Tribal Policy: Pulling Back from the Brink?

This story was written as a tribute to the young tribal man I encountered during my first tenure as SDM, who fought this long battle for almost two decades. To protect identities, I had altered his name and even the location of the story. The events of the legal battle in this story are entirely true, but the personal relationships are partly fictionalised, because this was written originally as the script of a movie.

Many readers have asked me whether Jagtu ultimately got back his land. In most such stories, across the length and breadth of tribal India, Jagtu would not. But it is almost a miracle that the tribal young man after whom Jagtu is fashioned did get back his land, several years later. This was the result of a combination of factors, most importantly his very rare persistence and courage. But also it was made possible by the unusual support he got from another young officer years later, who dropped all work to rush to the village and give him possession of the land on a single day on which by chance there was no stay order from any court. The court battles continue to date, but he fights it now from a position of strength, because he has become master of a vast tract of some of the most valuable land in the district.

Constituting about 8% of the total population of India, the tribal peoples are among the most vulnerable groups in the country. Not only do they share with other disadvantaged groups the common travails of economic deprivation, they are also faced with a grave threat to their cultural integrity and socio-political freedoms. Unlike the Scheduled Castes, for instance whose main problem is to find a place of dignity and equality within mainstream society, the central problem of tribals has been to cope with the consequences of the brutal and destructive way that their relative isolation from the mainstream has been broken down.

Though this isolation has historically never been absolute, particularly for tribes in west, central or south India¹, tribal communities managed to retain a distinct identity of their own through centuries of interaction (albeit limited) with the mainstream. The specific set of factors that came to threaten this independence in a serious fashion, however, arose only with the advent of the colonialism, with the single most important factor being the introduction of State ownership of forests by the colonial government, a policy continued by the post-colonial State.

In effect this policy, that on the one hand facilitated unhindered exploitation of natural resources by the State, represented the first but most significant attack on the livelihood base of tribal communities. Post-independence, the requirements of planned development brought with them the spectre of dams, mines, industries and roads on tribal lands. With these came the concomitant processes of displacement, both literal and metaphorical - as tribal institutions and practices were forced into uneasy existence with or gave way to market or formal State institutions (most significantly, in the legal sphere), tribal peoples found themselves at a profound disadvantage with respect to the influx of better-equipped outsiders into tribal areas. The repercussions for the already fragile socio-economic livelihood base of the tribals were devastating - ranging from land alienation on a vast scale to hereditary bondage.

As tribal people in India perilously, sometimes hopelessly, grapple with these tragic consequences, official tribal policy continues to grope confusedly in a vain attempt to find the golden mean between the two extremes of isolation and assimilation. The enlightened rhetoric of the policy after Independence has been translated into a small clutch of bureaucratic programmes, which have done little to assist the widely encountered pauperisation, exploitation and disintegration of tribal communities. As tribal people respond occasionally with anger and assertion, but often also in anomie and despair, the only ray of hope lies in the radical law guaranteeing self-rule- The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, passed by the Indian Parliament in the winter of 1996.

This book will attempt to briefly describe the grave and complex predicament of tribal communities in contemporary India, and the legislative and policy interventions, which have been designed to address these problems. It will end with a description of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (also called (PESA) and its potential to reverse or at least restrain some of the elements in the tragedy of the tribal people in India.

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