who has dug wells, who has made different partitions of landwho works in the fields and in whose names are the fields, who has made these rules? women work on the fields but farms are in menâs names, society has made such rules.
The above lines are taken from a song written by the members of Devgadh Mahila Sangathan (DMS), a tribal womenâs collective in Dahod, Gujarat. The lyrics of the song question the creation of private property, the social rules that ignore womenâs work and vest the ownership of land in the names of men. These lyrics reflect the lived experience of tribal women historically dispossessed of their land and livelihoods.
This chapter analyses tribal womenâs resistance to dispossession from land in Gujarat. It analyses four in-depth case studies of tribal women who have claimed their rights to land and livelihoods with the support of the DMS and Area Networking and Development Initiatives (ANANDI). ANANDI is a feminist collective based in Gujarat that works with tribal women in the eastern belt of Dahod and Panchmahaals, as well as the western Saurashtra region, on various issues including womenâs rights to land and livelihoods. Each woman has made an individual claim to natal, marital and/or forest lands. These women have also been part of the collective struggle for rights to food, employment and social protection. Individual and collective resistance, and the struggles and strategies of tribal women claiming land rights are analysed in the context of feminist mobilisation by DMS and ANANDI, and the efforts of the state-level network, Working Group for Womenâs Land Ownership (WGWLO).
The chapter documents tribal womenâs experiences of resisting dispossession from land and making land a sustainable source of livelihood. It looks at dispossession and resistance as a continuum, wherein womenâs experiences are neither linear nor episodic, but are everyday struggles to retain control and possession of their land and livelihoods. The chapter is organised into four sections. The first section places the study within the context of tribal Gujarat, discussing poverty, food insecurity and land ownership. It also presents the legal framework for tribal womenâs land rights. The second section presents the profile of four women respondents and describes their experiences of dispossession. The third section explores forms of dispossession from family lands (both natal and marital property), state lands (public and forest lands) and non-tribal lands. The fourth section discusses individual and collective strategies for resistance to tribal womenâs dispossession from land in the context of DMSâ collective struggle for the right to livelihoods.
The chapter draws on the experiences of women who have claimed their rights to land, having been supported by DMS and ANANDI. Community-based organisations such as DMS form the operational basis and starting point for all of ANANDIâs efforts to facilitate and train community organisers and to nurture womenâs leadership within the community. This process in tribal areas, initiated in 1995, led to the formation of DMS in 1999 as an autonomous womenâs organisation with an active base of 5,500 women members, across 80 villages in the two districts of Dahod and Panchmahaals. The women are active members of several state level networks that work, along with ANANDI, on issues such as the right to food and work, organic producers, womenâs land rights, forest rights and gender justice. One such state-level network that ANANDI and DMS are also members of is the WGWLO in Gujarat, which was established in 2003 with the aim of mainstreaming the issue of womenâs land ownership in Gujarat.
Context: Poverty, Food Insecurity and Land Ownership in Tribal Gujarat
Scheduled Tribes constitute 14 per cent of Gujaratâs population and are located primarily in the hilly regions of the eastern belt of Gujarat in the districts of Dahod, Panchmahaals and Dangs. Although Gujarat is an economically prosperous state, its growth has not been inclusive and has not translated into better social indicators for the poor. Among the tribal blocks, 31 of the 43 in the state are included in the list of the 50 most backward blocks in Gujarat (Government of Gujarat in Hirway et al. 2014), especially in terms of socio-economic indicators such as health and education. Gender biases in terms of education, morbidity and mortality are starkly significant. Only 36 per cent of tribal women are literate. The child sex ratio in Gujarat rose from 883 in 2001 to 890 in 2011, but dropped in the tribal dominated districts of Dahod (967 to 948), Panchmahaals (935 to 932) and Dangs (974 to 964) (Census of India, 2001 and 2011).
It is often argued that tribal communities are egalitarian, where women are treated equally and enjoy greater freedom. Such notions of tribal society coexist with images of tribal people living in close harmony with nature. However, a close examination of the status of women with regard to land rights presents a different picture. In most tribal communities in central India, there are only two cases in which women are allowed to inherit land. In the first, women who are widows may inherit their deceased husbandâs land share. In the second, women marry and settle in their natal village in cases where there are no able-bodied sons, or because the natal family requires labour to till their land. In such cases, daughters assume the primary responsibility of cultivating the land owned, as well as caring for their parents in their old age. Yet, she has no inheritance right to this land independent of her husband. Tribal women customarily also have two types of land rights that are distinct from inheritance rights (Sinha 2003; Kelkar and Nathan 1991; Nongbri 2003). The first is the right to manage land and its produce. The second is the right to share the produce of the land, not the right to manage and use the land.
