BJP is stealing rights of tribals by ‘erasing papers’, says Rahul Gandhi

Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, on Thursday (August 14, 2025) said that the Bharatiya Janata Party had made “Erase the papers, steal the rights” its new “weapon to oppress Bahujans” in India, reacting to a report in The Hindu that showed several thousands of forest rights titles across three districts had seemingly disappeared from the Chhattisgarh government’s records over the last 17 months.

The report, published on August 14, looked at State government records for the implementation of Forest Rights Act of 2006, which showed that in Bastar, Rajnandgaon, and Bijapur districts, several thousand individual forest rights (IFR) titles and a couple dozen community forest resource rights (CFRR) titles that had already been distributed as of January 2024, were no longer showing up in records of May 2025, even though the FRA law does not provide for cancelling or withdrawing titles already distributed.

State government officials have said that the increased numbers were a result of “reporting error and miscommunication” and so the latest figures had been “corrected” accordingly.

Mr. Gandhi posted an image of the report on social media, saying in an accompanying post, “Somewhere they remove the names of Dalits and Backward Classes from the voter list, and somewhere they make the forest rights titles of tribals ‘disappear’.” He added that the “Congress enacted the Forest Rights Act to protect the water, forest, and land of tribals — the BJP is weakening it and snatching their first right”.

He said, “We will not let this happen”, promising to protect the rights of tribals, whom he referred to as “first owners” of the country.

Taking a cue from Mr. Gandhi, former Chhattisgarh Deputy Chief Minister T.S. Singh Deo too hit out at the BJP over the report, saying in a post on X, “The forest rights lease is the shield that keeps the homes, property, and forests of the tribal community safe — we will not let it be destroyed in government conspiracies and bureaucratic manoeuvres.”

Meanwhile, forest rights activists in Chhattisgarh from outfits such as the Hasdeo Aranya Bachao Sangharsh Samiti and the Van Adhikar Manch have alleged that they have been suspecting that for a few years now, “there have been efforts to cancel titles that have been distributed”, adding that this has happened across regimes.

Alok Shukla of the Hasdeo Aranya Bachaon Sangharsh Samiti said, “Even when there is no process to cancel titles, there is a history of this happening as far back as 2016 in Chhattisgarh when titles distributed in Ghatbarra village of Surguja district were found ‘cancelled’. Even as the Chhattisgarh High Court is yet to determine if cancellation of titles is permissible, there have been other incidents of titles reducing.”

Chhattisgarh Van Adhikar Manch convener Anubhav Shori said, “Some methods of reducing FRA titles have been to physically ask the villagers to return titles distributed to them — this happened around 2022 in Mohla-Manpur district; in some cases, since there is no cancellation procedure, approved claims where titles have been distributed have been shown as a rejected claim with backdated paperwork.”