A toast to the tribals and their never-ending fight for Jal, Jungle and Zameen

There is a lot going on this week. Opposition parties have united in their demand to ask the government to reduce the 18% GST on life and health insurance, an issue affecting 45 million middle class people. Headline stories from Bangladesh. Vinesh Phogat. The silver lining of Neeraj Chopra and Indian hockey.

In all this, some topics do not receive the space they deserve in newspaper columns or are the subject of clickbait.

On June 29 this year, a young Bharat Adivasi Party MP, representing Banswara, led a unique march. His supporters carried blood samples in protest against a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister’s comment suggesting a DNA test to prove he was a Hindu. The young MP was adamant: they were Adivasis who did not need a DNA test to define their identity.

So today, on the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, your columnist writes about an often ignored topic: tribal rights in the last decade of the ruling regime.

To start with, here’s how the Ministry of Tribal Affairs fared in India’s Budget 2024:

• The word “Scheduled Tribe” appears only once in the Budget speech.
• Allocations for the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, a constitutional body, were reduced from Rs 22 crore to Rs 20 crore.
• The budget of Prime Minister’s Jan Jatiya Vikas Mission has been cut by 62%.
• Allocations for the National Tribal Welfare Program decreased by 10%.
• The development of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG) received only Rs 20 crore.
• Displacement and dispossession

According to the Xaxa Committee on Tribal Communities, over 40% of those displaced by development projects are tribals. The Forest Conservation Amendment Bill, 2023 was rushed through the Lok Sabha in just 38 minutes, with the participation of just four MPs.

This law weakens clearance requirements and grants blanket exemptions, affecting forests, wildlife and indigenous communities. Procedurally, the bill should have been sent to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change for scrutiny. Instead, it was sent to a Joint Parliamentary Committee that was packed with BJP MPs. The committee approved all the amendments despite six MPs filing notes against them.

Between June 2022 and July 2024, over 1,000 projects were granted forest clearances, while only six projects were denied clearance between 2018 and 2022. Interestingly, at least four companies that topped the list of electoral bond donors are known to violate forest and tribal rights.

Questions in Parliament have revealed that the Rs 72,000 crore Great Nicobar Project will result in felling of 10 lakh trees and alter the face of the Ecologically Sensitive Area.

Consider this:

• The Nicobar Island Tribal Council has withdrawn its no-objection certificate for the project.
• The Government has not consulted the original inhabitants, the Shompens (a PVTG tribe) and the Nicobarese.
• The Anthropological Survey of India was also not consulted.

Misrule

Speaking in the Lok Sabha, the Finance Minister claimed that the BJP government had guaranteed the rights of Scheduled Tribes (ST) people in India. But the situation on the ground tells a different story. The Eklavya Model Residential Schools have over 10,000 vacant seats across the country. The Venture Capital Fund for Scheduled Tribes (VCF-ST), announced two years ago, is still not operational.

Socio-economic indicators of the tribal population in India are also worrying. Six out of ten tribal women and seven out of ten tribal children suffer from anaemia. Four out of ten children above the age of six have not received any education. Five out of ten members of the tribal population belong to the lowest wealth quintile. Crimes against tribals increased by 14%, with Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra recording the highest number of cases of assault on tribal women and children.

Homogenization

In 2022, the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes published a book titled Contributions of Tribal Leaders in the Freedom Struggle. The book, which received harsh criticism for downplaying the Adivasi resistance to caste structures, is a replica of an e-book by the Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (ABVKA, an RSS affiliate focused on organizing religious events in tribal areas). At the time, the NCST was headed by a former ABVKA member. In fact, both the BJP and the RSS often refer to the Scheduled Tribe population as “vanvasi” (forest dwellers) rather than “adivasi” (original inhabitants), reflecting their long-standing stance. The ABVKA runs 21,000 projects in over 16,000 tribal areas, most of which are religious in nature.

The 2024 Lok Sabha elections yielded such figures. In 47 ST-reserved constituencies, the BJP’s seat tally fell from 32 in 2019 to 24, while that of the opposition rose from six in 2019 to 19 in 2024.

As the world celebrates the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, Adivasi communities in Hasdeo, Singrauli, Talabira, Gare Pelma, Chhindwara and elsewhere are resisting the takeover of their lands. jal, jangaland zameen.

We stand with them as they fight the good fight.

(Research credit: Anagha)

(Derek O’Brien, MP, leads the Trinamool Congress in the Rajya Sabha)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.