Another indication of the status of tribal women is their particular vulnerability to violence, the most extreme forms of which manifest as witch-hunting. This is a complex phenomenon that exists in many parts of India. Women are labelled as witches, harassed, tormented, thrown out of their homes, dispossessed of land and denied their resource rights. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau, which recorded witchcraft as a motive for murder between 2001 and 2012, show an average of 168 deaths per year in the eight tribal-dominated peninsular states (Kelkar et al. 2013) of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and West Bengal; some deaths have also been recorded in Bihar, Gujarat and Haryana. In Gujarat, these individuals are often women who own land or have other property entitlements, often single women or women who have âunconventionalâ relationships (Hardikar 2014). Victims of witch-hunting face physical and sexual violence, stigma and ostracism, and are subject to social and economic deprivation. Such victimisation is based on gender and social tensions (Sinha 2003), invariably on allegations of the use of âsupernatural powersâ, but underlying these allegations are tensions related to land, property, sexual advances or jealousy. Witch-hunting may be linked directly to a lack of basic educational and health infrastructures, issues âcentral to governance and developmentâ (Agarwal et al. 2014).
Legal Framework
The realisation and denial of tribal womenâs rights to land in Gujarat occurs within the framework of four important laws, discussed below. They are: the Bombay Land Revenue Code (1879); the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005; The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act, 2006 (dubbed the Forest Rights Act or FRA); and The Bombay Prevention of Fragmentation and Consolidation of Holdings Act (1947).
Section 73AA of the Bombay Land Revenue Code is an affirmative law preventing land transfers from tribal to non-tribal communities. It states, âan occupancy of a person belonging to any of the Scheduled Tribes shall not be transferred to any person without the previous sanction of the collector'. This law restricts all land transfers to non-tribals that took place after February 1981. However, it is fairly evident, both in practice and through recordsâsuch as police complaints and the judgements of district courts, the High Court and the Supreme Courtâthat such transfers have been blatantly taking place for decades. The succession of tribal property in Gujarat takes place according to the framework of The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005. This landmark act finally recognised womenâs rights to agricultural land, Mitakshara joint family property, natal dwelling rights and widowed womenâs claims to property (Agarwal 2005).
The Forest Rights Act (FRA) is the result of roughly 100 years of protest and struggle for forest dwellersâ rights to: hold and live in forest land; their usufructuary and ownership rights over non-timber forest produce; rights of use over water bodies, grazing and other resource rights of nomadic and pastoral communities. (Gopalkrishnan 2011). The implementation of the FRA in Gujarat is poor, despite significant mobilisation by NGOs working with tribal rights to file claims. According to the report on the implementation of the FRA as of 31 March 2014, only 63,219 (34 per cent) among 182,869 individual claims filed have been accepted. The remaining claims (which had earlier been rejected) are currently under review by the Government of Gujarat.
As small and marginal farmers with small land holdings, another hurdle that tribal women in Gujarat face concerns the partitioning of property, which provides an independent title and holding. Unlike in other states under the Bombay Prevention of Fragmentation and Consolidation of Holdings Act, in Gujarat there is a legal restriction on partitioning beyond two acres. Instead, the names of all heirs are listed as joint holders, even though these lands are often de facto partitioned within families.
Profile of Respondents
The findings of this chapter are based on an in-depth qualitative analysis of the experiences of four tribal women in Dahod, Gujarat, three of whom are currently residing in their marital villages and one of whom was homeless at the time of field work being conducted. All the women were engaged in agriculture as their primary occupation, supplementing it with wage and agricultural labour, the collection of non-timber forest produce, migration and, in one case, a honorarium for community work. Two of the women are literate (Table 2.1).
