[Assam] Adivasi Politics in Assam

Tue Dec 11 06:49:03 PST 2007

Thanks Baruah for a very enlightening article once again.  I continue 
to be pleasantly surprised by The Telegraph publishing it in view of 
their editorial stance, as culled from occasional readings, on issues 
relating to Assam .

While I find the article very informative, I continue to remain 
somewhat confused about the nuances of this entire ST / SC  imbroglio 
that India remains mired in and continues to drag Assam into it. And 
in that context, I am not sure I understood your observation:

>	>The tribal affairs minister, P.R. Kyndiah, a politician from the Khasi
>	>community, recognized as a scheduled tribe, says without any sense of
>	>irony that ST status for adivasis would involve examining 
>the case using
>	>the criteria of "tribal characteristics, including a 
>primitive background
	>and distinctive cultures and traditions".

Can you help?

Best.

m

At 4:13 PM -0500 12/10/07, Sanjib Baruah wrote:
>http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071211/asp/opinion/story_8654412.asp
>
>The Telegraph, Calcutta. Tuesday, December 11, 2007
>
>READING THE TEA LEAVES
>- The understanding of tribal status must be rid of colonial errors
>
>SANJIB BARUAH
>
>After the mayhem in Guwahati around the adivasi rally of November 24, the
>government of Assam is reportedly considering legislation that would
>restrict the public display of bows and arrows and other 'traditional'
>weapons.
>
>That a group that provided the muscle for the 19th-century capitalist
>transformation of Assam today finds the bow and arrow to be an attractive
>ethnic symbol is rather interesting. So is its preferred self-description
>as adivasis, in sharp contrast to the English term 'tribe' preferred by
>most other groups that have legal recognition as scheduled tribes in
>northeast India.
>
>The adivasis of Assam trace their roots to Munda, Oraon, Santhal and other
>people of the Jharkhand region. They are descendants of indentured
>labourers brought to the tea plantations of Assam. Adivasi activists argue
>that since their ethnic kin in their places of origin are recognized as
>STs, they should have the same status in Assam.
>
>According to some estimates, there are as many as 4 million adivasis in
>Assam - more than half of Assam's tea labour community. They constitute
>the majority of the tea labour community in Lower Assam, but other groups
>outnumber them in Upper Assam. If ST status is about whether a group
>deserves reservations in jobs and in educational institutions, the case
>for adivasis being recognized as STs is indisputable.
>
>A study on the tea labour community by the North Eastern Social Research
>Centre found that 60 per cent of the girls and 35 per cent of the boys in
>the age group of 6 to 14 are out of school, and only 4 per cent study
>beyond class VII. Tea plantations are still the major sources of
>employment: half of them live near plantations and work as casual
>labourers.
>
>Many adivasis were displaced during the Bodoland agitation because they or
>their forefathers had settled in reserved forest lands after giving their
>working lives to tea plantations. Since their villages were not legal
>settlements, the government did not facilitate their return to their homes
>even after the Bodo movement ended.
>
>Political mobilization of a community in support of a demand for inclusion
>on a schedule that would entitle them to preferences is not surprising.
>Yet the demand of the tea workers' descendants for ST status, and the
>framework within which the debate is being conducted, draw attention to
>our continued reliance on a highly questionable stock of colonial
>knowledge about Indian society and culture. This should be a source of
>embarrassment, as well as cause for serious introspection.
>
>The tribal affairs minister, P.R. Kyndiah, a politician from the Khasi
>community, recognized as a scheduled tribe, says without any sense of
>irony that ST status for adivasis would involve examining the case using
>the criteria of "tribal characteristics, including a primitive background
>and distinctive cultures and traditions".
>
>Ethnic activists opposed to the adivasi claim cite with approval the
>statement of the home minister, Shivraj Patil, that the adivasis have
>"lost their tribal characteristics". They also argue that the adivasis are
>not "aborigines of Assam". Since STs of Assam are not treated as STs in
>other parts of the country and even Bodos are not recognized as STs in
>Karbi Anglong, says a leader of an indigenous tribal organization, migrant
>communities cannot be recognized as STs in Assam.
>
>The argument points to a peculiarity of ST status in northeast India that
>goes back to British colonial thinking about race, caste and tribe in this
