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Tribal Policy

Pulling Back from the Brink?

by Harsh Mander

 

 

 

 

 

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Status and Problems of Tribes in India                                                                                                  ...Contd.

In addition, it is estimated that some 50 million persons have been displaced since 1950 on account of various development projects, of which more that 40 per cent are tribals. These projects include large irrigation dams, hydroelectricity projects, open cast and underground coalmines, super thermal power plants and mineral-based industrial units. In the name of development, tribals are displaced from their traditional habitats and livelihoods with little or no rehabilitation, and are rendered destitute, bewildered and pauperised by the development process.12 A.K. Roy (1982) poignantly describes the case of Jharkhand:

Darkness in the midst of light is Jharkhand… The area contains almost all the steel plants -Bokaro, Rourkela, Jamshedpur, all the power plants of the Damodar valley project and the Hirakud Dam of Orissa. There is no dearth of development, but only at the cost of the people there. Industries displace them, dams drown them, afforestation starves them (quoted in Shah 1990: 135).

Apart from a water policy, which rests on the pivot of big dams, State policy on mining has also worsened the internal colonisation of tribal populations. Massive mining and industrial projects have displaced tribal cultivators from their lands and irrevocably disrupted the social fabric of their lives. In the context of the Bailadila Iron Ore Mines in Bastar, Srivastava vividly describes the social upheaval:

After the establishment of the project, business contractors, labourers, technicians [started] coming to the area… vast areas both barren and fertile attracted the outsiders and they established themselves on both sides of the road passing through the village Badebachelli… allied industries and market centres were also set up… a bania (non-tribal) sells commodities of day to day need to the tribals and acts as a moneylender… any tribal who is not in a position to repay his debt loses his land to the money-lender… the land along the road is no longer in the possession of the tribals. The outsiders are further encroaching on the land situated a little bit in the interior both for cultivation and habitation… in Badebachelli village 2027 acres of land belonging to tribal cultivators have been officially permitted to be sold to non-tribals… but legal alienation of tribal land is not even one-tenth of the rate of illegal alienation… The thatched huts of the tribals are slowly and gradually being replaced by the pucca (brick) tiled house of the outsiders (quoted in Shah 1990: 135).

In these large mining projects, tribals lose their land not only to the project authorities, but even to non-tribal outsiders who converge into these areas and corner both the land and the new economic opportunities in commerce and petty industry. Even wage employment to local tribals is rare. ‘In Chotanagpur area, though the tribals constitute more than 50 per cent of the total population, there are not more than 5 per cent of them in the industrial working force. In some of the large firms like TISCO, Jamshedpur and Bharat Cooking Coal Ltd., Dhanbad, the tribals employed are less than 5 per cent’ (Shah 1990: 135). As Anand (1993) puts it ' Development for the nation has meant displacement, pauperisation, or, at its very best, peonage for the tribals'.

The result of these intermeshing cycles of exploitation is not merely the systematic and sustained immiseration of tribal communities. In most contemporary tribal communities in India, one can observe the painful tearing apart of social and cultural moorings. Homans (1950) describes social disintegration as a condition ‘marked by a decline in the number of activities in which the members of a group collaborate, by a decrease in the frequency of interaction between these members, and by a weakening of the control exercised by the group over the behaviour of individuals’ (quoted in Mann 1980: 33).

As a result of such disintegration, the majority of tribal people are trapped in anomie or normlessness, and some in profound despair. Verrier Elwin spoke of a ‘loss of nerve’ among certain Central Indian tribes, S.C. Roy of ‘a loss of interest in life’ among the Birhors and the Korwas and J.H. Hutton of ‘physical decline’ among the Andamanese (Mann 1980: 33). There are symptoms of this also in the high degrees of pathological alcoholism observed in tribal areas which have replaced the traditional joyous social drinking, and in growing fissures in tribal value systems of integrity, mutual respect and harmony with nature.

Tribal communities have also been affected from within. Indeed, there is documentation of increasing stratification within traditionally tribal communities. As long as these communities were relatively isolated, the major divisions were horizontal, between clans, rather than vertical.13 However, in their close encounters with the caste Hindu civilisation, some tribes became Sanskritised and absorbed themselves into the hierarchical caste-system, regarding other tribes as inferior. Many tribes have also begun to practice untouchability. For instance, a Kabirpanthi Bhil would be unwilling to accept a girl for marriage from (or even food prepared by) Shambh Dal Bhils and from the non-Bhagat Bhils. Gender relations have also worsened with the assimilation (Mann 1980: 36).

These are also recent signs of success in infecting tribal communities with the sectarian virus. Years of work by religious fundamentalists have succeeded in driving a deep wedge between Hindu and Christian tribal communities in parts of Central India. The RSS, the national headquarters of whose tribal programme, the Banwasi Kalyan Ashram, is located in a Christian missionary stronghold, in the remote district of Jashpur in Madhya Pradesh, has sought to persuade Christian tribals to ‘return to Hinduism’, in a militant ‘ghar vapasi’ (home-coming) campaign. Positions on the opposing Christian missionary camp have also hardened. The resulting sectarian hatred that erupted in 1999 caught international headlines with the burning alive of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two small sons in a remote tribal settlement in Orissa, allegedly by Hindu tribal mobs. Tribal communities have in this way been drawn into campaigns of aggressive religious militancy as pawns ironically by a civilisation, which excluded them for centuries.

The long history of penetration and profound disruption of tribal communities, the sustained and frequently brutal expropriation of tribal wealth, and the resultant anger and despair, have resulted in a situation in which many regions of tribal concentration are immersed in an unending cycle of violence. All states in the Indian Northeast have been ripped apart by separatist, and sometimes sectarian, violence.

In many stretches of forested Central India, it is the People’s War Group and an array of other Naxalite Marxist-Leninist outfits14, which continue to channelise tribal anger into violent resistance to State power. These regions are caught in a hopeless cycle of mutually retaliatory State and Naxalite violence: so-called police ‘encounters’ in which Naxalites are killed in cold blood by police personnel, and the regular killing by Naxalites groups of alleged ‘police informers’ and police personnel often through powerful land mines.15 In some pockets, State authority and control have shown signs of near-collapse, and Naxalites have described these as 'liberated areas'. There is evidence that in areas of Naxalite influence, petty exploitation especially by government functionaries has been contained. However, it is still unlikely that there is a clear and wide mandate within the local tribal communities for the perpetuation of violence either of the Naxalites or the State. Meanwhile, as violence from both sides nonetheless continues unabated, there seems no light at the end of the tunnel for local tribal communities condemned to survive in the crossfire.

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