Adivasi Quotes

If you think of the world as a global village, a fight between India and Pakistan is like a fight between the poorest people in the poorest quarters - the Adivasis and the Dalits. And in the meantime, the zamindars are laying the oil pipelines and selling both parties weapons.

Our treatment of Adivasi is a blot on Indian democracy. Only someone who cares sincerely for the future of this country will say that. Others will say that ‘Oh no no, they are doing fine, they live wonderfully… It is all hyperbole, exaggerated and manufactured dissent.’ If you are in a mode of self-denial, you will stay where you are- a flawed, intolerant and imperfect society. The main task of any nationalist is to be ashamed of crimes committed against his fellow citizens in the name of nationalism.

To separate the Adivasi from his land is to stop his breathing. If you want to see an Adivasi's extinction, take him away from his land- as it is happening at present. It is a strange irony that when the Adivasi could lead a life of self- reliance, he is being compelled to become disabled and parasitic. The Adivasi, after having been uprooted from his land through the establishment of big projects in the name of public interest and national development, is ending up in slums in the peripheries of modern cosmopolitan cities as an army of landless labourers and domestic servants losing altogether their self- reliance and self- esteem.

A society’s self-reliance is usually in inverse proportion to its reverence for the state. In some inexplicable way, the Adivasi of the deep forest showed his disdain for the sahib by wearing less; the threshold of shame increased as one neared the towns where he showed less of himself.

The gathering of information to control people is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, India’s government has embarked on a massive biometrics program, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information gathering projects in the world—the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor,” will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry?50 To digitize a country with such a large population of the illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum dwellers, hawkers, Adivasis without land records—will criminalize them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, numerical targets, and “scorecards of progress” as though it were a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.51

pathar pocha’, a leaf-wiper, an Adivasi. The manner of cleaning one’s bottom is stronger than any other custom in a culture. Most Adivasi people, left to themselves, use leaves. I pursued the rather neglected science of examining the qualities of various species of leaves; even sent my findings to the Kew Bulletin for publication but was turned down as their editorial board found it ‘rather inappropriate’.

Sarjomdih, which for about sixty years was another nondescript dot on a map. That part of the Chhotanagpur area which is now formally known as the Purbi Singbhum district. Sarjomdih, where most of the population is Santhal and the rest are Munda; all of them are followers of Sarna, the aboriginal faith of the Chhotanagpur area. Saijomdih, which stands atop the mineral-rich core of the Indian subcontinent. Sarjomdih, outside whose southern frontiers a mine and a copper factory were established, where the Copper Town sprang up, and which was now gradually threatening to swallow all of Sarjomdih. Sarjomdih, which bore the repercussions of development, the nationalization of the mine and the factory, the opening up of two more quarries, and the confiscation of the villagers' properties so roads and living quarters could be built. Sarjomdih, whose men were given jobs as unskilled laborers in the mines and the factory in return for their fecund land. Sarjomdih, which is a standing testimony to the collapse of an agrarian Adivasi society and the dilution of Adivasi culture, the twin gifts of industrialization and progress. Sarjomdih, which within sixty years acquired all the signs of urbanity, just like the Copper Town: concrete houses; cable television; two-wheelers; a hand-pump; a narrow, winding tarmac that everyone called the 'main road'; and a primary school...

Chakravarty. But Maoists often terrorise the very people they claim to protect and Adivasis have been killed on suspicion of being police informers or collaborators. I asked Ashim Chatterjee, a member of the original Naxalbari uprising who now mediates between the government and the Maoists, whether the tactics of execution and extortion could be described as terrorism. ”Without taking up the responsibility of organising the class struggle, if you launch an armed struggle, it will inevitably become terrorism. It degenerated into a terrorist campaign. I’ve given it a name; it’s an exercise in socialism in words, and terrorism in deeds,

The adivasi people have a long and courageous history of resistance that predates the birth of Maoism. To look upon them as brainless puppets being manipulated by a few middle-class Maoist ideologues is to do them something of a disservice.

Just as the rapacity of global capitalism has created a surplus population of eastern India’s Adivasis, driving them into the arms of the Maoist Naxalite rebellion, so too did it create a surplus population of New York’s upper-middle and upper class humanities graduates.

