that endeavours to show the robustness of modes of being in worlds parallel to the modern.

Savyasaachi

Department of Sociology

Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi

WHO KILLED BERTA CACERES? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet by Nina Lakhani. Verso, London and New York, 2020.

THE role of indigenous activists in protecting the earth’s most vibrant and vulnerable ecosystems is increasingly recognized. But so are the dangers they face. Berta Cáceres is one of dozens of prominent indigenous defenders assassinated in recent years, in many countries. Her country, Honduras, has the dubious reputation as the original ‘banana republic’ (a term coined in Cabbages and kings by O. Henry in 1904, after a stay there). Like other Latin American countries, it has a strong tradition of campesino and indigenista resistance, but the influence of corporate power continues, made infamous by the United Fruit Company that combined with the CIA to end democracy in neighbouring Guatemala in the coup that deposed Jacobo Árbenz in 1954.

Berta was from the indigenous Lenca community, and the movement that brought her death was against a big dam called Agua Zarca, on the Galcarque river. Parallels with India abound, where over 5,000 big dams have displaced unknown millions of villagers, especially Adivasis. The militarization and repression of communities, the impunity of extrajudicial killings, vast land-grabs of indigenous land, and the industrial extraction and privatization of water (as well as minerals) are among key similarities.

But just occasionally, the impunity is challenged successfully, and this is what makes this book so significant in the world context of escalating dangers; especially since Nina Lakhani, the author, can probably take a considerable share of the credit for this, using her role as a UK investigative journalist to maximum effect in drawing attention to Berta’s case, and then writing a book about it – often under surveillance and in considerable danger herself.

Honduras’ recent history is dominated by a coup in 2009 that ejected socialist-leaning President Manuel Zelaya (in his pyjamas!), and entrenched rightwing interests, with tacit assent from US leaders (including Obama and Hilary Clinton). The 2009 coup established a new level of institutionalized corruption, and an international role of Honduras as ‘narco-state’, as well as an extractivist economic policy, based on big dams, plantations and mining, supported by assassination of opponents. At least eight journalists and ten members of the popular resistance front (FNLP) were assassinated while Zelaya’s successor Pepe Lobo was President (January 2010-2014). Violence and narcotrafficking got even worse under Juan Orlando Hernández (2014-2021), from the same National Party, with another 75 Honduran journalists killed. Orlando’s brother Tony was convicted in October 2019 by a US court to life imprisonment for ‘state-sponsored drugs trafficking’.

Berta was a co-founder of COPINH, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, which has fought for Indigenous rights and territories; and she was especially proactive against the Agua Zarca dam. She came into international profile when she was awarded the Goldman prize for her work in 2015. She was shot dead in a night attack on her home in La Esperanza on 3 March 2016. Nelson García, a Mexican activist friend who was there with her in a different room was shot but survived.

At one level, this book reads as a real life detective story. At another, it’s a courtroom thriller, where justice at least begins to be seen to be done. The situation is rare, of impunity challenged and a complex hierarchy and social structure of government-abetted murder laid bare. Knowing of so many murders of activists and ‘false encounters’ in India and elsewhere, this is fascinating as well as extremely moving.

To cut a long story short, seven men, three of them US-military trained, were convicted of Berta’s murder during their trial at Tegucigalpa High Court in October-December 2018. But the man suspected of paying and co-ordinating the hitmen remained free at the time this book went to press.

Roberto David Castillo Mejia graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2004. From 2006 he served in the Honduran Armed Forces, in military intelligence, as a 2nd lieutenant. In 2007, he became part of an Armed Forces’ Intervention Board that took over the National Electrical Energy Company (ENEE), to address its spectacular losses. While in the military and ENEE, Castillo began numerous lucrative business ventures, setting up several corporations, and becoming CEO of DESA – Desarrollos Energéticos SA, the construction company created to build the Agua Zarca dam (which remains unbuilt).

