MOHAN GURUSWAMY - Favoring the Tribals and Ignoring the Adivasis!
The Adivasi homelands
are restive. From Palamau to Adilabad a new consciousness is making India’s
first people ask questions. How long will the Adivasis not only be denied
of what is their due by the Constitution but the exploitation of outsiders who
not only oppress them but also ostracize them?
Tribal people account
for 8.2% of India’s population. They are spread over all of India’s States and
Union Territories. Even so they can be broadly classified into three groupings.
The first grouping consists of populations who predate the Indo-Aryan
migrations. These are termed by many anthropologists as the
Austro-Asiatic-speaking Australoid people. The Central Indian Adivasis belong
to this grouping. The other two major groupings are the Caucasoid tribes who
migrated into northwestern India, and Sino-Tibetan or Mongoloid tribal people
of the Himalayan and Northeastern regions who migrated at more recent periods.
The Constitution of
India, Article 366 (25) defines Scheduled Tribes as "such tribes or tribal
communities or part of or groups within such tribes or tribal communities as
are deemed under Article 342 to the Scheduled Tribes (STs) for the purposes of
this Constitution.” The criteria for classification being geographical
isolation, backwardness and having distinctive culture, language, religion and
“shyness of contact.” There are some 573
communities recognized by the government as ST’s and therefore eligible to
receive special benefits and to compete for reserved seats in legis-latures,
government and educational institutions. The biggest tribal group, the Gonds,
number about 16 million, who are spread out in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh,
Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Orissa; closely followed by the Santhals with about
14 million. Central India is home to the country's largest Adivasi tribes, and,
taken as a whole, roughly 75 percent of the India’s tribal population lives
here.
The term Adivasi
carries the specific meaning of being the original inhabitants of a given
region and was specifically coined for that purpose in the 1930s. Clearly all
Scheduled Tribes are not Adivasis. Unlike the Adivasis the other two broad
tribal groupings have fared better in the post-independence dispensation.
Within them some, such as the Meena’s and Gujjar’s of Rajasthan, Lambadas of
Maharashtra and Telangana, and the Khasis, Mizos, Angami and Tangkhul Nagas,
and Meitei in the Northeast have done exceptionally well. Unlike the
Northeastern tribes, the Meena’s and Gujjar’s do not even meet the stipulated
criteria of geographical isolation, backwardness, distinctive culture, language
and religion. Forget “shyness of contact.”
We all now know very
well that big government in the absence of a responsive nervous system actually
means little government, and whatever little interaction the people at the
bottom have with the state is usually a none too happy one. In the vast Central
Indian highlands the occasional visit of an official invariably means
extraction by coercion of what little the poor people have. It doesn’t just end
with a chicken or a goat or a bottle of mahua, it often includes all these and
the modesties of the womenfolk.
Most tribal villages
and settlements have no access to schools and medical care. Very few are
connected with all weather roads. Perish the thought of electricity though all
the coal and most of the hydel projects to generate electricity are in the
tribal regions. The forests have been pillaged and the virgin forests thick
with giant teak and sal trees are things of the past. In mineral rich Orissa
over 72% of all Adivasis live well below the poverty line. At the national
level 45.86% of all Adivasis live below the poverty line. Incidentally the
official Indian poverty line is a nothing more than a starvation line, which
means that almost half of India’s original inhabitants go to bed every night
starving. Several anthropometric studies have revealed that successive generations
of Adivasis are actually becoming smaller unlike all other people in India who
benefit from better and increasingly nutritious diets.
What little the Indian
state apportions to the welfare and development of indigenous people gets
absorbed in the porous layers of our public administration. Out of the 3480 IAS
cadre strength, ST’s account for about 240, but there is not a single IAS
officer belonging to the largest Adivasi group, the Gonds. While the next
biggest group, the Santhals fare somewhat better because of the recognition of
Santhali as an official language enabling them to take the civil service entry
exams in their language. Despite this, tribals from Rajasthan – mostly the
Indo-Aryan Meena grouping, corner the over-whelming majority of places in the
All India Civil Services and the mission educated northeastern tribals such as
the Khasis, Nagas and Mizos.
Quite understandably
there is a raging fire of discontent and anger in these Adivasi homelands. The
State’s response is to treat it as a law and order problem and quell the
discontent by force, without trying to address it. In the recent years
there has been a sudden concern for Adivasis. It is as much driven by the
expansion of Naxalite influence in the Adivasi homelands, as it is motivated by
the fears of conversion to Christianity that would have precluded their
assimilation into the Hindu Samaj.
But the first NDA’s
feigned concern for Adivasis caused the states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand
were carved out of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh without addressing the real tribal
issues relating to their culture, way of life and aspirations were not
addressed. Political power has still, by and large, eluded them. Even when
tribal leaders come to the fore they are quickly sucked into the ways of the
traditional ruling classes and prove no less avaricious and corrupt.
Even if the provisions
of the Constitution were implemented in some measure if not all of its spirit
and word, the present situation would not have come to be. The Fifth and Sixth
Schedules under Article 244 of the Indian Constitution in 1950 provided for self-governance
in specified tribal majority areas. This did not happen. The migrations reduced
the number of Adivasi majority areas. But there are still solutions possible
within the Indian Constitution and in the universal principles of justice and
equality. There are 332 tribal majority tehsils in India, of which 110 are in
the Northeast, where they have won states of their own.
This leaves 222
tehsils encompassing an Adivasi population of over 20 million. These tehsils,
many of them contiguous must be immediately made self-governing areas, as
envisaged by the Constitution. All these tribal majority areas can be
consolidated into administrative divisions whose authority must be vested with
democratically chosen leadership.
Instead of the state
capital controlled government, the instruments of public administration dealing
with education, health, irrigation, roads and land records must be handed over
to local government structures. The police must also be made answerable to
local elected officials and not be a law unto themselves. The lament of the
Adivasi about their role in their government is well known. It is the subject
of many folk songs. A popular Gond song goes:
And the Gods were
greatly troubled/
in their heavenly courts and councils/
Sat no Gods of Gonds
among them. /
Gods of other nations sat there/
Eighteen threshing-floors of
Brahmins/
Sixteen scores of Telinganas/
But no Gods of Gonds appeared there/
From the glens of Seven Mountains/
From the twelve hills of the valleys