Why do most “official” feminists and women’s organizations in India keep a safe distance between themselves and organizations like say the ninety-thousand-member Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan (Revolutionary Adivasi Women’s Association) that is fighting patriarchy in its own communities

But I have come to say a few words on behalf of the Adivasis of India…. In the past, thanks to the major political parties, thanks to the British Government and thanks to every enlightened Indian citizen, we have been isolated and kept, as it were, in a zoo.... We are willing to mix with you, and it is for that reason, ... , that we have insisted on a reservation of seats as far as the Legislatures a re c o n c e rn e d . We h a v e n o t a s k e d ... ( f o r ) s e p a r a t e e l e c t o r a t e s ; ... U n d e r t h e 1 9 3 5 A c t , t h r o u g h o u t t h e Legislatures in India, there were al together only 24 Adivasi MLAs out of a total of 1585, …and not a single representative at the Centre. ” Jaipal Singh, CAD, Vol.V, pp.209-210, 27 August 1947

Food should figure in the writing of Adivasi identity. In villages far off the road, all the food – meat, fish, kuccha, yams – comes from the forest. Having complete independence in procuring one’s food allows a people to disregard all outside interference, even apparently relevant NGO (non-governmental organization) or government programmes. Consider, for instance, the luxury in food choices and tastes

the Adivasi is not viewed as ‘a person’ with individual attributes and character, with specific roles and importance within his community, but lumped into a convenient category like Scheduled or Primitive Tribes.

The absence of cowherds and the presence of the tractor have edged out other sounds from many Adivasi lives. The sounds of men waking up to grey monsoon dawns, getting ploughs and yokes ready, and then talking

An Adivasi home fashions several kinds of leafcups each day: dokpa for rice; chokni for the side dish; koondu for the chava; and chipdi for the mel. If there are any ceremonies, there is the kadan chokni, in which rice contributions are served, and the addom chokni, made of two sal leaves placed across each other and used to make offerings in a shrine.

Adivasi is only an incidental factor; a collateral that barely contributes to the GDP shrine.

Adivasi societies are not fossilized societies.

research university that primarily awards master’s degrees and PhDs, JNU saw the number of seats offered to students wishing to enroll in a master’s or a doctoral program plummet by 84 percent, from 1,234 to 194 in one year.101 Furthermore, admissions committees were made up solely of experts appointed by the JNU vice-chancellor, flouting university statutes and guidelines followed by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which stipulate that academics should be involved.102 This made it possible to hire teachers from Hindu nationalist circles,103 with few qualifications,104 and some facing charges of plagiarism.105 In particular, several former ABVP student activists from JNU have been appointed as assistant professors even after being disqualified by the committee in charge of short-listing applicants.106 The vice-chancellor replaced deans in the School of Social Sciences without following appointment procedures, cutting the number of researchers by 80 percent and ceasing to apply rules JNU had set to ensure diversity through a mechanism taking into account the social background and geographic origin of its applicants.107 The new recruitment procedure strongly disadvantaged Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs, who used to make up nearly 50 percent of the student intake and who now accounted for a mere 7 percent. The vice-chancellor also issued ad hoc promotions, nominating recently appointed faculty members to the post of full professor. Conversely, the freeze on promotions for “antigovernment” teachers who should have been promoted on the basis of seniority prompted some of the diktat’s victims to take the matter to court.108 However, even after the court—taking note of the illegality of the rejection procedure—ordered a reexamination of the claimants’ promotions, the latter were once again denied.109

The Union government from 2014 began systematic harassment and persecution of civil society. This harmed civil society but it also hurt India. NGOs provide the third largest workforce in the United States and more than 10 per cent of all Americans work in an NGO.1 In 24 American states out of 50, NGOs actually employ more workers than all the branches of manufacturing combined. It is similar in the United Kingdom. In Europe, 13 per cent of all jobs are in the NGO sector.2 To put this figure in perspective, consider that less than 10 per cent of all jobs in India are in the formal sector. Surely this was then a sector to be boosted and not obstructed, but obstruct is what Modi did. Through his years, the attack on civil society continued as the first two parts of this chapter will show. The third chronicles the heroic and sustained resistance from marginalised communites: Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis and farmers, which forced the government ultimately to retreat on vital issues.

Both exiled their indigenous peoples—the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States—to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted a fretwork of laws to chain the lowliest group—Dalits in India and African-Americans in the United States—to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there.

