. . . there is a double tragedy at work in tribal India. The first tragedy is that the state has treated its Adivasi citizens with contempt and condescension. The second tragedy is that their presumed protectors, the Naxalites, offer no long-term solution either.21
The Maoists’ primary aim, I gathered, was to capture power in New Delhi, and they were using the Adivasis as a stepping stone in this larger endeavour. Over the past few decades, the Maoists had been living with tribal populations as the hills and forests of central India were well suited to their methods of roaming guerrilla warfare. Their violent actions had indeed occasionally protected and helped the Adivasis survive—for instance, the Maoists had procured for the Adivasis higher wages for labour in a landlord’s field, and higher rates for the collection of forest produce. However, their involvement in the Adivasis’ habitat and affairs has not been consensual. The Adivasis have suffered during Maoist attacks on the government,22 being caught in the crossfire,23 for instance, when security forces poured into the state of Chhattisgarh to restore the primacy of the Indian state against the Maoists.24
Apart from the corporates, the Maoists and the police, Christian and Hindu missionaries have also intervened in many Adivasi areas with schools and hospitals.25 The Christian missionaries have been around since the fourteenth century,26 while the Hindu missionaries have been active for a while as well.27 They have been fairly successful in providing education to the Adivasis as well as in converting some of them to their own respective religious philosophies.
Modernization—just as much as tradition—is welcome only if it results in social progress. In India, however, despite all the modernization interventions, the Adivasis seem to have gained the least and lost the most. Let us compare the progress made by the Adivasis to some of the other backward classes in India. The literacy rate of Adivasis is only 59 per cent,28 even lower than the Dalit literacy rate of 66 per cent.29 Nearly 55 per cent of Adivasi schoolchildren drop out by the time they reach the upper primary level, which is more than the 40.8 per cent among India’s total population. In addition, 70.9 per cent of Adivasi children drop out by the time they reach the secondary level,30 a higher rate than the 56.1 per cent recorded among Scheduled Caste children. According to the World Bank, over 43 per cent of the Adivasi population in 2016 in rural India was poor,31 while this was recorded as 29 per cent in the Scheduled Caste population.
I will point towards an aspect of the desperate state of Adivasis that I consider strikingly crucial for progress—their abject lack of freedom of choice. Hardly any of the interventions—by the government, private companies, Maoist groups or religious missionaries—has been the choice of the Adivasis. In the name of modernization and development, which the Adivasis have rarely asked for, others have often caused mayhem in their once-peaceful habitat. So what progress are we talking about here? There can be no progress without freedom. By imposing our version of modernity on them, we have robbed the Adivasis of even the freedom to chart their own destiny.
Choice can be achieved through various channels of democracy. In this context too, Dalits and lower castes have been more successful than the Adivasis. The former have managed to establish themselves as major interest groups on the national stage, while the Adivasis have not. Dalits and Scheduled Castes are evenly distributed across India and are important vote banks for politicians so as to sway the outcome of state and national elections. Dalits also have successful political parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party, which has been in power in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh. They have an efficient second rung of activists who know how to build political networks nationwide.
On the other hand, the Adivasis, demographically concentrated in India’s densest forests, do not constitute a vote bank large enough to be considered significant. We have never had an Adivasi Ambedkar, a leader of pan-Indian significance, who could be a role model. In the past five decades, the Adivasis have sometimes expressed their public and collective discontent with the policies and programmes of the state, but their protests—in Bastar in 1966, in Jharkhand in the late 1970s, among others—have been led by traditional Adivasi leaders who were largely irrelevant at the national level. Only in some cases, such as in the Narmada Bachao Andolan, have Adivasis been mobilized by non-Adivasi social activists from an urban background.
About seventy million of these Adivasis live in the heart of India, across the states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Bihar and West Bengal.32 However, another 10.2 million or so tribals live in the north-east of India.33 I shall not include these tribes in this particular argument because they differ from their tribal counterparts in the peninsula in terms of socio-economic progress for at least two crucial reasons. One, the chances of their absorption into the Indian (or even global) economy is higher, thanks mostly to their English language skills and higher literacy rate. And so they have gained a large share in the Scheduled Tribes quota in government and civil services jobs, reserved seats in universities, as well as jobs in private companies that need communication skills. Two, they have been largely exempt from the trauma caused by land dispossession because of their location in a corner of the country.
I will now take up the goriest example that relates to another socio-economically disadvantaged group in India.
The partition of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan in August 1947 led to one of the deadliest migrations in human history. In a blatant violation of freedom of choice, Muslims in India were forced to trek
