The Fury of a Patient Man
(How one former prince turned tribal minister is changing India’s forests and democracy.)
(Once dismissed as a lightweight, Tribal Affairs Minister V K C Deo has turned out to be the most influential green activist in the government.)
Attached to the black leather wrist band of his plain white dial Citizen wristwatch is a little black compass. When asked, India’s Tribal Affairs and Panchayati Raj Minister Vyricherla Kishore Chandra Suryanarayana Deo laughs and says it keeps him from losing his way – whether in the jungles of his sprawling electoral constituency in Andhra Pradesh or the political labyrinth of Raisina Hill in Delhi.
It is easy to understand why the minister is in a maze. Since he became cabinet minister for the first time in July 2011, after 30 years as a Member of Parliament (MP) in both the Lok Sabha (5 times) and Rajya Sabha (once), the 65-year-old has taken on his government, at the centre and the state, fellow cabinet members and many powerful companies.
From writing to governors of states to invoking constitutional powers never used in modern India to taking on chief ministers and top bureaucrats, Deo is today acknowledged as the most influential voice for the tribals and against mining in tribal areas within the government. A voice more powerful – and holding more weight before the Gandhi family that heads the Congress – than even the incumbent environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan.
At the moment, he virtually stands alone stopping one of the biggest plans to mine for bauxite – primarily used to make aluminum — in his native Vishakhapatnam region in coastal Andhra Pradesh ever. His protests have prevented a Rs. 25,000 crore exploration of one of the world’s biggest reserves of bauxite by major companies including the Ras Al Khaimah government of the United Arab Emirates, their Indian partner Anrak, a subsidiary of Hyderabad-based Penna Cement, Jindal South West of the JSW Group and Nalco, the state-run aluminum major. Three of these – Ras Al Khaimah, Anrak and Jindal South West have agreements signed with the Andhra Pradesh Mineral Development Corporation (APMDC).
“No tribal minister has ever achieved what K. C. Deo has been able to do,” says Hyderabad-based researcher scholar Shashi Kumar who has studied Andhra Pradesh’s mineral belt for more than a decade. “He has given teeth to a relatively new ministry (tribal affairs is only 11 years old) which was considered an appendage to the rural affairs or environment ministry.
“But Deo has shown that that he is not going to remain an appendage,” says Kumar. “And he is willing to risk his job for India’s 100 million tribals.”
Deo’s constituency, the sylvan Araku Valley, is one of the largest parliamentary areas in the country at more than 3,500 square kilometres, and it is also one of the most pristine forest areas in the country. But it has more than 42 million tonnes of bauxite under its woods, and along with neighbouring areas, there are more than 570 million tonnes of mineral waiting to be tapped.
Local tribes have fought the coming of bulldozers to this valley for more than two decades but they have never had a campaigner within government like Deo, often described locally as an ‘aristocrat among locals’.
All of this would still be mere politicking had it not been that the areas to be mined are also some key Indian territory terror-struck by Maoist rebels who fight government forces often supported by local tribals.
Prime Minister Singh has described the Maoist insurgency as the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by the country.
The over-arching view of Singh’s cabinet colleagues has been to see the insurgency as something localised and to be stamped out by force – a strategy that has failed since 2001 nearly 12,000 people have been killed in Maoist violence.
But never had a cabinet minister clearly, and officially, pointed out government and business malpractice as the cause of this violence. Activists say Deo’s strident voice is today preventing war from breaking out in the dense jungles along the border between Andhra Pradesh and Odhisha.
“There is a sense that he understands and sees the problem from the perspective of the locals, without that the situation could worsen very quickly,” says Hyderabad-based researcher scholar Shashi Kumar who has studied Andhra Pradesh’s mineral belt for more than a decade. “There is tremendous opposition, including from the Maoists.”
In April last year, in a letter that created shock waves among the central United Progressive Alliance government and the Andhra Pradesh government, Deo wrote to the Andhra governor Ekkadu Srinivasan Lakshminarasimhan: “During the last five years, they (the Maoist rebels) have slowly regrouped themselves by gaining the sympathy of the local people only due to the threat of bauxite mining in Vishakhapatnam district.”
In the heart of the forests, wrote Deo, tribals disillusioned by the bauxite mafia were helping rebels hoard ammunitions and explosives. “It is necessary to note that most of the killings by the extremists are in connection with those who are said to have had close links with the bauxite mining lobbies and their agents,” said the 14-page letter.
