Let me return to my lovely forest in Gujarat to tell you about the irreparable harm that the Tribal Land Rights Bill is already beginning to do. The Marxists proudly acknowledge that it was they who forced the Sonia-Manmohan Government to make the law, giving Adivasis the right to forest land. It started being implemented from January this year without any noise from our usually noisy environmentalists. Never have they been more needed and never have they been more inexplicably silent.

The forest I speak of is called Ratan Mahal and is hidden away in a remote corner of one of Gujarat’s most backward regions, populated almost entirely by Adivasis. They are poor but not so poor that the mobile phone and dish TV and motorcycles have not arrived. In Dahod, I saw young Adivasi girls and boys taking computer courses. Modernity is spreading fast because of the 21st century’s technological tools and everyone agrees that the next generation will have given up primitive, rural life for better prospects in Gujarat’s booming cities. Before that, though, their parents would have succeeded in wiping out forests like Ratan Mahal because of the destructive, myopic law that the Marxists forced through. Why was there no opposition from the ‘right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP’, you may be asking, and the short answer to that is that no political party dare oppose free gifts to the poor. And, the BJP’s record in Opposition has been so appalling that they have opposed the nuclear deal when they know and we know that had they been in government, they would have signed it.

... contd.