Adivasi Politics and State Responses

C h a p t e r 9

Adivasi Politics and State ResponsesHistorical Processes and Contemporary Concerns

NaNdiNi SuNdar

I N the ‘ShiNiNg’ India of the twenty-first century, adivasis appear

as an anachronism, people the Indian government and industrialists would rather forget, as they eye new lands for SEZs, industrial projects or large dams. On the other hand, adivasis will not let themselves be forgotten—forcing their presence on the public stage, either as movements protesting displacement by large dams and industries, as armed Maoist guerrillas, as campaigners for new legislation like a forest rights act, or even as the lumpen foot soldiers of Hindutva.

Both these processes—the forgetting and the reminding—are not new, and go back in some way to processes that were initiated at the end of the nineteenth century—in the great wave of colonial law-making that produced the penal code, the forest act and the land acquisition act. While fin de siécle liberalization and globalization are important contexts, it is not clear yet whether they represent a watershed in adivasi politics or are merely a blip in a longer history of dispossession. As for historians, given the continuity of processes over time, deciding which

238 N a N d i N i S u N d a r

time to think with and framing an event in time, is itself a problem. On the other hand, as sociologists, we are now witness to diverse forms of adivasi politics, which in turn have generated new governmentalities. This chapter is an attempt to combine the understanding of both historians and sociologists, highlighting what recent developments mean, but within the longue dureé of adivasi history.

The article is divided into four parts: Section I frames the continuities in government policy from the colonial period till the present, Section II looks at the range of contemporary adivasi responses to the situation of underdevelopment created by government policy; Section III looks at the new (and perhaps not so new) strategies that government policy is adopting in response to adivasi resistance. In Section IV, I conclude by raising questions about the possible range of academic—specifically sociological—responses to adivasi politics and constructions of their own past.

State diScourSeS of deNigratioN for diSplacemeNt: old wiNe iN New bottleS

Across central India, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, adivasis were thrown out of their villages without any compensation, because the government wanted to take over their forests for revenue generation. A century later, in part because of the sweeping reservations and faulty settlements of that time, which changed the status of land in government records without changing people’s presence on the ground and in part because of new demands for land, adivasis are still being evicted and still without any compensation.1 The only difference, perhaps, is that now the takeover is often justified under the friendly name of joint forest management or conservation, rather than revenue production.2

The Gujarat government talks of building water parks with Narmada water and a tourism site at the Sardar Sarovar dam site at Kevadia, as if providing drinking water to parched Kutch had never been the excuse, and the Madhya Pradesh government claims that rehabilitation has been completed, as if all the families that still cling to the hillside are quite imaginary. Despite the energy and international attention the Narmada Bachao Andolan brought to bear on the issue of displacement and rehabilitation, little, in effect, has changed since 1969 when the sociologist Irawati Karve and her daughter Jai Nimbkar wrote of those displaced by the Koyna dam: ‘The adjustment could have been made easier by making the simplest amenities of life available to these people.

a d i v a S i P o l i t i c S a N d S t a t e r e S P o N S e S 239

The government has not been able to do this. . . . A large number of displaced people still do not feel settled. There is an atmosphere of anxiety and fear, of a certain amount of bitterness among the people we visited.’3

International consultancy companies like McKinsey and Arthur Anderson now prepare the so-called ‘vision statements’ of Indian states rather than these being formulated by the people of these states themselves, yet perhaps this is not so different from an India Office in London deciding on policy for the Agency areas, deciding whom to lease minerals or forest produce to. What has changed, perhaps, is that sometimes the Chief Ministers of states like Jharkhand, which hire these consultants, are now adivasis themselves, and this is not insignificant. Yet, this has not precluded violence against adivasis protesting against these policies, as shown by the killing of 9 persons at Tapkara in Ranchi district, Jharkhand who were protesting against the Koel Karo dam (2001) or of 12 adivasis in Kalinganagar (Orissa) in January 2006, protesting against land acquisition for Tata Steel.

Even representations of adivasis have not changed much from the colonial period, though it is now couched in the language of ‘development’ and discrimination, rather than savagery and civilization. Let me give three examples: The first is from the Class IX Social Studies Textbook in Gujarat. In Chapter 9 under the heading ‘Problems of the Country and their Solutions’ we find a typical statement that sees adivasis as ‘a problem’ and blames them for their condition:

There is very poor socio-economic development among the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in India, although they constitute one-fourth part of the total population. They have not been suitably placed in our social order, therefore, even after independence they are still backward and poor. Of course, their ignorance, illiteracy and blind faith are to be blamed for lack of progress because they still fail to realise importance of education in life.4

The second example is from the Supreme Court judgement in 2000 dismissing the petition of the Narmada Bachao Andolan where the Honourable Judges argue that displacement is actually good for adivasis:

