A new tribal identity
The BJP has mounted its campaign to woo the over 10 crore Scheduled Tribe voters across the country on the creation, legitimisation, and dissemination of knowledge on Adivasi histories. The new narrative situates them as an inseparable part of Indian civi
pand on the idea of ‘Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas’ and mark 2025 as ‘Janjatiya Gaurav Varsh’. It also happens to be Munda’s 150th birth anniversary year.
While congratulating Murmu on becoming President, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said, “India scripts history. At a time when 1.3 billion Indians are marking Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, a daughter of India hailing from a tribal community born in a remote part of eastern India has been elected our President!”
Since then, Tribal Aairs Minister Arjun Munda has taken every opportunity in Parliament to credit his party and their government for scripting history by ensuring the appointment of a person from the Scheduled Tribe community to the highest constitutional post of the country – and so has Social Justice Minister Virendra Kumar inside and outside the House.
At each of these instances when the BJP has credited the Prime Minister’s “vision for social justice” for Murmu’s election as President, it has also attacked the Opposition Indian National Congress as a party without a similar vision for having opposed her candidature. This played out months ago too — during the campaign for the Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh, where 31% of the country’s tribal population lives, and where the BJP was able to add to its ST seat count.
By the time the Assembly election campaign for these States was under way at the fag end of 2023, another key plank was emerging: a poll rhetoric designed around building a nationalistic tribal identity by emphasising the government’s eorts to recognise the “deliberately forgotten and neglected” histories of tribal freedom ghters and their struggles.
In Chhattisgarh, M.P., and Rajasthan, the Prime Minister Modi had made it a point to mention the government’s recognition of November 15 as ‘Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas’, a day for the country to recognise the contributions of tribal leaders and icons in India’s centuries-long history of resistance to Islamic and British invaders.
Names of leaders like Tilka Manjhi, Sinagi Dai, Rani Durgavati, Rana Punja Bhil, and many others became a mainstay in his campaign speeches throughout, being invoked whenever he referred to Adivasis as the real protectors of “Bharatiya Sabhyata and Sanskriti”. The Tribal Aairs Ministry and the NCST had been working hard to have the country familiarised with these names in the past year through its book.
The origins of the contents in the NCST’s book on Contributions of Tribal Leaders in the Freedom Struggle lie in an e-book of the same name that was just months before released by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-a liated ABVKA, an organisation that has a stated objective to build temples of Hindu gods and organise “cultural” events in tribal villages in order to encode the messaging of their motto, ‘ Tu-Mai, Ek Rakt’ (You and I have the same blood).
A tale of two books
The book gives short descriptions of Adivasi resistance movements led by about 50 leaders dating from the 16th century to the early 20th century and even after independence — much of it controversial and all of it unsourced and unattributed. Among the 50 leaders, at least two — Alluri Sitarama Raju (Andhra Pradesh) and ‘Thakur’ Ranmat Singh (Madhya Pradesh) — were not from tribal communities themselves, with the book showing Ranmat’s Baghel Kshatriya community as a “tribe”.
Further, the mention of Rana Punja Bhil from the 1576 Battle of Haldighati has led to a chain of consequences that has once again ignited a erce battle over establishing his caste in 2024 — leading to a struggle of identity crises among the people of Panarwa, a small village in Rajasthan, known as Rana Punja’s home.
In most of the Adivasi rebellions it touches upon, the ABVKA book goes on to mention collaborations of Islamic rulers with the British administration while choosing not to highlight similar collaborations between Hindu rulers and local upper-caste landlords and colonial administrators that tribespeople were resisting.
Further, in descriptions of many leaders, the book leaves out their eorts to build their own sociocultural and religious movements, which, at times, were a direct response to the way they were being treated within the Hindu social structure —like that of Rajasthan’s Govindgiri Banjara — or to the expansion of Hinduism in certain parts of the country like that of Haipou Jadonang in Manipur, a Rongmei Naga spiritual leader and activist, who wanted to resist both Christian missionaries and expanding Vaishnavism into Naga territories in the early 20th century.
