Adapting Law Enforcement to Climate-Induced Conflict
By Harssh A Poddar
A study of the annual rainfall patterns of the Indian subcontinent reveals a sharply growing propensity towards drought, particularly in the riparian basins of the Gangetic Plains and the Deccan Peninsula. As global warming metes out heretofore unforeseen depredations on earth, agriculture-dependent communities will be adversely affected. This could trigger competing interests, leading to escalations into violent conflicts. India’s vast agrarian hinterland, which serves as the food bowl of its burgeoning population, is particularly afflicted by a surge in land disputes that increasingly turn violent as climate change-induced droughts reduce land productivity.
The exponential returns of the Green Revolution in the 1960s made the world’s largest democracy self-sufficient in food production by leveraging the power of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yielding varieties of seeds. However, intensive cropping has also led to land degeneration. These anthropological effects have been exacerbated by unseasonal rainfall and failures of the annual monsoons that have historically propelled Indian agriculture. This results in a steeply increasing incidence of agrarian riots which are a major challenge to Indian law enforcement agencies. In instances where these riots occur between opposing factions of the same family or caste-based communities, swift police action can successfully contain them and prevent escalation. However, in instances where the parties involved belong to different religious or caste communities, conflicts can rapidly descend into widespread communal mayhem resulting in large-scale arson and loss of life.
CLIMATE CHANGE AS A DRIVER OF AGRICULTURAL CONFLICT
Indian agriculture is overwhelmingly sequestered in nature. Farms are typically held by a single family and passed down through generations by way of inheritance. This process of ownership transfer creates complexities because the change in land title is rarely recorded and is often undocumented. This is compounded by the fact that Indian villages are typically constituted of multiple caste groups which compete with each other for dominance. In this Darwinian fight, it is not uncommon for one caste group to try and encroach upon the land of another through violence or other means. Ownership of land is central to the signaling strategy for caste supremacy. These factors contribute to a situation where land disputes are litigated protractedly in the civil judicial and quasi-judicial courts of India. Decision-making through this process is ponderous, often extending for decades since more often than not, neither party has a comprehensive set of title documents to establish their claim. However, apart from adding to the burden of an immense judicial backlog in the lower courts of the country, these disputes also have a more sinister aspect to them.
As the vagaries of climate change dramatically reduce the productivity of the land, in some instances destroying even standing crops due to unseasonal climatic phenomena, every extra square meter of land serves as an insurance against certain ruin for the Indian farmer. Land that is enmeshed in civil disputes is typically subject to judicial injunctions that prevent any kind of cultivation. It is no surprise, therefore, that driven to desperation, farmers often attempt to stake their claim on disputed land by indulging in violence against the counterparty.
DEVELOPING LOCALIZED VIOLENCE MITIGATION PROGRAMS
The above scenario posits the need for an adaptation technique among Indian law enforcement agencies to counter climate-change-induced violence. An example of this can be found in the district of Beed, located in the state of Maharashtra. Beed is one of Maharashtra’s most underdeveloped districts and arguably the most violent. Schisms between the nearly equally represented and empowered Maratha and Vanzari communities almost habitually erupt into devastating agrarian riots. In 2020, Beed Police launched an interesting exercise that involved a village-level mapping of land disputes prior to the sowing season, which coincides with the advent of the monsoon rains in July. The police machinery was leveraged to gather intelligence from land records and courts about the number of land-related cases that were pending before the civil courts.
Thereafter, preventive legal interventions were made by the police in applicable cases to ensure that these disputes did not turn violent. India’s criminal procedure code empowers the police to facilitate the execution of bonds by parties who may reasonably be suspected of resorting to violence. This exercise reduced the number of violent riots during the sowing season (when such incidents are at their peak) by nearly fifty percent.
As climate change continues to alter global life patterns, its impact on conflict and violence remains largely unstudied and undocumented, with most adaptations being highly localized, such as the one in Beed. Law enforcement systems across the world need to swiftly devise adaptation techniques and operating procedures that harness both the predictive power of data and that of available legal options to counter emerging patterns of conflict.
Harssh A Poddar is pursuing the Mason Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School as Fulbright Scholar. He is an officer of the 2013 batch of the coveted Indian Police Service (IPS) and has served at the helm of law and order maintenance in some of the most testing jurisdictions of India. His initiatives on de-radicalization, service reform at police stations, countering disinformation and electoral management have received honors at the national level. He was rated among the most impactful civil servants of India in 2019. He served as the police chief of Beed district, where his work focused on the free and fair conduct of elections and management of the COVID pandemic for a population of nearly three million. Prior to joining the IPS he graduated with a masters degree in law from the University of Oxford as a Chevening Scholar and was working as a corporate lawyer with Clifford Chance LLP, London.
Photos for this article were provided by Mr. Pravin Talan.
