THE UPRISING
Conflicts over tribal rights and land acquisition for development projects are pitting communities against the government across central India. As elections approach, will tribal anger be mobilised at the polls?
Rampant takeover of their land by the state fuels massive resistance by tribal communities across India
On June 19, five tribal women and three men, activists with a Christian NGO, were performing a street play against human trafficking at a school in Burudih Kochang village in Jharkhand’s Khunti district when six armed attackers interrupted the show and abducted them. In a forest a few kilometres away, the women were gang-raped, brutalised and beaten, while the kidnapped men were forced to consume urine.
According to the local police, the rape survivors were asked by the school principal, Father Alfonso Aien, and two nuns to hush up the matter, but one of them broke her silence the next day. While the Catholic priest and two suspects were arrested, Jharkhand’s additional director general of police R.K. Mallik announced that the suspected attackers were members of a Maoist splinter group, the People’s Liberation Front of India (PLFI), and supporters of a burgeoning tribal autonomy agitation, the ‘Pathalgadi movement’, which has been a thorn in the side of the state government, barring public servants from entering tribal villages.
“The crime was perpetrated to deter individuals opposing the Pathalgadi movement,” Mallik said, adding that “it appears that Johan Jonas Tidu, one of the movement’s top leaders in Khunti, masterminded the abduction and rape”. Meanwhile, Tidu himself told india today that the police claims were a set-up: “The Pathalgadi movement is uniting the tribal communities, [making] them aware of their rights. This is a conspiracy to defame us—we are also looking for the culprits and will punish them.”
If the motives behind the brutal incident remain perplexing, the claims and counter-claims point to an escalating conflict in the state, pitting alienated tribal communities against a state administration that prefers to pin the blame for failures of governance on its favourite bogeys: Maoists, Pathalgadi and Christian missionaries. While the Khunti incident has offered the state government an opportunity to highlight this ‘triple threat’, it has also thrown a harsh light on the administration’s inadequacies and disconnect with local communities.
It’s a dynamic that is not confined to Jharkhand. These are rumblings of a whole new uprising, a growing restiveness amid tribal communities across the breadth of India: from Maharashtra in the west, through Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, to Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha. Much of it is being fuelled by the failure of successive state governments to adequately implement provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996 or PESA. The legislation was intended to give tribal gram sabhas the last word on land acquisitions as well as the right to forest resources in all ‘Scheduled Areas’ identified in the Constitution. The tribal ire is also driven by various attempts to tinker with the Forest Rights Act of 2006, and insidious moves by governments and political groups to dilute tribal cultures, identities and political solidarity. With five of these six states scheduled for assembly elections in 2018 and 2019, regional governments and the BJP in particular have reason to worry about a conflagration of tribal discontent. For the moment, the agitations remain dispersed and discrete but they are linked by cultural affinities and a common interest in defending tribal rights to land.
In Maharashtra, assertions of tribal identity are evident in the Maharashtra Rajya Adivasi Bachao Abhiyan (MRABA), headed by the Nashik-based professor Ashok Bagul, spearheading a campaign to have tribal communities acknowledged as ‘mool-nivasi’ or ‘original inhabitants’. Since 2017, MRABA has been organising tribal weddings where Ravana is honoured as the central deity and witness. “We firmly believe we are the original inhabitants of this country. The rest are migrants,” says Bagul. But behind such crude boasts is a very real conflict: Over 50,000 tribal claims to forest land await the Maharashtra government’s approval. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis
maintains that 20,000 such claims have been cleared in the past two years, although he admits that the forests department may have erred in settling claims where tribal beneficiaries were given less land than was rightfully due to them.
On May 17, hundreds of tribals, led by Ulka Mahajan of the Sarvahara Jan Andolan (SJA), demonstrated in Mumbai to protest against the state government’s failure to consult local gram sabhas in Maharashtra’s Raigad district before acquiring land for the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor. Mahajan challenges the government’s assertions that provisions of PESA were followed. “They took 15 years to frame rules under PESA and are now diluting the act,” she says, alleging that the mandatory consent of gram sabhas had been “forged” in many instances.
The lackadaisical approach to the Forest Rights Act is particularly glaring in northern Maharashtra, where traditional tribal rights to forest resources have been withdrawn and transferred to the forests department. Activist Pratibha Shinde of the Lok Sangharsh Morcha says it’s a major cause for the growing anger amid tribal communities. Mahajan of SJA concurs. Tribal villagers, she says, are not the beneficiaries of the roads crisscrossing their areas. She also points to 15 big dams in the tribal areas of Raigad and Thane. “Water from these go to big cities like Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai while the locals have been battling water scarcity for years,” she says.
Maharashtra’s public works department spends a major chunk of the Rs 16,000 crore annual budget for tribal development on building roads in tribal areas. Vishnu Savara, the state’s tribal development minister, had advised that PWD projects get prior approval from the tribal development department, but his suggestion was rejected. Both Mahajan and Shinde criticise the state government’s decision in April to shut down messes in tribal student hostels and instead pay the students cash via DBT (direct benefit transfer). The money, they say, seldom reaches the students on time.