A comparison between the e-book rst released by the ABVKA and the book released by the NCST showed that the contents on each of the 50 leaders mentioned in the two books were identical and so were the pictorial depictions of the leaders. The NCST had credited help from the ABVKA for compiling the material in it. Except for correcting the fact that Ranmat’s community was not a tribe, the NCST leaves the ABVKA material untouched.
At the time, the NCST was being headed by Chouhan, who, according to his resume, has been “working with Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram since 1992 as State Secretary and State President, Madhya Pradesh” and was member of the ABVKA national executive. While senior NCST o cials have not yet answered questions regarding what checks were applied to verify the information gathered by the ABVKA before republishing it, Pramod Pethekar of the ABVKA responded to The Hindu’s questions on sourcing.
“We were fortunate enough that our work throughout the tribal pockets of India allowed us access to these communities. So a large part of the content put up on these tribal heroes in the book has been meticulously gathered from oral sources of history within the communities themselves,” Pethekar said, explaining that these include community songs and anecdotes passed down through generations. “This is evidence that has been ignored for too long.”
NCST’s nudge
Chouhan was appointed as the Chairperson of NCST in February 2021, and one of the principal tasks the Commission had embarked upon since then was this project to highlight stories of Adivasi rebellions and celebrate the contributions of tribal leaders in India’s struggle for Independence, according to o cials who worked with him during his tenure there.
In the months preceding the o cial presentation of its book on tribal freedom ghters to the President, the NCST had been leading a project to take the book on a tour of over 100 universities across the country, where panel discussions were organised along with researchers from Tribal Research Institutes on producing literature on tribal identity, tribal cultures, and tribal development from within these communities in a bid to replace the existing “colonial-era” literature on the subject. The tour had culminated in a two-day workshop in November 2022 when the book was presented to the President of India.
By this time, the Delhi University had already announced its plans to open a Centre for Tribal Studies, with a key objective of encouraging studies on dening “tribes” in an Indian context — an indication of the recognition that much of the political discourse around the inclusion and exclusion of tribes on the ST list had become chaotic because of problems that originated with how British administrators, Census commissioners, and anthropologists had dened these communities and their characteristics.
Other universities like the University of Mumbai and the Central University of Rajasthan soon followed suit and the NCST has since been nudging as many as 104 universities to lay out plans they had for setting up centres for research in this area. The other universities include a couple of IITs, IIMs, and NITs, Banaras Hindu University, Assam University, Birsa Munda Tribal University in Gujarat, Central University of Odisha, and several others.
Once the book had been presented to President Murmu, the NCST released versions of it on its website. Then began the work from government channels to push this content out in as many forms and through as many platforms as possible. It began with the Ministry of Tribal Aairs using the book’s contents, as is, to make posts on X (formerly Twitter); the same content was then being pushed by social media handles of Doordarshan, smaller, regional o ces of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and the Press Information Bureau (PIB).
By the time campaigning was on for the Assembly elections in November 2023, the exact material had started appearing on campaign posts of the BJP’s Scheduled Tribe Morcha too. Now, even as the Model Code of Conduct is in place, government channels on social media like that of the Tribal Aairs Ministry and the PIB continue to post this same material on Adivasi leaders. As recently as April 4, when the Tribal Aairs Ministry used the content of the ABVKA e-book to make a video on the history of Siddo-Kanhu Murmu —leaders of the Hul revolt in the mid-19th century.
The content being posted does not anywhere mention the BJP or its positioning. But as the party proceeds to use this well-oiled pipeline designed for the creation, legitimisation, and dissemination of knowledge on Adivasi histories to woo Scheduled Tribe voters across the country, a battlefront has now been thrown open.
The most erce opposition to the BJP’s attempt at lling the vacuum of information on histories of Adivasi resistance in India is coming from the respective tribal communities themselves on the ground — driven by small, independent parties like the Bharat Adivasi Party in Rajasthan, which rose on the promise of resisting the appropriation of Adivasi identity, and outts such as the Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Mahasabha, Kendriya Sarna Samiti in Jharkhand, and similar ones across the northern tribal belts of the country.
A large part of the content put up on these tribal heroes in the book has been meticulously gathered from oral sources of history within the communities themselves PRAMOD PETHKAR Member of the ABVKA