Table 2.1
Profile of respondents
Age of women | No. of women | Marital status | |
|---|---|---|---|
35â45 years | 2 | Married | 1 |
60 and older | 2 | Single (widow) | 3 |
Educational qualification | Residence by locatio n | ||
Non-literate | 2 | Natal | 0 |
Primary | 1 | Marital | 3 |
Secondary | 1 | Independent | 1 |
Each of the women claimed land from multiple sources in a context of poverty and vulnerability. As shown in Table 2.2 below, the land sizes that women have claim to range between one to 15 acres. Most of the land over which women had completed the mutation1 process or were litigating was smaller than two acres, whereas land that exceeded two acres was under threat.
Table 2.2
Type, size and status of land claim
Sr No | Respondent | Claimed from | Type of land | Size in acres | Contestation with | Status of claima | Status of landholdinga |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Madhuben | Marital | Agricultural | 2.55 | Family | Has land title in her own name but not possession of the land | Partly mortgaged by son and grandson without her consent |
2 | Madhuben | Marital | Wasteland (not regularised) | 1.82 | State | Has neither possession nor land title | Given away entirely in inheritance to older daughter (Ghar Jamai) |
3 | Madhuben | Marital | Wasteland (regularised) | 1.09 | State | Has both possession and land title in her own name | Completed mutation, retains possession |
4 | Tetiben | Marital | Agricultural | 8.00 | Family | Has neither possession nor land title | Sold to nephew under duress for a fraction of its value |
5 | Tetiben | Natal | Agricultural | 14.55 | Non-tribal | Has neither possession nor land title | Lost in previous generation |
6 | Tetiben | Natal | Agricultural | 3.64 | Family & non-tribal | Has neither possession nor land title in her own name | Lost in previous generation; claim in process |
7 | Savitaben | Marital | Agricultural | 0.55 | Family | Has both possession and land title in her own name | Completed mutation |
8 | Savitaben | Natal | Agricultural | 0.73 | No contestation | Has both possession and land title in her own name | Mutation in process |
9 | Nandaben | Marital | Agricultural | 0.50 | Family | Has neither possession nor land title in her own name | Mutation in process |
10 | Nandaben | Marital | Forest land | 2.75 | State | Has both possession and land title in her own name | Completed mutation, retains possession |
Within a womanâs lifetime, we can observe the process of her inheriting or acquiring land, mortgaging and reclaiming the land, and giving away a piece of the land to her daughters. Throughout these processes, she experiences different points of resistance, employs different strategies and engages with multiple institutions for each piece of land she has claim to. When women do have possession of land they still have to struggle to retain possession and control of it and they struggle to claim legal title to it in their own name. Others struggle to reclaim their inheritance rights to land a previous generation had been dispossessed of via fraud and force.
The four women respondentsâ experiences of dispossession are described below.
Madhuben: Madhuben Nayak is a 70-year-old tribal widow who lives with her son and grandchildren. She has claimed three types of land (see Table 2.2).
Madhubenâs husbandâs extended family is looking to take over her agricultural land by encouraging her son and grandson to drink and give possession of the land to them in return for alcohol-related debt. Even though Madhuben has a measure of control over the land, she is vulnerable to extreme forms of economic, physical and sexual violence from her son and grandsons. Without her consent, they have sold food grain that she accumulated from migrant agricultural labour, which she undertook at the age of 70. They also sold assets, such as bullocks, and mortgaged land without her knowledge or consent to purchase alcohol.
During field work Madhuben had been raped by her grandson. With support from ANANDI and DMS, she fought a long battle to get medical care and to file a first information report. She then faced significant pressure from her extended family (who had the support of the community) to mortgage her land to them and to have her grandson released on bail. She has publicly refused to pay his bail, however, and insists on the due process of law taking its course. The case is currently under investigation and her grandson is being held in judicial custody.
Tetiben: Tetiben Bhil and Fatehbhai, a childless couple both over 60, who only have each other for support, live on the outskirts of Tetibenâs town in a makeshift shelter on public land with no real protection. Homeless during field work, they have no access to subsidised grains or pensions.
Tetiben has claimed three types of land (see Table 2.2). She was branded a witch by Fatehbhaiâs extended family, directed by his paternal cousinsâ sons. They attempted to drive Tetiben away from the village to take over the land belonging to her husband (who was the only heir to his ancestral land of over eight acres). Tetiben approached DMS for the first time eight years ago for support when she had to flee the village with her husband one night, fearing an attack on her life. She filed a police compla...