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Tribe portrayal in India cause of concern by Sarju Kaul

Activists working for the rights of tribes people are concerned about their portrayal in the media in India.

London-headquartered Survival International, which lobbies for the rights of tribal people across the world, said it is concerned about how tribals are viewed in India.

“They are often referred to as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’, implying that their way of life is in some way inferior and needs to be ‘developed,’” Survival’s South Asia campaigner Sophie Grig, who has been working for the rights of the tribes in Andaman Islands, said.

“Tribal people, living on their own lands, live in a way that is different to the mainstream but in no way less valuable or ‘developed.’ Tribal people in India, as in around the world, need to be respected for that difference, they need their rights to their land and their way of life to be respected,” she said, when asked about the state of tribal people in India.

“The truth is that tribes who live on their own land — controlling their own adaptation to a changing world — are poor in monetary terms, but their quality of life and health is often visibly better than their compatriots and is certainly better than it would be were they to be forced into the mainstream with all the untold misery that brings.”

The organisation, which is also helping the Dongria Kondh tribe in their battle against the Vedanta mine in Orissa, has been trying to get the Indian government to close down the Andaman Trunk Road that runs through the Jarawa reserve area in the Andamans, especially as it has given rise to the degrading “human safaris.”

The campaign group has documented instances where tour companies and cab drivers “attract” the Jarawa with biscuits and sweets in order to lure them out of forests for tourists. Recently, a video showing a group of Jarawa women being ordered to dance for tourists by a policeman, who had reportedly accepted a £200 bribe to take them into the reserve, was revealed.

This has increased concern of the campaigners about the treatment of the Jarawa, the hunter-gatherer tribe, estimated to have been living in the Andaman Islands for 55,000 years.
Survival, which neither advocates the Jarawa tribe’s integration into the mainstream nor their isolation, wants the decision on the amount of contact be in the hands of the Jarawa. “The road allows hundreds of people to go into their forest every day, over which the Jarawa have no control. If the road is closed then the Jarawa can decide how much interaction they want to have with outsiders and can control when and if this occurs,” MS Grig added.

Urging the Indian government to respect the rights of the Jarawa to their land and to make their own decisions about their way of life, Ms Grig said: “History has shown that forcing tribal people off their land and into settlements, in the way that the British did to the Bo and other Great Andamanese tribes, is always disastrous.”
Last year, the Bo Andaman tribe was wiped off with the death of its last member and the tribal campaigners are worried about the Jarawas, who now number about 365.

“Previously isolated tribes who are forcibly settled are usually decimated by disease and rates of depression, addiction and suicide soar. There are still people in the Andamans who are advocating that the Jarawa should be brought into the mainstream - this must be resisted at all costs. The Jarawa’s land and its resources must be protected so that they can continue to live on in their forests and only they must decide and control what, if any, ‘developments’ or changes they want.”