Residents of villages around Bhakra Nangal dam, Nagarjun Sagar dam, Tehri, Bhilai Steel Plant, Bokaro . . . and numerous other developmental sites are better off than people living in villages in whose vicinity no developmental project came in. It is not fair that tribals and the people in undeveloped villages should continue in the same condition without ever enjoying the fruits of science and technology for better health and have a higher quality of lifestyle. Should they not be encouraged to seek greener pastures elsewhere, if they can have access to it, either through their own efforts due to information exchange or due to outside compulsions.5


At the rehabilitation sites they will have more and better amenities than which they enjoyed in their tribal hamlets. The gradual assimilation in the main stream of society will lead to betterment and progress.6

The textbooks do not acknowledge that the problem of illiteracy may have more to do with teachers who don’t teach or low levels of investment in primary education than with adivasi reluctance to learn. The learned Justices who delivered the NBA judgement appear to forget that education and health are fundamental rights wherever one lives and that the record in urban slums where people are clustered together is scarcely better. However, the perverse thinking that portrays displacement as the ‘solution’ to underdevelopment is widespread, and underlies, for example, the justification for forced evacuation provided by the BJP Government of Chhattisgarh, in the course of its counter-insurgency campaign, the Salwa Judum: that adivasis would be more secure and could be better provided for in roadside camps than in their own villages.

The official tourism website of the Government of Chhattisgarh (www.bastar.nic.in), which is my third example, provides further ballast to the theme of the adivasi’s own responsibility for her/his ‘backwardness’. Not only is it breathtaking in terms of both its ethnographic illiteracy and its prejudice, it also appears obsessed with the notion that adivasi society encourages promiscuity. This standard trope is then used to justify non-adivasis exploiting adivasi women sexually:

Gonds have pro-fertility mentality. Divorces, remarriages, widow marriages, marriages with the wives of the brothers and between brothers and sisters are common.7

The Murias prefer ‘Mahua’ drinks rather than medicines for their ailments. The tribals of this area is famous for their ‘Ghotuls’ where the prospective couples do the ‘dating’ and have free sex also.

These people are not cleanly in their habits, and even when a Maria does bathe he does not wash his solitary garments but leaves it on the bank. When drinking from a stream they do not take up water in their hands but put their mouth down to it like cattle.8

Whether it is in terms of the elevation of resources over people, or the designation of people as wild or savage or simply undeserving in order to justify using savage methods against them,9 nothing much appears to have changed. What is happening now is just the latest version in the package of colonialism and capitalism that adivasis have for so long been familiar with, years after the rest of India, in varying degrees, began to think itself free.


adivaSi reSpoNSeS: New wiNe iN old bottleS

The Politics of Indigeneity, Class, Religion and Gender

Some things, however, have changed: the nuances of each period matter, as do the specifics of policy. What is perhaps most striking about the present moment is the extent to which the future is debated among adivasi communities themselves, the possibilities that are visualized, both politically and practically, and the diverse political platforms through which adivasis are responding to their condition of underdevelopment.

On the one hand, we have the growing politics of indigenism, which is played out at the level of the UN, and on the other hand, more national as well as local class-based mobilization, which takes the form of both issue-based non-violent social movements,10 or party-led armed struggle (Naxalism). In practice, there may be significant overlaps between these different strategies, for instance, in the degree to which the CPI (Maoist) is perceived as an adivasi or dalit party among local upper castes, but they have different political implications in terms of state responses.

The third plank is assimiliation into Hindutva politics, expressed by the growing participation of adivasis in the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, which is the RSS front specifically meant for ‘vanvasis’ as they call adivasis. The presence of Christian evangelicals is also visible throughout adivasi areas, resulting in a cascading duet of competitive proselytization.

Adivasi electoral politics, which could have served as a fourth stream, has not taken off in the same way as dalit electoral politics under the Bahujan Samaj Party; the Gondwana Ganatantra Party in Madhya Pradesh is perhaps the sole example of a purely adivasi formation, though the Adivasi Mahasabha under Jaipal Singh and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha historically represented such an attempt.11

Finally, there is the most common everyday response to displacement, landlessness or the increasingly meagre return from land: migration. Large numbers of adivasis from western Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra migrate to the sugarcane fields of Gujarat; adivasis from Jharkhand work in the fields and brick kilns of Bengal, as road labour in Ladakh for the Border Roads Organization, or as domestics in Delhi; adivasis from Bastar migrate seasonally to work on the chilli harvest in Andhra Pradesh. There are also migrations further afield, as contractors put together work gangs to work on construction projects or factories


in the metropoles. The emptying out of villages thus naturally affects adivasi strategies and their relation to the politics of place.