The minister pointed out that under the Alienation of Land Transfer (ALTR) Act in Schedule 5 areas, non-tribals are strictly prohibited from purchasing or leasing land. The Indian constitution defines Schedule 5 and 6 areas as regions historically inhabited by tribal people who live in and off the forest lands. In Schedule 6 areas – the northeastern states — the indigenous tribal populations are a majority, whereas in Schedule 5 areas, or areas in Andhra Pradesh, Odhisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, tribals are numerous though not a majority of the population. Mining wrote Deo would poison the sources of three rivers – Gosthani, Champavathi and Sarada and destroy drinking water supply in across the Vishakhapatnam area, which has more than 4.5 million people.
Deo then went on to criticize one of the most powerful and successful Congress chief ministers in recent times – Yeduguri Sandinti Rajaskhara Reddy (popularly YSR)who died in a plane crash in 2009 – saying the Memorandums of Understanding signed by the Andhra government between 2005 and 2010 “which were neither owned nor controlled by people belonging to Scheduled Tribes”.
He pointed out that 13 applications for mining lease had been recommended by previous governors like Rameshwar Thakur and Narayan Dutt Tiwari in favour of the Andhra Pradesh Mining Development Corporation (APMDC), an organisation neither owned nor controlled by the tribals. “These decisions of the then chief minister not only betrays our commitment for the cause of the people who belong to the scheduled tribe community but also amounts to a flagrant violation and affront of our constitutional provisions.”
Deo didn’t stop at hitting out only at politicians. “It is ironical that the license to Anrak was signed by Y. Srilakshmi, the former (state) secretary of industry and commerce who is now languishing in prison in the Obulapuram illegal mining case and former APMDC MD P. D. Rajagopal who signed the supply agreement between APMDC and Anrak is also in jail (in the same case). The mala fide intentions are abundantly clear.” (Illegal exploration by the Obulapuram Mining Company has also put its owner and former Karnataka minister Gali Janardhana Reddy in prison.)
Then, in the letter, Deo dropped a bombshell no one expected. He pointed out that in Schedule 5 areas, the governor has powers under the constitution to “repeal or amend any central or state legislation or any existing law applicable to such area”.
He had done his homework. To justify his point Deo quoted a presidential speech in 2008 and also the opinion of the Attorney General, the highest legal bureaucrat, of the land, and from judgment after judgment of various courts in India over the years– all of them suggested that a governor is not bound by the aid and advice of the council of ministers of the state in Schedule 5 areas.
Therefore, the minister urged the governor to cancel all MoUs and agreements in Schedule 5 areas using the constitutional powers. If the mining was not stopped, the letter said, there could be bloodshed. “You will also appreciate the fact that extremist activities have now reached a point which is threatening our national security. Your intervention at this stage will… strike at the basic premise on which the Maoists have gained sympathy in our state.”
To date, he has written similar letters to governors of all states which have Schedule 5 areas including the hotbeds of Maoist rebel violence – Chattisgarh, Odhisha and Jharkhand. Officially there has been barely a response.
“Only one of the governors wrote back,” smiles Deo. The Chhattisgarh governor Shekhar Dutt replied with a technicality. Dutt said that while Deo’s letter said that governors are not bound in Schedule 5 areas by the advice of the state government and council of ministers, in a case in 2012, the High Court in Bilaspur had suggested that in fact the governor is bound to consult the ministers. The governor’s reply asked Deo write back with “the final opinion of the government of India”.
The tribal minister’s office is now working on a detailed reply and he says he is not perturbed by the lack of response. “I am more concerned with response on the ground than response on paper,” he says.
There are many reasons for the sangfroid, not the least that in spite of the severe efforts by the incumbent state government and chief minister Kiran Reddy, no mining has started in Vishakhapatnam. A key reason for this is Deo’s tremendous influence with the Gandhi family, where he has the ear of both Congress President Sonia Gandhi and her son and Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi who see him as the most serious voice from Andhra Pradesh.
“While it is true that Deo is a marginal voice in the cabinet since his ministry is not a large one but on tribal matters in Andhra Pradesh he is listened to with the utmost care,” says Chandra Bhushan, deputy director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment.
Bhushan says Deo’s interventions before the Congress leadership get a major share of the credit of the clause of giving 26% of profits to local tribals in India’s new proposed mining bill, the Mining and Minerals (Amendment) Bill, 2011 which is now being considered by the Parliamentary Standing Committee. “It is a very vital clause and something that has never happened anywhere in the world. That this clause is even there in the bill is a huge achievement. Deo is important because the understanding of the party leadership is that he is scrupulously honest, he knows what he is talking about and has no private agenda.”
In fact, in party circles, it is a joke that Deo never became chief minister of Andhra Pradesh because he usually flies directly between Vishakhapatnam and Delhi, rarely stopping in Hyderabad. “He is not involved in petty politics,” says Bhushan.