Tribal activists point to a 2016 Maharashtra government circular, which does away with the need to consult with gram sabhas to acquire land for projects that serve ‘a wider national interest’. Further, the government upgraded three tribal pan-
chayats—Akkalkuva, Taloda and Dhadgaon—to municipal councils in 2017. As a consequence, tribal representatives, who had the constitutional right to head the panchayats, no longer hold sway in the newly constituted civil bodies.
In Madhya Pradesh, similar grievances have seen tribal communities organising themselves into politically savvy groups, such as Jai Adivasi Yuva Shakti (JAYS). Hira Alawa, a 35-year-old doctor who quit the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in 2016 to return to JAYS (a group he floated in 2012) in Kukshi town in Madhya Pradesh’s tribal district of Dhar, claims his group has a million members. Working in tandem with Alawa is a fellow Bhil, Arvind Mujalda, whose Birsa Brigade runs coaching classes for tribal youth.
Mujalda, who has served as a police constable and land revenue officer, points to the surfeit of benami deals through which patidars (outsiders) have taken control of large tracts of tribal land. “Tribals must take control of their destiny,” he says. His coaching classes are aimed at preparing tribal youngsters for gainful government employment.
Alawa believes the half-hearted implementation of PESA has rendered tribal communities vulnerable. He points to Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s pet programme of holding mass marriages in tribal areas as an attempt to impose brahminical norms. Alawa also accuses both the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the church of tampering with tribal culture. “Missionaries in Jhabua have replaced our gods while organisations like the Gayatri Pariwar and Jai Gurudev ask tribals to give up meat and alcohol, which are integral to tribal culture,” he says.
JAYS claims that in Madhya Pradesh as in Maharashtra, the mandatory consultative process with tribal gram sabhas for land acquisition is marred by interference and fraud. Alawa says his outfit will host or support candidates in all 47 constituencies reserved for tribals in the forthcoming state assembly polls. The group will also support candidates in nearly 50 other seats that have more than 20 per cent tribal electors. Although opposed to both the BJP and Congress, the outfit views the saffron party as its main adversary. To counter the RSS-BJP strategy of appointing ‘page pramukhs’ (responsible for cultivating voters in the electoral lists), Mujalda plans to unleash “half page pramukhs”.
JAYS has already registered electoral success in student body elections held last October—nine student council presidents and 162 council members in Dhar district. It even got the term ‘vanvasi’ replaced with ‘adivasi’ in all state government programmes.
At Ukala, some 50 km from Kukshi in Madhya Pradesh, Alawa engages with tribal boys and girls via a Facebook Live session to find out if they are receiving benefits under welfare schemes. “There are just 50 seats in the tribal [students’] hostel for the entire district. [Even] the girls have to find a place to stay on their own. There are water problems and security issues in the hostels as well,” he says.
In eastern Madhya Pradesh, the tribal anger is shaping up into overtly militant campaigns. In Surajpur and Jashpur on the eastern flank of Chhattisgarh, the Pathalgadi ‘village autonomy’ movement seems to have spilled over from neighbouring Jharkhand where it has swept through the districts of Khunti, Gumla and Saraikela-Kharsawan. In Jharkhand, of course, the movement has snowballed into full-scale defiance of the state’s jurisdiction, with stone plaques in over 100 tribal villages declaring territorial independence. Government officials are barred from these area and ‘outsiders’ warned against seeking employment or trying to set up businesses.
Of late, Jharkhand, with over 26.2 per cent tribal population, has seen a growing mistrust for the government in large sections of the tribal population. Their protest against the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Jharkhand Amendment) Act, 2017 is a case in point. The new law— which does away with the requirement that 70 per cent of landowners must consent before clearing land for devel-
opment projects—could snowball into yet another major issue. Though BJP state chief Laxman Gilua insists the law would pave the way for ‘positive’ growth, leader of opposition Hemant Soren has threatened a mass agitation if it isn’t withdrawn.
On June 18, the Jharkhand Disom Party (JDP) and its sister outfit, the Adivasi Sengel Abhiyan, a collective of over 40 tribal outfits, called for a statewide bandh to protest against the act. The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, too, has threatened an agitation against the policy.
Tribal unrest, however, has also gone beyond political forums in Jharkhand. The ongoing agitation against land acquisition for the proposed Adani power plant in Godda draws on both tribal and non-tribal protesters. The tribal/non-tribal divide is more explicit in the Pathalgadi belt. Here, tribal activists are advocating the primacy of gram sabhas and calling on tribals to boycott the assembly and Lok Sabha elections. The Raghubar Das government has made some ineffectual attempts to engage the tribal population, with Governor Draupadi Murmu holding talks with traditional tribal chieftains in the hope of drawing them back to ‘the mainstream’, the initiative has hardly had the desired impact. Meanwhile, a series of moves by the government—from enforcing the anti-conversion bill to attempts to change the local tenancy laws—have only strengthened tribal mistrust. Early this month, Pathalgadi leaders set up the ‘Bank of Gram Sabha’ and issued passbooks to some 100 tribal villagers.