In the following sections, I take up three issues around which contemporary adivasi politics is constructed: indigeneity versus class as the marker of adivasi identity; religious identity; and the construction of adivasi women in relation to adivasi tradition. In all three cases, I weave in state practices as critical to the way these class, religious and gendered adivasi identities are constituted.

Indigeneity and Class as the Site of Difference within Adivasi Politics

One of the major faultlines within adivasi politics today lies along the indigeneity/ethnicity versus class distinction, and the manner in which adivasi history is read in the service of these politics. It is possible to label organizations according to where they stand on this issue, though as I show, in practice, the distinction is often blurred.

One striking feature of the twenty-first century is the extent to which phrases involving ‘indigenous’—indigenous peoples, indigenous knowledge—have become an essential part of global discourse. Some adivasi groups have begun to make alliances with international networks of tribal and indigenous peoples, leading to the formation of groups like the AICFAIP (All India Coordinating Forum of Adivasis and Indigenous Peoples), or the ICITP (Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples). Groups from Jharkhand, among others, were visible in the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004 on indigenous-adivasi platforms. Kaushik Ghosh (2006) has described the way in which the middle-class leadership of these groups is often divorced from the everyday struggles of adivasi communities against displacement.12

For some of these organizations, the homogeneous adivasi commu-nity is pitted against caste Hindu society (and more rarely, the national state), but almost never against the international community, even when it comes in the guise of the pro-private property interventions of the World Bank or the expansionism of the United States.13

On the other hand, the Maoists see adivasi society as internally stratified, and their main struggle is with both the upper echelons of adivasi society as well as with the Indian government.14 The leadership of the CPI (Maoist) is not adivasi, although the bulk of their cadre is.

In between, are several other organizations such as the Ekta Parishad, the Narmada Bachao Andolan or the Campaign for Survival and Dignity, which focus on economic issues, rather than adivasi identiy. However, the adivasi identity they portray is a homogeneous one, united against


oppression by outsiders or the state. Most such organizations cobble together an internal compromise, highlighting their adivasi identity in certain forums, and the broader issue in others. An organization like the Campaign for Survival and Dignity is an interesting example in this regard: it is an umbrella organization of several adivasi groups which came together to campaign against forced evictions by the forest department and then moved on to campaign for the Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006.15 In the course of its mobilization, while the Campaign has been forced to work within the categories the government uses—tribal, non-tribal; or to work within the framework of tribal interests represented by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, it has sought to define both tribals and ‘traditional forest dwellers’ in class and not ethnic terms, in determining who should be eligible for forest rights.

Just as class is not absent from adivasi platforms, on the ground, ethnicity surfaces even within class–based politics. Within Ekta Parishad in Chhattisgarh, for instance, there have been occasional suspicions between adivasi and non-adivasi activists.16 The CPI, recognizing the need for a separate adivasi platform, has recently set up the All India Adivasi Mahasabha, a front organization meant to mobilize on adivasi issues. And in practice, even though the CPI or the Maoists in Bastar are careful to claim that they are fighting in the larger interests of all the exploited people of Bastar, the core of these parties consists of adivasis. In Bastar, the CPI (Maoist) is most closely identified with Madias; members of non-adivasi communities told me the Maoist leaders would speak either in Telugu or in Gondi, the songs would be in Gondi and so on. In Maharashtra too, when the Maoist armed squads visit the villages, they stay with Gond families and are seen as a Gond party.17

Ideologically, the difference between indigenist organizations and the Maoists is best represented in terms of their differences over whether and how to retain the ‘traditional’ political structure in adivasi areas. Several rebellions in the past—whether the Kol rebellion of 1831–2, the Santhal rebellion of 1855–7, the Birsa Ulgulan of 1895–1900, or the Bastar Bhumkal of 1910—were organized through the village and pargana headmen. The pure ‘rebel consciousness’ that Ranajit Guha writes about, though constructed in terms of unity and solidarity against the state18 was a unity constructed within a particular structure of kinship and leadership, where the founding lineage of the village was simultaneously kin and leader.19 In places like Bastar, Chotanagpur and the Santhal Parganas, the government responded to the rebellions by ‘recognizing’ the local political structure, and creating headmen where they did not exist. In the process, however, their role was transformed


to becoming the articulating link between their own communities and the government.

These positions have now become a potent site of differentiation in the post-colonial period. While the indigenist activists and Maoists take open stands for and against these political structures, and have different views on whether they are benignly ‘traditional’ or, less benignly, ‘feudal’, they are also important to mainstream parties like the Congress and the BJP. Their relation to this debate, however, is both silent and shamefaced. Though they give village headmen no formal role in their version of party–led electoral politics, in practice they often put up descendants of these families as candidates in panchayat elections. The RSS has also tried to organize platforms of traditional leaders in Jharkhand.