Os Estados Unidos e a Índia são profundamente diferentes entre si — na cultura, na tecnologia, na economia, na composição étnica. Apesar disso, muitas gerações atrás, havia diversos paralelos entre essas duas grandes terras férteis e cobiçadas, ambas protegidas por oceanos e governadas por britânicos. Tanto os Estados Unidos quanto a Índia adotavam hierarquias sociais e mantinham um grande fosso de distância entre quem estava na base e quem estava no topo. Os dois países foram conquistados por povos ditos arianos, chegando, num caso, pelo oceano Atlântico, e, no outro, pelo norte. Os considerados inferiores em cada país serviam aos considerados superiores. O país mais novo, os Estados Unidos, se tornaria a democracia mais poderosa do mundo. O país mais antigo, a Índia, a mais populosa. Suas respectivas hierarquias são profundamente diferentes. Apesar disso, como se operassem com o mesmo manual de instruções, traduzido para se adequar a suas diferentes culturas, esses dois países adotaram métodos similares para manter rígidos protocolos e linhas de demarcação. Ambos mantinham sua casta dominante separada, à parte e acima dos considerados inferiores. Ambos exilaram seus povos indígenas — os adivasis na Índia, os americanos nativos nos Estados Unidos — para terras distantes e margens invisíveis da sociedade. Ambos criaram um emaranhado de leis para confinar os grupos de status mais baixo — os dalits na Índia e os afro-americanos nos Estados Unidos — à base inferior, usando o terror e a força para mantê-los ali. “Talvez somente os judeus tenham uma história de sofrimentos por discriminação tão longa quanto a dos dalits”, escreveu o jornalista V. T. Rajshekar. “Mas, quando consideramos a natureza dos sofrimentos suportados pelos dalits, apenas o paralelo afro-americano de escravização, segregação e assimilação forçada é que vem à mente.

Anybody who criticizes the corporate takeover of Adivasi land is called an antinational “sympathizer” of the banned Maoists. Sympathy is a crime, too. In television studios, guests who try to bring a semblance of intelligence into the debate are shouted down and compelled to demonstrate their loyalty to the nation. This is a war against people who have barely enough to eat one square meal a day. What particular brand of nationalism does this come under? What exactly are we supposed to be proud of? Our lumpen nationalists don’t seem to understand that the more they insist on this hollow sloganeering, the more they force people to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai!” and to declare that “Kashmir is an integral part of India,” the less sure of themselves they sound. The nationalism that is being rammed down our throats is more about hating another country—Pakistan—than loving our own. It’s more about securing territory than loving the land and its people. Paradoxically, those who are branded antinational are the ones who speak about the deaths of rivers and the desecration of forests. They are the ones who worry about the poisoning of the land and the falling of water tables. The “nationalists,” on the other hand, go about speaking of mining, damming, clear-felling, blasting, and selling. In their rule book, hawking minerals to multinational companies is patriotic activity. They have privatized the flag and wrested the microphone.

We, tribals, we have no history or historian to chronicle the wars we fought, number of people we killed. We have no King, no President and no prince or princess to nurture. We have no God or goddess to worship. It is air, water, fire, trees, rivers and land; our benefactors, we nurtured and take succour from.

Adivasi societies are not fossilized societies. The historical legitimacy of groups such as forest tribes lies in recognizing their way of life and in analysing the signifi-cance of their contribution to the creation of Indian culture since early times. Given that the precise meaning of the term ‘tribe’ remains controversial and is not uniformly defined, it becomes even more difficult to deduce an authentic history.

In 2005, when Congress still depended on Communist votes for a majority in Parliament, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was passed, assuring any household in the countryside a hundred days labour a year at the legal minimum wage on public works, with at least a third of these jobs for women. It is work for pay, rather than a direct cash transfer scheme as in Brazil, to minimize the danger of money going to those who are not actually the poor, and so ensure it reaches only those willing to do the work. Denounced by all right-thinking opinion as debilitating charity behind a façade of make-work, it was greeted by the middle-class like ‘a wet dog at a glamorous party’, in the words of one of its architects, the Belgian-Indian economist Jean Drèze. Unlike the Bolsa Família in Brazil, the application of NREGA was left to state governments rather than the centre, so its impact has been very uneven and incomplete, wages often paid lower than the legal minimum, for days many fewer than a hundred.75 Works performed are not always durable, and as with all other social programmes in India, funds are liable to local malversation. But in scale NREGA now represents the largest entitlement programme in the world, reaching some 40 million rural households, a quarter of the total in the country. Over half of these dalit or adivasi, and 48 per cent of its beneficiaries are women – double their share of casual labour in the private sector. Such is the demand for employment by NREGA in the countryside that it far outruns supply. A National Survey Sample for 2009–2010 has revealed that 45 per cent of all rural households wanted the work it offers, of whom only 56 per cent got it.76 What NREGA has started to do, in the formulation Drèze has taken from Ambedkar, is break the dictatorship of the private employer in the countryside, helping by its example to raise wages even of non-recipients. Since inception, its annual cost has risen from $2.5 to over $8 billion, a token of its popularity. This remains less than 1 per cent of GDP, and the great majority of rural labourers in the private sector are still not paid the minimum wage due them. Conceived outside the party system, and accepted by Congress only when it had little expectation of winning the elections of 2004, the Act eventually had such popular demand behind it that the Lok Sabha adopted it nem con. Three years later, with typical dishonesty, the Manmohan regime renamed it as ‘Gandhian’ to fool the masses that Congress inspired it.

Adivasi