Every morning forest officials, even the most junior of them, would appear in villages like a bad dream, preventing people from ploughing their fields, grazing their cattle, collecting firewood, plucking leaves, picking fruit—from living. They brought elephants to overrun fields and scattered babool seeds to destroy the soil as they passed by. People would be beaten, arrested, humiliated, their crops destroyed. Of course, from the Forest Department’s point of view, these were illegal people engaged in unconstitutional activity, and the department was only implementing the Rule of Law.