In Jharkhand, where headmen are recognized both by tenure law, and official stipends,20 the ‘traditional’ system has been portrayed by indigenous rights activists as more desirable than elections to the panchayat, which they argue will only divide the village along party lines. They argue that in contrast to an elected sarpanch who needs money to fight elections, a traditional headman is more familiar and accessible to people, and that the power vested in him is really power vested in the community. Apart from mounting legal challenges to the Jharkhand Panchayati Raj Act 2001, many adivasi groups in Jharkhand have begun to revitalize their political structures, consisting of village and pargana or parha headmen. In the Kolhan, an NGO, Johar, set up over 800 gram sabhas in the period between the passing of PESA 1996 and the Jharkhand PRA 2001. Villages that showed interest were contacted and ‘elections’ were held, in which a committee was formed representing all the different groups in the village. This committee then elected its head, who was normally, but not always, also the traditional munda.

The Maoists have opposed this discourse of indigeneity and custom, and have formed their own village level organizations called sanghams, to displace the traditional structures. Maoist literature dismisses these structures as ‘feudal’, arguing that the Bhuria Committee proposals and Panchayati Raj were aimed at countering the Gram Rajya committees of the People’s War Group: ‘Any form of “traditional” village organization, called by whatever nice-sounding name, will only perpetuate the existing traditional feudal and tyrannical authority of the landlords and the bad gentry. So any so-called self-governing body set up will be dominated only by these elements, where the masses will have no real voice. Unless the old feudal authority is smashed no democratic institution can grow in the villages.’ As for the Bharat Jan Andolan’s


attempt to organize villagers under the slogan ‘our village, our rule’, the Maoists argue that ‘In reality they are organising all the village elders, patels, sarpanches, etc. to sustain the existing feudal authority from attacks by an awakening tribal people. By calling on villagers to protect their forests against other villagers they are pitting one village against another.’21 In practice, however, Maoist policy may be more pragmatic—and the degree to which sanghams have overthrown the traditional leadership is likely to vary from village to village, depending in part on how stratified the village is.

Regardless of where adivasi organizations or parties with adivasi cadres place themselves along the indigeneity-class continuum, they are accused by upper-castes of being indigenist and excluding others.22 For instance, in 1995–6, when a section of the CPI and Congress proposed having the Sixth Schedule in Bastar, the BJP started a campaign to convince non-tribal groups like Sundis, Kallars, and Maharas, that they would suffer under an autonomous council, with the Gonds being in power. The RSS also claims that its use of the term vanvasi is preferable to adivasi since it distinguishes people not on the basis of their indigeneity, but on place of residence (shehrvasi, gaonvasi or vanvasi). Never mind that uppercastes are never called shehrvasis, and that adivasis resent the jungly connotation of vanvasi.

And at the same time as the state and mainstream political parties charge others with creating divisions by the use of indigenism, they draw upon tribal identity in equally divisive ways. The long struggle for Jharkhand, which was eventually hijacked by the BJP, represented the struggle for adivasi rights in terms of the modern entrapments of statehood. However, soon after statehood, religion and caste became salient features in Jharkhand adivasi politics, in a way they never were before—for instance, with the jockeying between the JMM and BJP for chief ministership translated as a jockeying among different adivasi groups, Santhals and Mundas, for power. The years since the struggle for the Sixth Schedule in Bastar have seen the rise of several caste associations of tribals and non-tribals, aimed at preserving often anachronistic caste rules, or (in the case of the Rauts) demanding scheduled tribe status. In Jharkhand, the demand by the Kurmi-Mahtos to be listed as scheduled tribes on the grounds that they are as indigenous as any other community has been a major political issue in recent years.

While the Government of India does not recognize claims to either indigeneity or class, the categories it uses to classify communities as scheduled tribe are equally divisive, as shown by the Gujjar agitation in Rajasthan in 2007 to gain scheduled tribes status. Criteria such as


‘isolation’, and ‘shyness of contact’ that were developed by the Lokur Committee in the 1950s and are still used, do not describe the actual situation of most tribal communities in India; and yet, there is a reluctance to rethink the basis of the categorization.

Religion, Adivasi Politics and State Practice

If religion was a force for united struggle in the colonial period, as subaltern studies historians insist contra Marxist historians who posit a nascent secular consciousness to these struggles, it is now the basis of deep divisions. Much of this is due to the history of competitive proselytization in the last hundred years or so.

