Chained to the rivers.

Byline: Asfand Yar Warraich

FOR centuries, the adivasi fisher communities of South Asia lived a life tethered to the banks of its rivers. They shared an intimate tie to their environment, one that gave them a unique insight into its cyclical nature - the rhythmic ebb and flow of its waters, the shifting geography of the riverbed underneath, and of course, the many plants and animals that dotted this landscape.

As custodians of the riverbanks, they exercised a right to fish, based not on the sanction of any law but on custom and tradition, shaped and navigated through time immemorial. Then came the Raj, and the Brits, with their unbridled thirst for economic extraction no matter the cost, usurped the rivers altogether and began to 'regulate' them, effectively planting the seed of a legal framework that would one day come to ensnare these communities.

Post-independence, having inherited this colonial infrastructure (and consequently, the same mindset), the government under Ayub Khan went several degrees further in its quest for maximising revenue. In 1961, the Fisheries Ordinance was introduced, empowering the state with the ability to 'lease out' the right to fish in public waters for a period of three years. Before long, the rivers were butchered, sectioned off into disparate parts and parcels, as though one was not intrinsically linked to the other, and then, these large bodies of water (stretching at times up to 90 kilometres in length) were sold off to the highest bidders. Naturally, these ended up being 'local influentials', who, with their deep pockets and their political clout, colluded with the state machinery to create a grotesque and sinister system of entrapment.

Since a lease provides the leaseholder with an 'exclusive' right to fish in the particular section of the river that has been auctioned off, it automatically becomes illegal for anyone else to fish in leased waters. For adivasi fishers, this meant that they had suddenly become trespassers in the very rivers they had long practised their craft in. Due to their dependence on an aquaculture-based economy, they faced insurmountable challenges in uprooting themselves for greener pastures, leaving them with little option but to enter into whatever exploitative arrangements lessees had to offer. As a result, today, the waters that once fed them have ended up shackling their ankles, turning them from a collection of free and self-sufficient communities into the bonded labour of a...