>region. However, whether migrants should be considered ST or not, given
>the contribution of the tea labour community in blood and in sweat to the
>formation of modern Assam, no other group has a better claim to full
>citizenship rights and compensatory justice than they do.
>
>Colonial ethnography relied on racist notions of tribes having fixed
>habitats and ethnic traits that are almost biological and even
>inheritable. In northeast India, the so-called 'hill tribes' were thus all
>fixed to their supposed natural habitats. Therefore, it became necessary
>to distinguish between so-called pure and impure types to account for
>those that stray away from the assigned physical spaces, or do not conform
>to particular ethnic stereotypes.
>
>The distinction between plains tribes and hill tribes can be traced to
>this difficulty of colonial ethnic classification. As the anthropologist,
>Matthew Rich, has shown, the relatively egalitarian mores and habits of
>many of the peoples of northeast India - for instance, the absence of
>caste in the hills - presented a 'problem' for colonial ethnographers.
>Since India for them was a hierarchical and a 'caste ridden' civilization,
>the question was: were these people outside or inside India? There was no
>easy answer, since many of the ethnic kin of the people without caste also
>performed Hindu-like rituals just a short distance away.
>
>The opposition between hills and plains became the solution to this
>conceptual 'problem'. It is this history that explains why a number of
>groups that today seek ST or sixth schedule status were distinguished
>sharply from 'hill tribes' in the colonial classificatory system. For
>instance, the Koch Rajbongshis were labelled caste Hindus and not a
>'tribe', and the Bodos were labelled a 'plains tribe'.
>
>Tea workers posed a classificatory problem for the census as early as in
>1891. The "aboriginal tribes of central India" were explicitly excluded
>from the "forest and hill tribes" in the census of Assam, and instead were
>classified simply as labourers.
>
>Colonial knowledge continues to shape categories of Indian census. Thus of
>the 23 STs in Assam, 14 are hill tribes and 9 are plains tribes. Since the
>census counts tribes only in their supposed natural habitats, it produces
>the absurdity of the number of people classified as plains tribals being
>zero in the hills, and those classified as hill tribals being zero in the
>plains. This is the source of the complaint of Bodo activists that Bodos
>are not a scheduled tribe in Karbi Anglong, which is a hill district.
>Thus, if one goes by the Indian census, the number of hill tribals living
>even in metropolitan Guwahati is zero.
>
>The discourse surrounding the adivasi claim to ST status underscores a
>major structural dilemma for our practice of citizenship. The effect of
>making indigenousness the test for rights, says the African intellectual,
>Mahmood Mamdani, in another context, is that the state penalizes those
>that the commodity economy dynamizes.
>
>Seen through the prism of the global political economy, the adivasis of
>Assam are part of the same 19th-century migration that took Indian
>labourers to plantations in various parts of the British Empire, such as
>Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius or South Africa.
>
>We now celebrate the Indian diaspora. The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas honours
>descendants of those migrants to far-away shores, some of whom rose to
>become presidents and prime ministers of their countries. But the
>descendants of those who remained within India's borders are reduced to
>defending their ordinary citizenship rights, and making claims to
>compensatory justice, with a borrowed idiom of remembered tribal-ness.
>
>It is time to rethink our image of northeast India as remote and exotic,
>and recognize that the region was incorporated into the global capitalist
>economy earlier and more solidly than many parts of the Indian heartland.
>The basis for making claims to rights and entitlements in such a region
>must be common residence and a vision of a common future, and not only a
>real or imagined shared past.
>
>The genocide in Rwanda was ultimately the product of the Hutu and Tutsi
>being constructed as native and outsider, thanks to the legacy of colonial
>knowledge embedded in African political institutions. This should serve as
>a warning against trying to manage conflicts in northeast India by simply
>tinkering with institutions such as the sixth schedule and ST status that
>have ample traces of colonial knowledge built into them.
>
>The author is at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and the Indian
>Institute of Technology, Guwahati.
>
>
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