While the gradualist, anonymously authored process termed ‘the Hindu method of tribal absorption’ or ‘Sanskritization’ is an old phenomenon and popular perception tends to conflate Hindu conversion with this,23 what is happening now is qualitatively different. The RSS front, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, was set up in the 1950s to counter Christian missionary organizations working in adivasi areas and prevent conversions. Competitive proselytization is primarily a political phenomenon, aimed at expanding numbers and keeping alternative religions out. If converts find solace in religion, or if new forms of religious and social imagining emerge, this is quite incidental to the purpose for which programmes of conversion are undertaken. It is true that this phenomenon cannot be divorced from wider aspirations to a middle-class lifestyle or changes induced by the state’s desire to ‘uplift’ adivasis and absorb them into some ‘mainstream’. As adivasi life is increasingly subject to wage labour, the growing commodification of life requires a portable, commodified religion.24 Yet, increasingly, under competitive proselytization, choices about greeting, dressing, naming, or which sport to play are tied into particular religious markers. In Jaspur, Chhattisgarh, for example adivasi Christians shake hands, adivasi Hindus fold their hands into namastes, and adivasi adivasis say Johar. Adivasi Christians use their gotra names as surnames, e.g. Seraphinius Tirkey or Augustinius Toppo, while adivasi Hindus use Bhagat, Bairagi or Nirala, e.g. Maneswar Ram Bhagat. Adivasi Christians play hockey, while adivasi Hindus play kho kho. These are not hard and fast distinctions, and elsewhere in Chhattisgarh, both Hindus and Christians use clan names as surnames. Further research is required to understand how and in what context these markers of difference operate, but the point here is that even as ascent into a middle class leads to some homogenization, under the influence of competitive


proselytization, it imbues that middle class formation with religious differences.

While both Hindu and Christian organizations practice some kind of boundary keeping for their people, what distinguishes the RSS organizations is the slow penetration of hate. What they are producing is not just Hindu adivasis but bodies for Hindutva, as shown by the involvement of adivasis in the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. While there has been some focus on RSS ghar vapsi or ‘reconversion ceremonies’, in fact the maximum and most effective work of conversion takes place through everyday conversation in hostels or satsang kendras.

While the evangelicals and the RSS battle it out, adivasi organizations wishing to uphold some version of ‘adivasi religion’ like the ‘sarna dharm’ in Jharkhand, face much tougher times, with little support from government or anyone else.25 As Sura Oraon, a Professor of Kurukh at the B.S. College, Lohardaga and Secretary of the District Parha Sabha said, ‘Once the Christian missionaries had finished pulling us towards Christianity, the Kalyan Ashram began pulling us towards Hinduism.’ Even when Hindus and Christians are willing to concede the existence of such a thing as a distinctive adivasi religion, their descriptions involve acts of appropriation. A VKA pamphlet claims that adivasis are part of a wider Hindu family because Hindus also worship nature (Tulsi, Ganga, Nag, etc.).26 Christians propagandists like John Lakra, on the other hand, argue that Oraon religion is similar to Christianity in that it too is founded on belief in Dharmes or one Supreme God.27

The state’s acts of omission and commission are central to the enterprise of religious mobilization. Quite apart from the religious practices of the state, which often go unmarked, both the colonial and post-colonial states have enabled conversion through their absence in the fields of education and health. Access to medical or schooling facilities have been important reasons for the formation of new religious affiliations. But more subtly, the state also enables religions to convert by, on the one hand, refusing to recognize ordinary political protest as legitimate and, on the other hand, legitimizing religious violations as acts of conscience. In the past, while the colonial state routinely expelled people it thought guilty of political propaganda, it went out of its way to ensure freedom of conscience to those engaged in religious propaganda. In the present, state discourse through the media depicts the destruction of the Babri Masjid as something more than a pure act of vandalism, while political organizations fighting for the economic and political rights of workers or peasants, are seen as mere terrorists. The same demand when couched in religious terms receives greater


state attention than if it had been made in purely secular terms.28 In other words, the Indian state has routinely privileged religious belief and identity over other forms of belief and identity, which inevitably has the circular and reaffirming effect of strengthening religious affiliation.

But the impact of religious proselytization on both indigenist or class-based adivasi mobilization has not been uniformly negative. For one, many of those who convert are people who could not afford the costs of ritual sacrifices mandated by their village priests, or people who needed the facilities that the Hindus or Christians offered. In some ways, therefore, conversion marks a form of class differentiation within adivasi society. Missionary education has also been an important source for creating adivasi leaders, and an adivasi middle class with a consciousness of itself as exploited. In Jharkhand, this manifested itself in the Adivasi Mahasabha led by Jaipal Singh in Jharkhand, and subsequently, in a range of adivasi organizations which have taken up issues of statehood, cultural rights, displacement and so on. In Gujarat, Hindu reformist movements, and later the work of the Gandhian, Thakkar Bapa, created another class of upwardly mobile adivasis.

