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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Adivasi Predicament in Chhattisgarh by Supriya Sharma

Adivasi Predicament in Chhattisgarh by Supriya Sharma

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published Published on Jan 10, 2012   modified Modified on Jan 10, 2012

Not only are the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act routinely violated in Chhattisgarh, the adivasis are also short-changed on legislative representation and reservations in government jobs. As the state cedes land to capital while reducing the adivasis to an ornamental presence, there is increasing assertion of adivasi identity, born out of class predicaments and experiences of displacement as much as notions of indigeneity.

Supriya Sharma (ssupriya@gmail.com) reports from Chhattisgarh for the Times of India and joins the Reuters Institute, Oxford University, as a research fellow in 2012.
 
A phalanx of buffalo heads overlooks traffic in Raipur. Cast in bell metal, installed in a patch of green not far from the chief minister’s residence, on an avenue named Gaurav Path, this panorama of Bastar art is supposed to symbolise official pride in Chhattisgarh’s adivasi identity, except that it is sponsored by a mining and power company. The company’s signboards jostle for space with bell metal figurines of adivasi men and women, not unlike the real contestation between capital and people unfolding in many pockets of Chhattisgarh. To stretch the analogy: is this a glimpse of a state eager to cede land to capital while reducing adivasis to an ornamental presence?
 
On the Margins of Power
 
Eleven years ago, at the turn of the millennium, when sprawling Madhya Pradesh was spliced, the new state created was proclaimed an adivasi homeland, not e­ntirely without reason. With a one-third adivasi population, no other state has a larger proportion of adivasi people than Chhattisgarh, barring India’s north-east.
 
And yet, in the state’s locus of power, its capital city of Raipur, an adivasi imprint is hard to find.1 Shops and business esta­blishments are owned by Sindhis, Marwaris and Punjabis. Banks and colleges have a sprinkling of middle-class professionals from across India. Government o­ffices have only the odd adivasi employee. Curiously, even the informal economy, the refuge of the poor, is not exactly swarming with adivasis. Random enquiries with street workers, drivers, and rickshaw drivers threw up more self-identified dalits than adivasis. While this is at best anecdotal evidence, last month brought some s­tatistical validation, in a rare gathering of adivasis in Raipur.
 
Between 15 and 17 October, Raipur hosted the Adivasi Mahasabha, a national forum for adivasis to discuss common concerns. One of the many sessions focused on constitutional safeguards for adivasis. One would have expected the discussion to be limited to lesser known legislations like the Forest Rights Act, or the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act, both of which are routinely violated in Chhattisgarh. Instead, one of the speakers, B P S Netam, a retired adivasi civil ser­vant, pointed out the state government was also violating the oldest safeguard mandated by the Constitution – reservations in government jobs.
 
India’s Constitution gives dalits and adivasis a share in government jobs pro­portionate to their population. Madhya Pradesh had a 20% dalit or scheduled tribe (ST) and a 16% scheduled caste (SC) population. This ratio changed to 32% ST and 12% SC in newly created Chhattisgarh, necessitating a change in the job pie, with an additional 12% reservation for adivasis. But 11 years later, this is yet to happen. Netam pointed out that for an estimated four lakh jobs generated in this period, adivasis had lost these 12% or nearly half a lakh jobs.
 
Contacted for a response, the Chhattisgarh government’s spokesperson, the principal secretary, Baijendra Kumar, denied the number was that large, claiming that in adivasi-majority districts, recruitment for lower-grade jobs was already proportionate to their population, sometimes as high as 70%. But he admitted the government had not implemented 32% reservation in higher grades of government employment, which he said would be done soon. Indeed, a government press release, carried by the Raipur edition ofDainik Bhaskar of 8 Dec­ember 2011, among other Hindi newspapers, announced the state government would present a proposal for 32% reservation for adivasis in the winter session of the assembly.
 
Under-representation
 
Authoritative data on adivasi representation in government jobs was not available. But this is neither a debate over numbers nor on the impact of reservations on deprived communities. Instead, what is revelatory is that in a country where even smaller communities stage aggressive a­gitations for reservation, the one-third strong adivasi populace of Chhattisgarh had failed to force the government to give its constitutionally mandated share of jobs, both an indication and an outcome of its marginality in the state’s electoral arena.
 
This sets Chhattisgarh apart from Jharkhand, where despite deep flaws in adivasi political representation, as a voting bloc, adivasis have retained a measure of political strength. Forming 26% of the state’s population, Jharkhand adivasis have 28 seats reserved in an assembly of 81, or about 35% representation. In Chhattisgarh, adivasis form 32% of the population. They began with 34 reserved seats in 2000, but post-delimitation in 2008, were left with just 29 seats in a house of 90, or just about 32% representation.
 
The same marginalisation is reflected in the state’s bureaucracy. According to a pamphlet published by an adivasi government employees association, across 18 districts, just two district collectors, one police superintendent and one district judge are adivasi. Of 31 government boards, none is headed by an adivasi. In the highest echelons of the capital’s bureaucracy, there is just one adivasi, and in the governor and chief minister’s office, none at all. “Jharkhand always has an adivasi chief minister. But in Chhattisgarh, count it as good luck if one of us makes it to the chief minister’s staff”, said a civil servant who did not want to be named.
 
