ABSTRACT
Kaziranga National Park has increasingly become a site of intense political and conservation science debates surrounding the questions of the future of nature, law and rights of agrarian communities. A wider and more diverse set of institutions has joined these debates to decide the future of this park. These questions are essentially conditioned by the fate of the flagship megafauna, especially the great one-horned rhinoceros, and the lives of Assam’s agrarian communities. Public debates increasingly aim at alienating the agrarian communities from the landscape of Kaziranga National Park. The governmental institutions further reinforce this anti-agrarian public rhetoric. A series of legal and executive prescriptions tries to sanitise Kaziranga National Park from all human influences. Over the years, a set of prescriptions, which ignores both the landscape and ecological complexities of the region, has now set the tone of the idea of the governance of Kaziranga. These debates are immune from the complex ecological, historical and political realities of Assam. This chapter tries to understand the historical evolution of the Kaziranga National Park and its political fallout.