Women as a Site of Political Difference

At an everyday level, adivasi livelihood practices, both within the traditional village, and in migratory work gangs, are significantly gendered. Anger against displacement, unemployment and high mortality are often diverted into blaming women, resulting in a growing incidence of the killing of women as alleged witches.29

In adivasi politics too, the ‘woman question’ has become salient in the way different platforms are constructed. The politics of indigeneity and custom often defines itself against women—community ownership over land is not only asserted against the state, but also against women of the community. In both Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, ‘community leaders’ have reacted sharply to the idea that women should get land rights, on the grounds that it will splinter community lands and that non-adivasi men will marry adivasi women only to get their land. There are, however, no figures, on how much land is being lost due to adivasi women marrying outside their communities and how much due to other factors. Equally, ‘traditional’ panchayats did often recognize women’s usufructory and sometimes even ownership rights over land.30

While women are a significant part of the Maoist guerrilla cadre, and CPI (Maoist) front organizations like the Nari Mukti Sanghatan or the


Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan have taken up issues like bigamy and forced marriages, the dialogue between Maoism and feminism remains fraught with questions.31 The position of women in the Hindu right is even more complicated. Adivasi girls in the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram hostels that I studied were often called upon to do domestic tasks in a way that boys were not, and the discourse of sewa (service) that was used to mobilize them as pracharaks (workers/propagandists) was tinged with notions of ideal womanhood and motherhood drawing on non-adivasi family types. In other words, they were called upon to be the mothers of warriors rather than soldiers themselves (in contrast to the Maoists). However, relations between young adivasi women pracharaks and elder non-adivasi male pracharaks was relatively informal, reflecting perhaps the greater social exchange allowed in adivasi society between genders and ages.32 At the same time, participation in a formal association is a step up from the political disempowerment of women in traditional adivasi village panchayats, and a number of scholars have written about the empowerment of women in Hindutva organizations.33

Some old, Some New State StrategieS to divide aNd rule

While the image of a homogeneous adivasi community struggling against a greater and external state power may never have been valid, the paradigm is increasingly under pressure, as the state is increasingly intervening within adivasi struggles. The formal structure of government participatory policies and the political reality in which they operate means that for every adivasi movement protesting against displacement or destructive mining or demanding shares in industries, there is often now a counter adivasi movement, propped up by an opposing party.

The Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996 (PESA) stipulates that local communities should be consulted before their land is acquired, but in Amrapara in Jharkhand, in Kashipur in Orissa, and in Nagarnar in Chhattisgarh, the government has followed this law by simply ignoring or tearing up resolutions that the villagers pass against mining or against steel plants and passing its own instead with the help of pliant gram sabha members. In 2000, under ‘Operation Clean’ in Dewas, the forest department, police and civil administration jointly terrorized some 16 villages, pulled down houses, looted grain and agricultural implements and finally killed four people. This was justified in the name of protecting forests from the Adivasi Morcha Sanghatan (AMS), which was allegedly cutting trees for house building.


The Morcha claimed, on the other hand, that it had prevented illicit felling by forest staff in its area. What was particularly worrying was the use of forest protection committee (FPCs) members as ‘labour’ to demolish the houses of members of the Sanghatan members. The latter were told that their forest offences would be forgiven with a minor fine and they would be given forest employment only if they left the Sanghatan and joined the FPCs. This is entirely in keeping with the insidious trend of creating armed gangs from ‘civil society’ like the Adivasi Samaj Sudhar Shanti Sena of Congress MLA Subhash Yadav which was used to attack the Adivasi Mukti Sanghatan in Khargone in the late 1990s. The government can then claim it is helpless, and even better, point to the violence as evidence that the movement in question does not enjoy a mass base.

The most egregious example of this use of civil society to fight against Maoists or other radical organizations was the Salwa Judum in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh. The government claims that the Salwa Judum was a spontaneous uprising of tribals against Maoists. In practice, it was a state organized anti-insurgency campaign using civilians as a front. According to a video, clearly made at the government’s behest, ‘Operation Salwa Judum’ was initiated in January 2005 when the police launched ‘overt and covert’ operations to mobilize villagers against Maoists.34 The leadership of the Salwa Judum consisted mainly of urban non-tribal youth, from families of shopkeepers and traders, and some tribal politicians and their supporters. This is the section which was directly threatened by the Maoists, and has the most to gain from unchecked industrialization. The Salwa Judum has taken the form of processions to villages, accompanied by politicians, members of the civil administration and paramilitary, asking them to join the Salwa Judum.

Villages which supported the Maoists and resisted joining were repeatedly attacked, their houses burnt, their grain and cattle looted. They were forced to surrender to the Judum and come and live in roadside camps. Sangham members who resisted were killed. An estimated one lakh people are thus either living in temporary roadside camps or had fled across the border to Andhra to escape the Judum. Instead of being a ‘peace mission’ as the government claims, the Salwa Judum escalated violence on all sides. In retaliation for the burning, looting and killing by the Salwa Judum, the Maoists have attacked camps and killed those who joined the Salwa Judum as special police officers. However, only the murders by Maoists are recognized, and the Salwa Judum and paramilitary operate with complete impunity. The rule of law has completely broken down. The Salwa Judum is the scary


face of future state action, which will work through sections of society to fight other sections. It finds a receptive ground in new forms of class differentiation, which it in turn extends and promotes by giving some adivasis a share in the spoils of government, and excluding others.

towardS collaboratioNS iN lieu of coNcluSioNS

There are significant continuities with the past—both in terms of the issues people are fighting about, and the way that the state represents them. What is different is the categories through which people resist. Even when they borrow from state categories, they are not simply being derivative, but are also transforming the meanings of these categories. They are also proposing alternative registers of resistance.