When a delegation of adivasi employees called upon the chief minister on Diwali eve to present yet another petition seeking the implementation of 32% reservation, they claim that he showed greater interest in the legal case against his rival, former Congress Chief Minister Ajit Jogi, who stands accused of faking an adivasi identity and contesting elections from a reserved seat based on a forged community certificate.
 
Clientelistic Networks
 
Whether it is the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), there is not much difference in the way the parties have built clientelistic networks among adivasis. What has made it easier is that adivasis are split into diverse groups and regions. In the absence of a self-conscious adivasi politics, few identify themselves as adivasi; instead they are Gond, Halba, Baiga, Kanwar, Binjhwar, etc.
 
Netam and his fellow middle-class acti­vists, most of them former government employees, would like to change that. Their search for a more unifying politics has led them to the idea of indigeneity: that as original inhabitants, adivasis have a primordial relationship with the land, and special cultural claims, which must be recognised by the state. While this idea has taken firm root within activist spheres in other adivasi states, it is relatively new in Chhattisgarh, where this year the civil servants-turned-activists chose 9 August, World Indigenous Day, to hold a protest rally and publish a book which carried, among India-specific facts on adivasi rights, excerpts from the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indi­genous Peoples.
 
The other attempt to claim a unified adivasi politics took an earthier form. On 1 November, the day the state completed 11 years of existence, a sea of bows and a­rrows flooded the prim lanes of Raipur’s Civil Lines, outside the chief minister’s gated residence. Pamphlets handed out to the press identified the protestors as members of “Sarva Adivasi Samaj” (entire adivasi society), demanding, among other rights, 32% reservations in jobs. The chief organiser of the protest was a man called Ramesh Thakur, described by many as a maverick adivasi leader, without any party affiliation. Did the choice of bows and a­rrows run the danger of reification of adivasi identity and reinforcement of stereo­types? Or was it the most effective form of assertiveness in a city where adivasis, if any, are lost in the multitudes?
 
Cultural Conundrums
 
The iconic image of an arrow strung over a bow hung over the speakers panel at the Adivasi Mahasabha in Raipur. It provoked the guest of honour, P A Sangma, Member of Parliament (MP) from Meghalaya, to launch into an impassioned speech. “Why bow and arrow? This is the era of missiles. We think we can fight with bow and a­rrow?” he said. Evidently, his was not an argument for adivasi militarisation, but one for embracing modern living, as b­ecame clear from the rest of his speech, a narration of vignettes from his trips to China, where he found leaders wore “bow-ties” and walked and talked like Americans, and so felt equal to Americans. Sangma advocated a similar approach for India’s adivasis. “The arrow is not enough. Bura manana hai to mano. Whether you like it or not, education is our only way out,” he said, to a loud round of applause.
 
Another speaker struck a more reflective note on the cultural loss that accompanies education in the mainstream mould. “I was born Kunjam Massa”, said Manish Kunjam, Communist Party of I­ndia (CPI) leader, “but when I went to school, it sounded anachronistic, and so I changed my name to Manish”.
 
If names are a barometer of sensitivity to adivasi culture, then the urban radicals who established Bastar as the foremost base for the Maoist guerrilla movement, have displayed it amply. A series of accounts detail how the Maoist leaders learnt adivasi languages and adopted adivasi names. And so, Gudsa Usendi, the CPI-Maoist spokesperson for Dandakaranya, could well be a Telugu-speaking upper-caste man, as most of the leadership presumably are, but he chooses to be known by an adivasi alias.
 
This could, however, be seen in another light. Is it part of the Maoist project of l­egitimising their violent politics in Bastar as an adivasi rebellion? The Maoists frequently use the language of indigenity in their literature and pepper their press r­eleases with phrases likeBastar ki junta ka sangarsh (the struggle of the people of Bastar). But this project is complicated by the fact that while the party’s cadre is, by available accounts, overwhelmingly adivasi, the top rungs of the leadership are not. More disturbingly, in the classic inward ire of insurgent groups, those being killed by the Maoists as state collaborators and spies are mostly adivasis.
 
A less explored aspect of the Maoist i­mpact on adivasi society is in the realm of culture. In field visits to Bastar, I often heard about Maoists frowning upon the practices of village shamans and traditional healers. In Narayanpur district, I met a village shaman, locally known asvadde, who had been evicted from the village. Why were Maoists evicting vaddes? There were multiple explanations: vaddes were exploiters, they extracted grain and poultry as offerings from villagers; vaddes were the centre of traditional authority and were perceived as threats by the Maoists; vaddes were spreading superstition, which was frowned upon by the Maoists. Whatever be the actual reason, the eviction of vaddes suggested the Maoists had their own reformist ideas for adivasi society, not unlike Hindutva groups.
 