In neighbouring Chhattisgarh last month, tribal residents stopped Jashpur district officials from entering Kaliya. Police arrested eight people and charged them with instigating animosity between religious groups and preventing public servants from performing their duty. The developments came up for discussion during a meeting held by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat in Raipur on June 18.
Local BJP leaders claim that Maoists from Jharkhand are supporting the tribal movement in Chhattisgarh and allusions to Christian missionaries instigating tribals are often invoked. Jashpur, incidentally, has been the scene of a strident ‘ghar wapasi’ campaign launched by the late BJP leader Dilip Singh Judeo in the 1990s. Jashpur collector Priyanka Shukla, however, claims the incident at Kaliya was the result of rumours that tribal land was to be acquired for an industrial project. “The situation has been clarified,” says Shukla.
Campaigns to protect tribal culture and identity are also gaining ground in West Bengal, where ironically the BJP— as an opposition party—has been on friendlier terms with tribal groups in conflict with the Trinamool Congress government. On April 27, some 100,000 Santhali tribespeople gathered in Bankura to listen to 87-year-old Nityananda Hembram. Popularly addressed as ‘Dishom Manjhi’, he heads the Bharat Jakat Majhi Pargana Mahal (BJMPM), a collective of some 6.4 million Santhals across West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Assam. The outfit has started 60 Santhali language schools. The Raghunath Murmu Memorial School in Jhargram subdivision, which promotes adult literacy amid the community, has occupied 62 bighas of government land. But the state government has made no move to evict them. Manjhi fiercely advocates preserving tribal traditions. “It’s high time you wake up and realise your inner strength, otherwise you will be repeatedly exploited and eventually discarded,” he tells the huge crowd of tribal residents gathered there to hear him.
Despite the imminent threat of being branded as Maoists, the BJMPM has chosen to confront the ruling TMC, and close to a dozen tribal candidates filed nominations for the recent panchayat polls. “We went to file nominations in a procession of 3,000 men,” says Subhas Soren, headman of Melera village in Bankura.
Manjhi has set his sights on what he believes are achievable targets by 2025—
OVER 50,000 TRIBAL CLAIMS TO FOREST LAND AWAIT THE APPROVAL OF THE MAHARASHTRA GOVERNMENT
literacy for all Santhali people and the creation of an autonomous tribal council, including the four tribal districts of Odisha, three of Bihar, Jharkhand, parts of Assam and the western Bengal districts of West Midnapore, Bankura, Purulia and Birbhum.
Odisha, of course, has been at the vanguard of tribal agitations against corporate or state encroachments of community land. The successful struggle by the Dongria Kondh community (designated a ‘particularly vulnerable tribal group’ or PVTG) in the Niyamgiri hills spread across the two districts of Kalahandi and Rayagada—against mining the hill for bauxite may have drawn worldwide attention (the Supreme Court barred the mine in 2013), but the state has witnessed several other notable tribal agitations.
Though the mining proposals were rejected by gram sabhas in Niyamgiri, the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti (NSS), a tribal outfit, alleges tribals are still being harassed by security forces for the benefit of the multinational aluminium giant Vedanta. On May 1,
2017, the police picked up the 20-year-old daughter-in-law of NSS functionary Dadhi Puchika and labelled her a ‘surrendered Maoist’ before the media. Her husband and three other relatives were also tagged surrendered Maoists.
With the government’s focus on mining-based industrialisation declining, tribal mobilisation is less frenetic here than in the neighbouring states. But communities in many tribal areas are now demanding land rights under the Forest
Rights Act. The Odisha government’s record of granting individual forest rights is better than many other states. But tribals are aggrieved that the government has granted very few community forest rights to the local community, and this is a potential cause of future unrest on the lines of the Pathalgadi movement.
Will the constellation of grievances and the building agitations among communities across such a swathe of central India coalesce into a common movement that could provoke a response from the central government? There are signals that the BJP is already reading tribal discontent as a significant threat in the run-up to its campaign for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Unfortunately, this response follows a familiar trope of branding any form of community resistance to statesponsored development projects a ‘Maoist conspiracy’. Visiting Chhattisgarh earlier this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a pointed reference of his own. “Development is the only answer to violence and conspiracy. The trust emanating from development ends violence,” he said.
While making assurances that more revenue from the exploitation of the state’s mineral wealth will be spent on tribal welfare, he left little doubt about his vision for the future. Chhattisgarh was earlier known for forests and tribals, he said, but now it is known for its ‘smart city’—a reference to the concrete jungle of Naya Raipur. But if the agitations across central India are any indication, many tribal communities would prefer a future that protects their rights to ancestral lands and forests.
THERE ARE SIGNS THE BJP IS READING TRIBAL DISCONTENT AS A SIGNIFICANT THREAT TO ITS 2019 LOK SABHA CAMPAIGN