If adivasi communities are divided around a range of possible options, sociologists and historians face equally serious challenges in studying adivasi history and politics. As the above discussion should have made clear, anthropologists/sociologists are no longer the only ones representing adivasis. The problem arises when the ‘subjects’ of an anthropological study, or social movements disagree with the categorizations of the sociologist. It is doubly compounded when the alternative to an indigenist understanding appears to involve cohabitation with right wing forces. For instance, the historical evidence against a sharp distinction between adivasi religions and folk Hinduism often seems to support the Hindu fundamentalist argument which claims adivasis as ‘backward Hindus’. Similarly the argument from historical evidence that forests in India were not necessarily managed by egalitarian village communities even before the colonial period comes into conflict with people’s movements fighting against an authoritarian forest department, on the grounds that they are better and more natural conservationists.35 Historical research challenging the notion of any special indigeneity on the part of adivasi populations, and pointing to the role of ecological niche or occupation in distinguishing communities,36 goes against the grain of many adivasi organizations’ representations of themselves.

Some anthropologists have argued that this contradiction between the constructionism of social science and history and one’s interlocutor’s own views requires new forms of collaboration, sharpening one’s theoretical perspectives and information with people, as against simply on them.37 In his work exploring possible alliances between organic intellectuals from indigenous communities who need to rely on essentialist representations of the self and academic theorists engaged in showing how identities have been constructed,


Fields lays out a range of possible collaborations. This involves ‘an overt commitment on the part of the anthropologist to tribal strategies rather than to current academic theories and trends’.38 However, as he points out, tribal strategies are divided creating further questions for anthropologists. What is important then is to open up debate between adivasi communities and sociologists/historians.

NoteS

1. Campaign for Survival and Dignity, Endangered Symbiosis, Delhi, 2003. The MP Forest Survey 2003, for example, admitted that people’s rights had not been settled in 83 per cent of land declared forests, something the forest department was legally bound to do by the Indian Forest Act.

2. See Nandini Sundar, Roger Jeffery and Neil Thin, Branching Out: Joint Forest Management in Four Indian States, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

3. Irawati Karve and Jai Nimbkar, A Survey of the People Displaced Through the Koyna Dam, Pune: Deccan College Building Centenary and Silver Jubilee Series no. 61, 1969.

4. Reproduced in Aakar Patel et al., Rights and Wrongs: Ordeal by Fire in the Killing Fields of Gujarat, Delhi: Editors’ Guild of India, 2002, p. 246.

5. 2000 Majority Judgement by Justices Kirpal and Anand in WP (C) 319 of 1994, Narmada Bachao Andolan v. Union of India and ors, pp. 172–3, emphasis mine.

6. Ibid., p. 48. 7. The prejudice is clearly apparent here since clan exogamy is a well known

feature of Gond society, so there is no question of brothers marrying sisters. 8. This part of the website has now been pulled due to adverse news coverage;

though it was online from 2005 to 2007. 9. See also David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, Durham: Duke University Press,

1993; Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

10. See for example, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and the Koel Karo Samiti working on issues of dam displacement, the organizations under the umbrella of the Campaign for Survival and Dignity working on forest and land rights; the Kashipur, Posco and Kalinganagar struggles against displacement, mining and steel/alumina plants.

11. For an analysis of why adivasi elected representatives have failed to register their presence, see Alistair Mcmillan, Standing at the Margins: Representation and Electoral Reservation in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.

12. Kaushik Ghosh, ‘Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality and the Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India’, in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 4, 2006, p. 501.

13. Internationally, the term ‘indigenous’ is double edged. On the one hand, it provides an opportunity for international mobilization against displacement and state repression in solidarity with other groups facing similar problems. On the other hand, it is open to appropriation by powerful states in a situation


where donor lending and military action have increasingly intervened to defend identities defined in religious or ethnic terms at the expense of identities based on other attributes such as class or nation. The concept of ‘indigenous’ people comes partly out of one of the shifts of this image, the alleged guilt of the ‘West’ towards their own actions in the past and the desire to make other states complicit in this. Groups like the NSCN appear to have fallen into this trap by calling upon the United States as a supporter of democracy to help them in their struggle against the Indian state.

