EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Whenever there is an important post to fill, the media goes into a frenzy with the names of possible candidates who could fill the vacancy. With the NDA government incumbent since 2014, they mostly get it wrong. So it was with the selection of the new President of India. By choosing Droupadi Murmu, an Adivasi woman who was relatively unknown, the BJP top brass delivered a political masterstroke. To the point where some Opposition parties felt obliged to vote in her favour. By choosing a tribal woman to be the resident of Raisina Hill, the Narendra Modi government has tapped into the power of symbolism in a way that takes it several notches above the token gestures of old. For, the powerful social import of the choice blends right into a political strategy.
It was a choice made out of a menu of options by the BJP’s top brains trust, and it was made for clear strategic reasons—for the political edge it affords the ruling party. Although the Scheduled Tribes of India may amount to only 9 per cent of the country’s population, the regions where they are concentrated give us a clue. Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Murmu’s native Odisha,
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana—the classic tribal homelands of east, central and peninsular India— are all Opposition-ruled states now. And zones the BJP is keen to crack open. Nor will the symbolism do any harm in the tribal-rich Northeast, a region it has freshly acquired.
The sense it seeks to exude about the BJP, in general, is even more crucial. This works at two levels. The RSS has been keen to evangelise in India’s tribal lands for decades, and Murmu, blending as she does a capacity to be at home with mainstream Hindu symbols while still articulating her Adivasi roots, is a perfect vehicle for that. Over and above that, it also becomes a step towards extending the party’s political vocabulary—burnishing its claim to be speaking for
India’s poorest sections is a vital bridge to cross if it wishes to emulate the old Congress consensus.
Regardless of partisan politics, the coming of Murmu puts a much-needed spotlight on the appalling state of our tribal communities. The disparity in socio-economic indices between them and the rest of the population is rather stark. Naturally, as communities often living closer to forest, hill or desert zones, some 90 per cent of our Scheduled Tribes are rural, compared to India’s average of 60 per cent. But critically, 45 per cent of those rural tribals were in the BPL (below poverty line) category according to the 2011 census, as against 26 per cent for the rest.
Everything else fits with that all too depressingly. To take those 2011 figures, the literacy rate for tribals was just 59 per cent, compared to 74 per cent overall—a massive gap of 15 percentage points that’s also reflected in the enrolment ratios at the senior secondary level. Tech and engineering graduates count for only 5.92 per cent among them; as for medical graduates, it’s a near-blank slate at 1.94 per cent. The patterns also hold across almost all health indicators, whether it’s the number of anaemic women, infant mortality rates, mortality rates for children under age five, or underweight children in that same age bracket. The last shows the largest gap: 45 per cent among Adivasi children against just over 30 per cent in the general population. The only data point where the Scheduled Tribes make a better showing is in the gender ratio—990 women per 1,000 males, as against India’s abysmal average of 943—a reflection of the traditionally more egalitarian ethos of many of these communities.
We take this occasion, therefore, both to celebrate and to introspect. Our cover story package casts a wide-angle lens over India’s tribal landscape. Group Editorial Director Raj Chengappa examines the political import of Murmu’s arrival on centre stage. Our team also visited her native village for a personal profile. Murmu’s village, Uparbeda, did not have a pucca road till she became Odisha’s transport minister in 2000— the year when urban India was thrilling to the idea of entering the 21st century. Back in the 1970s, even getting to the backbenches of Bhubaneswar’s premier government school was a giant leap for this quiet Santhali girl from Mayurbhanj. Small wonder, for Mayurbhanj still hugs the bottom in India’s socio-economic rankings—the clichés ‘poor’ and ‘backward’ would fit in an unqualified way for a district with a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.15 per cent, the second lowest in the country. “Her father, in fact, had to mortgage his land to send Droupadi to Bhubaneswar,” says Basudev Behera, Murmu’s primary school teacher back in Uparbeda. And he sent her Rs 10 a month, enabling only a spartan life. As Murmu’s ascension to the Rashtrapati Bhavan brings conversations around India’s Adivasi communities, those ten rupees may prove to be among the most valuable investments in modern India’s human economics.
Her own story—elevating herself from immeasurably modest beginnings, to which she stays loyal in the most dignified way—has a fairy-tale touch to it. Something like the Indian version of the ‘American dream’, filled with a spirit of can-doism, it’s a textbook model for the possibilities that our democracy holds.
We also profile tribal achievers across all walks of life, visiting many of them in their native locale—and returning enriched with lavish photographic moments. We analyse the socioeconomic data exhaustively. And we also cast a look at Adivasi history, culture, language and culinary traditions. In the end, we find ourselves in sync with a fact gleaned from the ground. A friend from Murmu’s Uparbeda primary school recalls that the Odia translation of Robert Frost’s famous lines “Miles to go before I sleep” used to be a favourite of hers. That could also be said for India’s pledge toward its oldest inhabitants.