But politics is critical to understand the mind and ecosystem of K. C. Deo. Cut to May 2004. That month against the collective wisdom of punters and psephologists, the Congress Party came back to power in Andhra Pradesh after eight years and eight months of the rule of Nara Chandrababu Naidu, the information technology touting, self-styled CEO chief minister, from the Telegu Desam Party (TDP).
The giant killer was a rural heavyweight who walked more than 1400 kilometres over three months for his campaign. The man who became chief minister was YSR. Like Deo, he was a veteran Congress hand and had won every election he had contested in 30 years.
YSR had a very different vision of Andhra Pradesh than Naidu who had wanted to make capital Hyderabad, the information technology hub of India with the slogan “Bye, bye Bangalore, hello Hyderabad”.
The new chief minister did not, and could not, compete with Naidu who had had US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair visiting him in Hyderabad and the governor of Illinois declaring a Naidu Day, so the action moved elsewhere.
The money would no longer from technology, though Andhra Pradesh would still become, as Naidu had dreamt, ‘an Asian tiger’. For his goldmine, the rural satrap in YSR looked to his comfort zone, in the rural heartland of Andhra Pradesh which as it happened had a mineral goldmine, and none more lucrative than bauxite.
It was the time when India was swiftly becoming the world’s third largest exporter of bauxite, shipping half of its annual nearly 100 million tonnes of output to a growing China.
“YSR could see that potentially minerals could bring in much more money than IT, especially in the short run,” says an MP from Andhra Pradesh who asked not to be named.
In July 2005, YSR’s government signed the first Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Jindal South West, a subsidiary of the JSW Group of Sajjan Jindal. According to the agreement, the Jindals would spend Rs. 9,000 crores to create an aluminum refinery and smelter which would be able to produce 250,000 metric tonnes of aluminum each year. APMDC was going to supply the bauxite from the Akaru reserves and its neighbouring Sapparla reserves which together had more than 240 million tonnes of ore. Till date, the Jindals have spent Rs. 3,000 crores and in the absence of Andhra ore, have now started transporting bauxite from Gujarat for their refinery.
In subsequent years 2007 and 2008, two more agreements were signed between the APMDC and the government of Ras Al Khaimah of the United Arab Emirates and Anrak, a Khaimah subsidiary which is a joint venture with YSR’s friend Prathap Reddy of Penna Cements. (Today none of the companies are ready to comment on the issue. Fortune India wrote numerous mails and called top executives of the companies for a month with no reply.)
It was between 2005 and 2008 that the first differences between YSR and Deo about mining were seeded. Convinced that mining would bring a bloody backlash from the Left rebels, Deo could do little but watch helplessly from the sidelines as YSR used elite Greyhound commandos to attack Maoist camps and kill rebel leaders deep in their jungle lairs.
In this both men were burdened by their own history. Deo says he has always been convinced that the only solution to Maoist violence is to prevent the exploitation of tribals. “The area I come from has been the nerve centre of Maoist activity since the 1960s,” says Deo. Vishakhapatnam was the area where 11 government officers were kidnapped by rebels in 1987; in 1993, Pasupuleti Balaraju, then a Member of the Legislative Assembly and now state tribal affairs minister, was kidnapped and later exchanged for the release of a top rebel, and in March 2004, the husband of then tribal affairs minister Mani Kumari was shot dead by the Left-wing Peoples War Group in this region.
“The main cause is lack of development and destruction of forests by the timber mafia. I have seen this mafia cut down forests and then burn even the stumps to that they can accuse the tribals of slash and burn agriculture. These are the kind of atrocities that have gone on for decades.”
Pushed by Fortune India to explain the reference to mafia, the minister only smiles and says: “You know what I mean.” But the reference to mafia is to a few Congress leaders in Andhra Pradesh. In a report presented earlier this year to Sonia Gandhi, Deo allegedly referred to the head of the Congress committee in Andhra Pradesh Botsa Satyanarayana as a ‘don’ with interests in ‘liquor, land and mining’.
So Deo believed that that peace could only come by preventing the exploitation of tribal land and livelihood. “If the Maoist problem is only seen as a law and order problem then that is completely flawed,” says Deo.
For YSR, the rebels deserved only one answer – gunfire. After all, only months before the election that brought him to power, YSR had seen a deadly attack that almost killed Naidu in October 2003 when a landmine went off under the chief minister’s convoy headed to a temple. Naidu survived with a fractured collarbone and ribs, his life saved by his armoured car.
YSR entered office determined not to die in the hands of the guerillas. His twin strategy of clear-and-mine – using commandos to flush out rebels from the jungles and then bring in the earth movers – was against everything Deo had spoken all his life against.
