Kaziranga and Beyond: An Activist's Case Against "Militarized Conservation" in Assam

Pranab Doley has spent more than a decade organizing around land, conservation and indigenous rights in Bokakhat, the Assam constituency that contains Kaziranga National Park. In 2021 he ran for the assembly seat as an independent, backed by the Congress alliance, and lost. Ahead of the 2026 Assam elections he is running again — a decision he discussed with Nous Network's Asad Ashraf against a backdrop of the question that has dogged activist-politicians across India: why so few of them, from Irom Sharmila to Medha Patkar, have managed to convert movement credibility into electoral wins.

Why run again after losing once

Doley framed his second run not as a personal ambition but as an outcome of years of organizing among people he said feel structurally denied political power. "It's an exercise to protect democracy," he said, "not just an exercise to contest an election for the sake of contesting." He described Bokakhat's electoral machinery as heavily tilted against independent, grassroots candidates — dominated, he said, by "huge lumps of cash" and a state apparatus that works against anyone challenging the status quo — but said the alternative, waiting for someone else to fix the system from outside, was no longer tenable for a younger generation he believes has been shut out of hierarchical, "corporate-managed" party politics.

A constituency squeezed from every side

Bokakhat, Doley said, sits between the Karbi Hills and the Brahmaputra, half of it flood-prone and much of the rest tea-garden Adivasi country, with holistic development largely absent despite years of "double engine" government promises. He put the poverty rate at roughly 90%, with basic health, agricultural and road infrastructure still missing. Layered on top of that geography is Kaziranga itself: a UNESCO World Heritage site whose tourism economy, he said, was once shared with local communities but is now dominated by large hospitality groups — he named Hyatt, Mahindra and the Taj group — building on land whose costs fall on poor farming and tea-garden communities rather than the corporations profiting from it. Meanwhile the sitting MLA, Atul Bora, president of the NDA-aligned AGP, has held the seat for two terms without, in Doley's account, building any real relationship with the people there — driving high outward migration as younger residents leave for work the constituency can't provide.

"Militarized conservation"

Doley has previously described Kaziranga's conservation regime as militarized, and Ashraf pressed him on whether that framing undercuts India's most celebrated rhino-conservation success. Doley didn't walk it back. Kaziranga's success, he argued, belongs first to the communities who sacrificed for it — cattle herders who lost livestock to tigers as part of the working ecosystem, families who lived alongside the park for generations — recognition he said has been "blanketly erased" in favour of a fortress-conservation model enforced with rules he compared to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. "Without the ecosystem built by the communities," he said, "I don't think the animals in Kaziranga, or Kaziranga, could survive on its own." He pointed to Nagarhole, where the Jenu Kuruba community's fight over habitat rights follows a similar script, as evidence the same fortress model is being replicated nationally even as it collides with protections nominally guaranteed under the Forest Rights Act.

Evictions, animal conflict, and where the land actually goes

Ashraf raised an apparent tension in Doley's position: he opposes evictions from land the government calls "encroached," while also acknowledging that communities living near forest land do generate real human-animal conflict. Doley rejected the premise that this is a contradiction. The rising conflict, he said, is a governance failure being reframed as a problem caused by ordinary people — while eviction itself is applied unevenly. Recent drives, he said, have disproportionately hit Muslim and agrarian communities across Assam under what he called a vengeful BJP strategy of division, even as thousands of hectares elsewhere — in the hill districts of Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao, in Upper Assam's coal and oil belt — are handed to corporations he named as Adani, Ambani, Vedanta and Ramdev. "They're not removing people from forest," he said. "They are removing people who are growing forests." The animals' actual territory, he argued, is where corporate land grants are doing the real ecological damage — a dichotomy he said gets erased when the government blames landless communities instead.

Tribal rights without a single tribal politics

Asked how he squares advocacy for tribal rights with the reality that Assam's tribal communities — Bodo, Karbi, Missing and others — often have overlapping or competing territorial claims, Doley acknowledged the fractures are real but argued the state actively works to widen them, citing Manipur as the clearest national example of engineered ethnic conflict. He said Assam's tribal communities increasingly recognize that protections like the Sixth Schedule and tribal belts and blocks are being hollowed into symbolism under the current government, pushing a wider coalition of communities toward shared demands — against evictions, against the erosion of constitutional protections — rather than toward fighting each other.

On Muslim evictions and the NRC

Pressed directly on whether Muslims are disproportionately affected by Assam's eviction campaigns, Doley didn't hedge: "Outrightly clear... the whole BJP government's whole modus operandi is to polarize the community in the name of religion." He linked this to Assam's historical proximity to Bangladesh and pre-independence demographic ties, arguing the BJP exploits real, older anxieties on both sides to manufacture a durable communal binary. He called the state's eviction and detention-center apparatus — which he compared to Uttar Pradesh's "bulldozer raj" under Yogi Adityanath — a violation of the constitutional right to residence, and argued that people displaced repeatedly by Brahmaputra erosion, not cross-border migration, make up much of the affected population. On the NRC specifically, he said his own constituency is among the least demographically affected, but that the exercise troubles him personally and politically: "They have more to fear because the NRC exercise in itself is a failure," he said, arguing the government lacks the courage to defend its own results and that detention centers have no place in a modern democracy. He called for resolving cross-border migration through diplomacy with Bangladesh rather than what he described as criminalizing ordinary people.

Closing the gap between activist and politician

Returning to his opening question, Ashraf asked how Doley squares the historically poor electoral record of Indian activists with his own campaign. Doley described his politics as heavily weighted toward activism by necessity, arguing that entrenched party structures have repeatedly been proven wrong by people who organize from outside them. He rejected the idea that "curated leaders" can fight what he called fascist politics, arguing that only grassroots, community-rooted candidates can credibly do so — pointing to large volunteer turnout and organic village-level support as evidence his campaign, unlike better-funded rivals, is being built from within the community it represents rather than staged for it.