Castillo was finally found guilty by the Tegucigalpa High Court in July 2021 for masterminding Berta’s murder and paying the hitmen – their texts and conversations by mobile formed a crucial part of the evidence. Castillo’s conviction is outlined in a sequel to her book by Nina Lakhani (‘Berta Cáceres assassination: ex-head of dam company found guilty’, The Guardian, 5 July 2021). Castillo had used his military contacts. The darkest part of the book documents the experiences of a soldier who was made a member of a military death squad, who fled Honduras and exposed this. Castillo’s defence had claimed he was friends with Berta. The court rejected this, and established he had maintained contact with her as surveillance on her whereabouts and intentions.

The saga continues. Though convicted in mid-2021, Castillo has not been formally sentenced to jail like the other seven culprits, but remains confined to barracks, with the Supreme Court – reportedly under control of the Honduran President – delaying the process due to the ‘complexity’ of the case. Like two of the others involved, Castillo was trained in the ‘School of the Americas’ – an institution responsible for training death squads responsible for tens of thousands of killings throughout Latin America and Vietnam. It started out in Panama in the 1940s, and moved to Fort Benning, Georgia (USA), with several changes of name as criticism of the violence it spawned intensified.

On 26 December 2020, another Lenca environmental activist was assassinated, Félix Vásquez, involved in defending indigenous land rights since the 1980s and well known for organizing opposition to dams, mines, wind farms and logging, and helping dispossessed communities recover ancestral land titles. According to his friend and lawyer Roger Medina, he had opposed extractivism in Honduras for 35 years. Roger did not expect justice for Félix. Like David Castillo, his killers evidently expected impunity.

But in November 2021, Hondurans voted in their first woman as President, Xiomara Castro Sarmiento Zelaya, wife of Manuel Zelaya, ousted in 2009. After she formally assumes office at the end January 2022, it is hoped that justice will be served on these and other cases. Berta Cáceres fought for women’s and LGBT as well as indigenous rights. According to human rights groups, 399 LGBT murders were committed in Honduras since the 2009 coup, including prominent LGBT activist Vicky Hernandez; and 304 women were murdered in 2021 alone, of which only 50 cases came to court. Berta was passionate in calling out patriarchy, including among close friends, and it’s noticeable that wherever a policy of extractivism is pursued, abuse of women – and resistance by women! – is also to be found.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Honduras in a ruling of 8 October 2015, for violating territories belonging to the Garífuna Community of Triunfo de la Cruz, contravening ILO Convention 169. In November 2021, UN human rights experts in Geneva urged Honduras to release eight environmental activists known as the Guapinol Defenders, who were placed in pre-trial detention two years before for opposing an iron oxide mine inside a protected national park in Tocoa in the country’s northern Colón department, that was polluting the Guapinol, a sacred river like the Galcarque, that Berta died defending.

Nina Lakhani has focused on cases throughout Central America, especially around indigenous rights, and is The Guardian’s first correspondent specifically focused on Environmental Justice. The first and only time she met Berta Cáceres, Berta told her: ‘The army has an assassination list with my name at the top. I want to live, but in this country there is total impunity. When they want to kill me, they will do it.’

In Honduras, of all countries, impunity was challenged, partly because Berta won the Goldman prize. Who killed Berta Cáceres? is an exemplary case study of the corrupting influence of corporate power, and the extractivist nexus it forms with political and military hierarchies. It offers forensic detail both of the legal case and the political context of an activist’s murder. As such, there is much that can be learnt from it in India and any country. A book of truly global relevance.

Felix Padel

Former Professor

Rural Management, Indian Institute of Health Management Research, Jaipur

* Nandini Sundar is the editor of The Scheduled Tribes and their India, OUP, 2016.

Footnotes:

1. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009.

2. Antoni Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. Avon Books, New York, 1994.

3. Functions located in the left hemisphere include right hand control, analytical thought, logic, language, reasoning; in the right hemisphere are left hand control, creativity, imagination, insight, intuition.

4. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray. Harper & Row, New York, 1954, quoting pages 3-4, 42, 143, 213.

5. Stefano Mancuso, The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behaviours. Atria Books, New York, 2017, p. 5.

6. Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. Collins, 1988, pp. 269-270.

7. Richard Grant, ‘Do Trees Talk To Each Other?’ Smithsonian Magazine, March 2018.

8. Peter Wohlleben, The Secret Network of Nature: The Delicate Balance of All Living Things. Translated from German by Jane Bilinghurst. Bodley Head, London, 2017.