Deo also objected strongly to YSR’s also use of a landmark judgment in the history of tribal rights in India in his favour. Ravi Rebbapragada explains this best.
He is one of the most prominent activists working for tribal welfare in Andhra Pradesh and part of the Samata foundation, one of the oldest and most influential not-for-profits working in tribal welfare in the state. In 1990s, Samata fought a court case against the government of Andhra Pradesh which became the defining judgment for mining in Schedule 5 areas.
In that judgment, the Supreme Court declared that no land in such areas can be leased to private mining companies and that village gram sabhas or councils would have the right to prevent such exploration. It also said minerals can be extracted only by tribals historically living in the area either individually or through a cooperative society with the financial assistance of the state, at least 20% of the profits must be in a permanent fund for the development of locals, and prohibited any transfer of any lease or fresh lease of land to any non-tribal.
But the court also said state-run companies could work in mineral extraction.
YSR used this to get MoUs signed via the APMDC. “But that was fundamentally wrong,” says Rebbapragada. “The APMDC was basically just signing the deed while all the work would be done by the private companies and the real power on the ground was with private companies who had nothing to do with tribals.”
Deo calls it a mere sleight of hand, “My main question for all these years has remained – what tribal ownership do any of these companies have?”
There was another fundamental difference between YSR and Deo that egged on the rift, says Rebbapragada. “Essentially Deo would not be servile. He was never servile to any chief minister including NTR (Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, the matinee idol turned politician who was one of the most popular chief minister of Andhra Pradesh). When YSR was chief minister, he was very powerful and every politician would make a beeline for him and ask for patronage and favour.
“But Deo wouldn’t. He didn’t care. He was sure of his base, his clout and his people and he would not bend to Hyderabad.”
Rebbapragada remembers this one time in 2006 when Deo was at his ancestral fort in Kurupam in his constituency and YSR was visiting the area. “I asked him, aren’t you going to see the chief minister? He said, I don’t there is any invitation, why should I do?
“Now that’s not the way it worked with YSR. If he was in your area, you went to show you allegiance. But those are not the rules K. C. Deo follows. Also Deo is a quiet man, who has always stayed under the radar. YSR sought to be larger than life, there was an intrinsic difference.”
Yugantar’s Kumar says there is another major ideological difference underlying the battle for Andhra Pradesh’s bauxite. The tribal king is a socialist and the late socialist reformer was essentially a capitalist.
“There is a tradition of liberal feudalism in Andhra Pradesh to which Deo belongs. Here royals have often been part of socialist parties. Look at other former royals like Anand Gajpati Raju or Raja Rameshwar Rao who were socialists and considered themselves the trustee of the wealth of the people.”
Deo has no commercial interests and no income from any source apart from agricultural monies from his family lands. “I am a farmer, have always been one,” says the minister.
In comparison, YSR’s empire managed by his son Jaganmohan Reddy sprawled across 13 companies from TV stations to power stations and cement. When Reddy, now in prison in a disproportionate assets case, contested a by-poll in 2011 after his father’s death, he declared assets of Rs. 365 crores. The Central Bureau of Investigation says that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
But with all the differences, as long as YSR was alive, Deo could do little to stop the MoUs from being signed. Then, before work could start, YSR died.
And in a bid to get his father’s throne, Reddy fought the Gandhi family and left the Congress to start his own YSR Congress. And Deo’s voice against destructive mining grew ever stronger. He now has support from the Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh, who used to be India’s most combative environment minister till recently. At a recent public meeting attended both Ramesh and Deo spoke against mining leases asking the incumbent Chief Minister Kiran Reddy to cancel them. Reddy has only said that the matter is being investigated.
In the 20 letters he has written to governors and chief ministers, Deo has emphasized constantly the 2006 Forest Rights Act which give first right to forest land and produce to traditional dwellers.
In his April letter to the chief ministers of the all states that have Schedule 5 areas, an exasperated sounding Deo listed out a litany of crimes, quoted the founding fathers of modern India, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru on caring for the underprivileged and even invoked the Bible to demand change!
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of god is with men, and he will live with them… There will be no more death or mourning or crying or paid, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Rebbapragada says on the ground, there is an even more compelling argument for Deo’s case which comes each time the tribal minister travels in Vishakhapatnam. “He travels with barely one constable, if that. Compare that with when the state tribal affairs minister Balaraju comes to the area – there is always a huge convoy, scores of police and commandos, there is security everywhere, the routes are checked for mines; it becomes a jamboree.
“But Deo has nothing to fear in the hotbed of Maoist violence. What can be better evidence for his argument?”
(A version of this essay first appeared in the Fortune magazine’s India edition.)
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