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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Police's Continued Victimisation of 'Denotified' Tribal Communities Can No Longer Go Unchallenged -Sujata Gothoskar

Police's Continued Victimisation of 'Denotified' Tribal Communities Can No Longer Go Unchallenged -Sujata Gothoskar

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published Published on Dec 14, 2017   modified Modified on Dec 14, 2017
-TheWire.in

Years of stigmatisation and harassment have pushed members of the Pardhi and other Adivasi communities in Bhopal to come together and protest police impunity.

Fed up with police harassment, Indramal Bai committed suicide in the Gandhi Nagar basti of Bhopal on November 20, 2017. Nothing has changed over the last decade since Tanti Bai, a 14 year old, committed suicide for the very same reason on January 19, 2007. Both were poor waste pickers from the Pardhi community, one of the 150 ‘denotified tribes’ (DNT) in India, comprising almost 10% of the country’s population.

A survey conducted a year ago in the bastis of Bhopal among 189 Pardhi families found that 25 people of all ages had committed suicide, most of them due to harassment by the police. There may have been many more suicides which have gone unreported for fear of the very police that drove them to it.

The Pardhis may have been formally denotified, but they continue to be stigmatised and treated by the police as a ‘criminal tribe’. They are blamed whenever any crime takes place, and often harassed even if there is no crime. The question is whether all these deaths should be considered suicides or institutional murders.

Highlighting this state of affairs, from December 5 to December 10 (International Human Rights Day), members of the Pardhi community set up base in Roshanpura, the central square in Bhopal, to protest against the victimisation of their community. They were joined by other Adivasis living in Bhopal’s bastis.

Indramal Bai’s ‘crime’: To attend the collector’s jan sunwai and complain of police harassment

Indramal lived with her two young children; her husband had been living separately for the past ten years. For over a week, three policemen from the local Gandhi Nagar police station had been harassing her daily, trying to extort money by threatening to register a criminal case of theft against her. Repeated pleas of innocence by Indramal, as well as her sheer inability to pay, had no effect. On November 17, the policemen visited her house thrice. By the end of the day, she was so desperate she poured kerosene on herself. Even as she was burning, the policemen walked away, claiming it was all regular Pardhi drama. Even though Indramal’s relatives tried to save her, she had over 60% burns when she was admitted to Hamidia Hospital. Three nights later, at 12:40 am on November 20, she died a painful death.

Just three days before this incident, on November 14, Indramal along with others from her basti had attended the Bhopal collector’s jan sunwai (public hearing) and complained of police extortion. Ten days prior to the jan sunwai, one person from Gandhi Nagar had been arbitrarily picked up and beaten in the police station after refusing to give money to the police. They had also heard about people from the Pardhi community in two other bastis being similarly harassed around the same time. By attending the public hearing, the Pardhis were hoping for some redress. Instead, what they got was another ‘suicide’.

After Indramal died, from November 20 onwards, there have been continuous rallies and demonstrations on the streets of Bhopal. On November 24 too, there were candlelight rallies in different parts of Bhopal. One of the reasons for this spontaneous outpouring of anger was that people have had enough of police torture, harassment and extortion. They have come to realise that if they and their children have to survive, they have no alternative but to come together with other marginalised communities and organise as working, labouring people.

When there is a continuous spate of people killing themselves and there is a pattern to it, do we call it suicide? Where does this impunity for the police and armed forces come from? The people at the receiving end of this impunity are communities that exist on the margins of society and it is this impunity that keeps reproducing their marginalisation. The tragedy is that large parts of the civil society is complicit in this, as shown by the outpouring of righteous indignation and cries of ‘hang them’ whenever it is the poor and marginalised that are perceived to be in the wrong. The immediate charging of a bus conductor – who was later found to be innocent – for the murder of a student from Ryan International School is a recent case in point.

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 13 December, 2017, https://thewire.in/204200/polices-continued-victimisation-denotified-tribal-communities-can-no-longer-go-unchallenged/


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