14. Contrary to the notion of a homogeneous adivasi society outside the pale of caste differentiation, or beyond the boundaries of kingdoms, class has often been central to the conduct of adivasi politics, and even to defining who an adivasi is. Adivasis were not always the oppressed groups they are now—there were several Gond kingdoms in central India such as that of Garha Mandla, or Chanda. Many of the so-called Rajput kingdoms of central and western India actually emerged through a process of stratification among adivasi communities themselves. However, the Maoist notion of class is not necessarily cognizant of this history of the fluid intersections of identity and class. They see history in more schematic terms as a progression from feudalism to capitalism, based on differences in land ownership.

15. The roots of the Act lie in the colonial appropriation of forests from adivasis. In the absence of proper land surveys, many families which have been cultivating forest land for generations, have been legally reclassified as ‘encroachers’ on this land. A large number of others—including people displaced by various ‘development’ projects like dams and industries—have broken fresh ground in forest land, since they had no other means of subsistence. Over the years, this has created huge tensions between the forest department and adivasis, with foresters resorting to forced evictions, the burning of crops and razing of houses.

16. R. Nath, pers. com. 17. Amit Desai, pers. com. 18. He lists, among other forms of resistance, ‘negation’ or the extension of

opposition to everything and everyone connected with the government; and ‘solidarity’ expressed by threats against anyone who tried to break subaltern unity. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.

19. See also Asoka Kumar Sen, ‘The Process of Social Stratification in the Lineage Society of Kolhan in Singhbhum, South Asia’, in Journal of South Asian Studies,n.s., vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 27–38.

20. In the Kolhan, the mundas and mankis were given rights called hukumnamas; and both the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act and the Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act give the headmen certain powers, e.g. to settle wastes on landless inhabitants of the village and to maintain law and order.

21. New People’s Power in Dandakaranya, Calcutta: Biplabi Yug, 2000, pp. 8–9.22. See also Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound, Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999 on Ladino reactions to Mayan organizing. 23. For Sanskritization and Hinduization, see N.K. Bose, ‘The Hindu Method

of Tribal Absorption’, in Science and Culture, vol. 8, 1941, pp. 188–94; M.N. Srinivas, ‘Hinduism’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 12, Chicago, 1961.


24. For instance, displacement and migration make it harder to worship spirits localized in particular natural phenomena.

25. No doubt, any conception of adivasi religion is itself a systematization of a variety of practices. Yet as an alternative to the religious hegemony of both Hindus and Christians, it serves an important purpose.

26. Surya Narayan Saksena, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram Kya or Kyon?, Delhi: Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, 1994, pp. 5–6.

27. John Lakra, ‘Tribal Culture and Tribal Christians’, in Sevartham, vol. 25, 2000, p. 18.

28. See for example, ‘Dalits Threaten to Convert if Displaced’, in The Times of India, 22 December 1998.

29. See Ajitha Susan George, ‘Witch–Hunting in Jharkhand’, Draft mss., 2000. 30. See Nitya Rao, ‘Standing One’s Ground: Gender, Land and Livelihoods in

the Santal Parganas, Jharkhand, India’, Ph.D. thesis, School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, 2002; see also Tiplut Nongbri, Development, Ethnicity and Gender, Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2003.

31. Kalpana and Vasanta Kannabiran, ‘Commentary: AP—Women’s Rights and Naxalite Groups’, in Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 39, no. 45, 2004, p. 4874.

32. See Nandini Sundar, Adivasi vs. Vanvasi: The Politics of Conversion and Re–conversion in Central India, in Satish Saberwal and Mushirul Hasan, eds., Assertive Religious Identities, New Delhi: Manohar, 2006, pp. 357–90. For instance, a male pracharak told the girls that they should aspire to be like Jijaji, Shivaji’s mother.

33. Tanika Sarkar, ‘Female Militarism and Nuclearised Nationalism: Women of the Sangh in India’, in Peace Research Abstracts, vol. 39, no. 5, 2002, pp. 611–755; Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu, Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicised Religion in South Asia, New York: Routledge, 1998.

34. For further details of government sponsorship of the Salwa Judum, see Afterword in Nandini Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.

35. See articles in R.H. Grove, V. Damodaran and S. Sangwan, eds., Nature & the Orient: The Environmental History of South and South-East Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

36. See André Béteille, ‘The Idea of Indigenous People’, Current Anthropology, vol. 39, no. 2, 1988, p. 187; Sumit Guha, in Environment and Ethnicity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

37. See Les Fields, ‘Complicities and Collaborations: Anthropologists and the “Unacknowledged Tribes” of California’, in Current Anthropology, vol. 40, no. 2, 1999, pp. 193–209; Joanne Rappaport, Intercultural Utopias, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

38. Fields, ‘Complicities and Collaborations’, p. 199.

Documents

Adivasi Politics and State Responses