Kumar Singh Toppa, a young journalism student from a Maoist-controlled part of Kanker district, reinforced this impression. As part of his workshop with an non-governmental organisation (NGO), Charkha Features, Toppa had published an article on Ghotuls, the adivasi youth institution that anthropologist Verrier Elwin wrote about admiringly in the 1940s. In his article, Toppa lamented the way admiration had been overtaken by revulsion in mainstream society. He argued this was unfortunate, since reviling the Ghotul was tantamount to alienating adivasis. I imagined this lament was directed to mainstream Hindutva organisations. But Toppa claimed andarwaale, or the Maoists, were no different. “They have tried to impose their ideas on us”, he said, “sometimes we accept, sometimes we fight back”. Twenty-one year old Toppa is the first literate member of his family, and aspires to join the media where, like every other sphere of power, the adivasi voice is hard to find.
 
Land Wars
 
If adivasi society is besieged by violence in the south of Chhattisgarh, in the north, it faces the onslaught of mining and power companies. Contrary to the narrative that seeks to fuse Maoist rebellion with the des­pair of the mining displaced, both do not neatly overlap in Chhattisgarh: the districts seeing the maximum displacement are Korba, Raigarh and Janjgir Champa in the north, far from the Maoist areas of ­influence in Bastar in the south.
 
Korba and Raigarh are textbook examples of the intersection of forests, minerals and adivasis. Both have massive coal deposits that are being extracted to produce power in factories built either here or in the plains of Janjgir Champa, flush with the waters of the Mahanadi and its tributaries. Despite the large presence of adivasi people, the anti-mining struggle here does not draw on the idea of indigeneity but is more closely allied with the green movement. The leading activists are non-adivasi – Ramesh Agarwal and his associate Ramesh Tripathi of Jan Chetana in Raigarh, Laxmi Chauhan of Sarthak in Korba, among others – who have deftly used environmental laws to challenge mining and power corporations. These activists say it is wiser to stay away from group appeals and create broad-based alliances since mining and industrialisation affect both adivasi and non-adivasi communities. This is even truer of Janjgir Champa, where adivasi peasants are smaller in numbers compared to other communities, including dalits.
 
The idea of broad-based alliance or farmer unity was at display last year in Akaltara, a village in Janjgir Champa, where more than 2,000 acres of farmland is being acquired by KSK Energy to set up a 3,600 MW power plant, one of the largest in the state. Unhappy over the terms of transfer, farmers staged a sustained agitation against the company. Non-adivasi and adivasi farmers faced several rounds of police lathi-charge t­ogether. But over time, the differences in their predicament became predictable: the non-adivasi farmers were resisting the sale of their land unless they were given better compensation, while the adivasi farmers had already sold their land, for a pittance, and were now simply asking the company to give them the jobs it had promised. As it turned out, when the company began acquiring land, its officers had first knocked at the doorsteps of the adivasi farmers, who owned smaller parcels of land, were less literate, and were easily swayed by the offer of jobs. And so, adivasi farmers like Sadhram Gond sold their land for just Rs 1.55 lakh per acre, while non-adivasi farmers parted with their land only after negotiating a higher price of Rs 17 lakh.
 
This was not an isolated case. In another part of the district, where Videocon Power was purchasing farmland, using the state home minister’s son as a front, adivasi farmers were again the first to lose their land, again for the lowest compensation. What does this pattern indicate? Perhaps, just the greater socio-economic vulnerability of adivasis?
 
However, in neighbouring Korba was a startlingly different case. Yet another power company, Vandana Vidyut, was staking claim to farmland in five villages. Farmers resisted the sale, but cornered by a state that employed its powers of eminent domain on behalf of the company, most of them finally relented, except those in village Jhora, exclusively home to adivasis. More than a 100 adivasi farmers refused to accept the money deposited in bank accounts by the district administration.
 
Was this a validation of the idea of indigeneity? Of the special adivasi connection to land? When I asked adivasi farmers, they revealed this was not their ancestral land. They had moved to Jhora three decades ago, when they had been displaced by a hydel power project upstream. “One round of displacement is enough”, they said in unison, “we can’t go through another”.
 
It seemed the adivasi stance towards the usurping of land by corporations is born out of more than just the idea of indigeneity; it is rooted in their class predicament and their particular experience, in this case, repeated rounds of displacement.
 
This is perhaps a bewildering moment in the history of Chhattisgarh’s adivasi people, besieged more than any other community by powerful players – the state, Maoists, mining corporations – and yet with little say. If only the bell metal figurines could unfreeze and find a politics that truly speaks for them.
 
Note
 
1 Two caveats are needed here. Many would argue the lack of an adivasi imprint in the city is an outcome of geography. Raipur is located in the plains of the Mahanadi and the closest adivasi belt is nearly 100 kilometres away. But given its overlapping circles of trade, commerce and state power, the city sees a large influx of people from all over the state and even outside. In such circumstances, the absence of adivasis is noticeable. Also, it is no one’s case that the adivasi has distinct features that set him/her apart from members of other communities. Hence, to clarify, the anecdotal evidence gathered was not based on an overview but on conversations with a range of city people.

The Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XLVII, No. 2, 14 January, 2012, http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/190887/


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