Could an Indian guppi shed some light about what constitutes the Tribal areas in India?
http://www.dawn.com/2003/text/fea.htm#1
By M.J. Akbar
When was the last time that India witnessed a national political agitation on a purely economic issue? 1973, when George Fernandes organized the railway strike.
The great movement inspired by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1974, which left Indira Gandhi so impotent that she was forced to declare an Emergency in June 1975, was a call against corruption and political immorality. There was no serious economic agenda beyond undefined aspirations for a socialist society. The eighties began with the explosive Khalistan conflict, but that was another attempt to partition the country in the name of religion.
L.K. Advani and V.P. Singh launched their separate assaults on Rajiv Gandhi in the late eighties: Advani exploited with consummate skill a horrific mistake made by Rajiv Gandhi when he chose to appease the most regressive elements in the Indian Muslim community over a Supreme Court judgment that sought to protect an impoverished Muslim divorcee’s alimony.
In the process, Advani let loose the most regressive elements in the Indian Hindu community, but that is another story. V.P. Singh settled for the familiar territory of corruption. When corruption withered on the vine, V.P. Singh turned to casteism, the alternative dialectic of Indian socialists.
But it was the Advani momentum that consumed the nineties, and eventually brought the BJP to power at the head of a coalition. One of the ironies of these last three decades has been the co-option of George Fernandes as well as many of the Jayaprakash socialists into this coalition.
Both the BJP and the socialists put something of their past aside to share a common platform. But that is not the only irony. It was easier for the socialists to surrender their past because their ideas sank somewhere in the shifting sands of the nineties. It is entirely understandable that George Fernandes chose to ignore the 30th anniversary of the great railway strike. It is as if he does not want to remember the high point of a now irrelevant past.
A child born in 1973 could have voted five times to elect a national government. In none of the general elections since 1989 has economic development been the principal issue on which the fate of governments has hinged. Nor has there been any serious opportunity for a child of 1973 to channel his anger at hunger or deprivation through a democratic forum. This is extraordinary. There is a current feel-good factor that encourages us to believe that we are no longer a poor nation.
This may even be partially true: certainly we are richer than we were three decades ago, and infinitely better off than we were four decades ago when famine was still a familiar ghost at an empty table. But India is still the nation with the world’s largest population of poor people. About 400 million Indians are still either on the wrong side of the poverty line, or hovering too close to the line to tell the difference. That is more than the population of the whole of North America.
Poverty is not a statistic. Poverty is people. Who are the poor of India?
You will find the poor among all the castes and communities, but the two groups that have the largest incidence of poverty are the Dalits and the tribals. Poverty levels among Muslims are high too, but not as high as that among the Dalits and tribals. Moreover, Muslim politics - unfortunately - is not driven by economic issues.
What distinguishes the Dalit experience from the tribal one is empowerment. The Dalits were fortunate to have a leader of the eminence of Babasaheb Ambedkar who began to mobilize his community to become a participant in the political structures that the British started to set up after the Communal Award of 1932. Ambedkar, passionate in his anger against the inhuman injustice reserved for the Dalits, wanted the most radical options: he urged conversion to Buddhism and separate electorates.
Mahatma Gandhi, seeking to prevent another schism within the Hindu community, intervened and launched the process by which the Dalits became part of the Congress vote bank. In other words, the politicization of the Dalits began early, and moved up a significant notch upwards when Kanshi Ram launched the Bahujan Samaj Party and Mayawati emerged as his heir.
The tribals have been the most neglected, exploited and manipulated people of the country. Gandhi had no time for the people of the forest, because there was no Ambedkar to threaten his vision of social coexistence. The tribals we are talking about live in a belt across the middle of India, from Jharkhand through Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. They have lived on the margins of our society. Their men were treated like animals and their women like sex slaves.
Their own liberal social mores provided a convenient veneer for this exploitation, and their voice is still drowned out in a litany of crude jeers mixed with ferocious brutality. The only institution that had time for tribals was the Church. The Vatican has recognized this by elevating the archbishop of Ranchi, Teleshore P. Toppo, to a cardinal.
The Congress took the tribals for granted. It picked up their votes and forgot about them. The socialists, whose social philosophy was more egalitarian, should have attempted to empower them, shifted to other streams of politics. They invested in the Backward Castes in the north, and in trade unions. The only political force that went into tribal areas was the Communists. The first show of Communist muscle was in Telengana, but since it was an armed struggle rather than a democratic one, it was defeated.
The Communists did not bring the tribals into the democratic flow of Indian politics; not when they were limited to Telengana, and not in their Naxalite incarnation either. This historical hangover, as well as the inability of either national or regional parties to create a connect with the tribals, has left them unempowered.
The tribals wanted economic development; they wanted rescue from the degrading poverty into which they had been born. They lived in the midst of great natural wealth, of forest and ore, but while every other kind of Indian prospered from coal and mine, the people of the land were left in hopeless misery. Political parties walked away from economic issues, and the indifference of the 1950s and 1960s evolved into the callous neglect of the next three decades.
The only organization that began work in tribal areas, partly in response to the Church, was the RSS. This brought important dividends in a state like Gujarat. But the RSS could work only where it could; and its mission was socio-religious, not economic.
The real answer was political, and for five decades the tribals were denied their legitimate states because the Congress and its successor governments simply did not care enough to do what should have been done with the Fazl Ali commission in the mid-fifties: the creation of tribal-majority states. It was left to Atal Behari Vajpayee to push through the first decisive affirmative action on behalf of the tribals when his government created the states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
In such an environment, violence has sometimes been the only answer. In fact, perhaps the surprise is why there has not been more violence in central India.
But the story of the People’s War Group, which attempted the assassination of Andhra Pradesh’s capable chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu, is a little more complicated, and a little less savoury. The PWG, or the Naxalites, once evoked the romance of Telengana and of Naxalbari. But today they are running a state within a state. They have parallel revenue raising means, which is a polite way of describing extortion. The state government has either an easy or uneasy relationship with the Naxalites, depending on deals made on the ground between the MLA, the police and the Naxalites. When the deals have not been struck, or have been violated, violence begins, or resumes.
Why would a politician want to make a deal with the Naxalites? The answer is simple enough. Naxalites have popular support and control votes; they can deliver them in bulk. Why quarrel with the managers of any vote bank? The disease is not restricted to Andhra; Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh is flirting with similar fire.
Of course it is a dangerous game, because those who believe in the gun are dangerous people. This factor turns the game into a sinister one, because once violence becomes part of the power culture, it blurs into convenience. When you want to settle scores, you can use the Naxalites to blame the death. Indeed, they themselves could become guns for hire; after all, they do use it for revenue. In the shadowy nether regions of power, who knows what is the truth?
Andhra Pradesh is fortunate that Chandrababu is alive and well. This should be a wake-up call for the chief minister if there ever was one. He needs to find out the truth, and then do something about the truth.
The diagnosis must reach out to the heart of the problem, which remains poverty, and the neglect of the poor. The poor have also become pawns, but the answer is to promote the pawns to a point where they have a place in the economy and thereby a stake in the system.
President Kalam asked a vital question when he last spoke to the nation: what will future generations remember us for? As builders of temples and mosques, or as builders of a nation? To build a nation politics has to reconnect with economics.
The writer is edit-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.