Tribal Hero

Threatened by Mining
Naomi Canton

He has shot nineteen rogue elephants in his home-land In dia, over a dozen of them man-killers and others crop destroyers, so shooting pheasants in Wiltshire is probably rather inconsequential to the aristocratic professional hunter Bulu Imam.

The 70-year-old had more pressing things on his mind during his recent trip to England: the proposed destruction of 200 tribal villages, of more than 2,000 square kilometres of rich fertile agricultural land and of precious forest wildlife corridors in the North Karanpura Valley of Jharkhand in India where he lives, to make way for 31 open-cast mining projects. The north of the valley boasts 1,230 sq. km of coalfields, which make up nine per cent of India's coal reserves.

Imam, an environmentalist and author, who has spent years researching and documenting tribal culture, is bitterly opposed to the project because the land the coalfields lie beneath happens to be the homeland of millions of India's indigenous people who have lived there for centuries. Not only do they rely on the land and forest for their livelihood, but they worship sacred rocks there, the land underpins their cultural way of life and the bones of their ancestors, whom they worship, are buried under megaliths there, some even dating back to before 2000 BC.

There are approximately 100 million tribal people in India, most of whom, live in the forests. Sixty million tribal people have so far been ruthlessly displaced to make way for moneymaking industrial projects to extract rich mineral resources which lie beneath their homes. Approximately 51 billion tones or 27% of India's coal reserves lie in Jharkhand alone.

Twenty-seven years ago, at the age of 43, Imam first heard about plans by an Australian company, Whyte Industries Limited of Sydney, coming to mine 600m tonnes of coal at Piparwar, just 80 kilometres from his country mansion. Two hundred villages, an environmentally sustainable way of' life and fertile land were all earmarked for destruction. "I was appalled, I knew the jungle very well and the villagers would come to our house and we would go to their villages on horses." He says, sipping tea at a relative's home in Wiltshire, on his recent trip.

"I was a man who shot tigers and knew people were going to get displaced and I thought how can I protect them?" Dressed in a bright red checked shirt, Imam explains how he soon heard from Australian engineers that the discovery of aboriginal rock art had been used to establish territory in northern Australia to stop mining. The art had been taken as title to the land and it dawned on him that maybe he could do the same in India.

Six years later, Imam miraculously brought to light the first of more than a dozen Palaeolithic rock art sites more than 5,000 years old, in the Upper Damodar Valley, one of the areas threatened by the industrial projects. He also found palaeoarchaeologial sites connected with the Mesoiithic rock art, ancient megaliths and Buddhist archaeological sites.

He got them all "noted" by the Archaeological Survey of India, which is in charge of preserving the cultural heritage of India; that led to the Ministry of Environment and Forests making archaeological and environmental clearance for mining projects in the Upper Damodar Valley mandatory, leading to substantial delays on all of the 23 mining projects that were proposed in that region.

He then remarkably established a link between the prehistoric rock art and the living mural paintings by tribal women of wild animals and plants on the mud walls of their homes. They paint these murals to celebrate weddings and at harvest time. He hoped this would persuade the authorities to stop the mining, as the art categorically established the rights of the people to the valley and land.

It was this passion for tribal people in fact, and their rights to their land that had brought Imam, who is married to a tribal woman, to England. He had been chosen to receive the Gandhi International Peace Award 2011 from The Gandhi Foundation in London jointly with Dr Binayak Sen on behalf of "The Adivasis—The Tribal Peoples of India". In Imam's case, it was for the work he had done identifying and preserving tribal cultural heritage in the region.

During the last 50 years, the lower Damodar River has been completely ravaged by open-cast and underground mining and a relentless construction of big dams, thermal power stations and other industrialisation. Hellish underground mine fires are even causing subsidence, Imam says. ‘‘Several thousand villages were destroyed and tribals displaced in the Lower Valley of Damodar first in 1949 in what was known as "Nehru's Dream", Imam says. "A staggering area measuring 400 kilometres by 200 kilometres of old growth forest land was destroyed. Today the Lower Valley is one vast industrial landscape like the Rhine Valley in Germany. The mining companies are now turning their eye to the Upper Valley for coal and coal-based gas," he adds.

Pakri Barwadhi.. 40 kilometres from his house, is one example. It has just been given environmental clearance and the Australian company Thiess is expected to commence open-cast coal mining there this year. Thousands of villagers and wildlife corridors are to be displaced soon for that mine, from which seven hundred million tonnes of coal are expected to be extracted. It is also an area rich in palaeoarchaeological sites, megaliths, and Buddhist stupa remains. More than one dozen villages will be destroyed in the first phase of mining.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No.9, Sep 9-15 2012