Dear Sanjib:
Thank you, as always, for the voice of reason and insight. This time
even the saner intelligentia seemed to speak in forked tongue.
The demand for inclusion in the ST category by the "adivasis" among the
tea labor community is probably something more than simply a desire to
be counted among those offered preferential treatment by the state in
matters of employment and education. It has the tone of social and
political assertion by a community that is numerically large and has for
centuries been ring fenced from the rest of society in Assam.
Indeed, even in recent times, tea plantation workers were not subject to
the kind of political and economic institutions that rest of society
takes as granted (however dysfunctional they may be). They (still?)
receive part of their subsistence wages in kind ("ration" as it is
called) instead of buying in the open market and this creates a very
different kind of structure of economic dependency on their employers -
who not only provide employment but also directly supply all the
subsistence goods including meager health care and other social
infrastructure (often non-existent in the peripheral areas).
If the state is weak in Assam, it is non-existent in the tea sector. You
could murder a worker for personal reasons and get away with a slight
reprimand (I know real cases).
The gradual alienation of younger generations from their traditional
more, their entry into the urban communities, the closure of large
number of estates, deforestation as a form of asset stripping by estate
owners, the conversion of tea land to farm land etc - has meant that two
things. For one, the ones who have left have crossed the fence and are
visible in society at large; they have learned to carry the economic and
political aspirations of that society. More importantly, greater
interface with markets, media and society has challenged the mores of
habitual dependency that the plantations survived on for centuries. In
short, the babus and owners are pissed.
Political assertion by the community therefore threatens many. There is
an aspect of yet another assertive group adding to the ethnic
fragmentation and potential conflict in Assam - always unnerving to the
nationalist Assamese cause. There is the aspect of the community being
more vulnerable to exploitation by mainland Hindi politicians who can
use them to assert a foothold in the domestic populace. There is even an
aspect of them being exploited by the "adivasi" loving hypocracy of the
Sangh parivar. There is the larger question of an important vote bank
for national parties dissolving and ethnic political parties or even
miltant groups taking over. And most importantly, there is the question
of an increasingly economically displaced community looking for a place
outside the tea economy and competing for resources (including public
doles). The demand for inclusion in ST category impinges on all these
and many other fronts.
I am hoping you will write about these socio-economic and political
complexities so that we can understand the situation better.
Best-
Santanu.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sanjib Baruah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 3:13 PM
To: assam@assamnet.org
Subject: [Assam] Adivasi Politics in Assam
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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