(On 13 September a workshop on ‘tribal question and Indian revolution’ was held at Diphu, Karbi Anglong under the auspices of the North East Zonal Coordination of the Party. The workshop was attended by nearly a hundred comrades from Karbi Anglong, NC Hills and other parts of Assam and Tripura. The workshop evoked an interesting discussion around a talk given by Party General Secretary, Dipankar Bhattacharya. Below we carry a summary of the talk.)
T he English word ‘tribe’ coonotes a range of meanings in different parts of the country. In official Hindi, tribe is translated as ‘janjati’, but the word used predominantly in Hindi and several other Indian languages is adivasi, meaning indigenous or aboriginal people. In Tripura, the word used for tribe is ‘upajati’ which is more akin to sub-nationality.
Whichever word we may use, we can note certain common features to describe the tribal people. In most parts of the country we can find the tribal people living closest to nature, in the hills and forests and remote interiors, away from the so-called high road of socio-economic development. Viewed from the other end, it means the penetration of the capitalist market economy is still quite limited in tribal societies. This is why there is always the talk of bringing the tribal people into the mainstream of the country.
In fact, the tribal people in many parts of the country still display unmistakable traits of what Marxists describe as primitive communism. They depend mostly on very backward agriculture and forest produce coupled with activities like food-gathering and hunting. This means a life of acute poverty and destitution for large sections of the tribal people and no wonder that cases of starvation death are reported predominantly from tribal areas. And conomic backwardness also implies backwardness in terms of most social indicators or indices of quality of life.
The process of class differentiation remains rather retarded in most tribal communities even though the system of reservation in education, employment and elections has given rise to some privileged sections and tribal representatives are constantly being co-opted by the ruling classes and their parties. Alongside this emergence of a tribal petty bourgeoisie, some sections of tribal people have also found employment, albeit often as contract labourers, in modern industry and mining,
Tribal communities are marked at the same time by tremendous inter-tribal diversity as well as a high degree of internal cultural cohesion. A colourful celebration of collective life and labour, tribal culture remains a major component of India’s rich and pluralistic cultural heritage.
Historically, tribal peasant revolots have been forerunners of a popular anti-feudal anti-imperialist awakening in many parts of the country. But the Congress-led stream of the freedom struggle provided no scope for politicisation and development of peasant insurgency. It was through the ruling elite of the princely states and traditional tribal chieftains that the Congress penetrated tribal communities and enlisted a degree of tribal support.
Unfortunately, the communist movement in colonial India too did not pay adequate attention to the agrarian revolution which, as our programme defines it, is the axis of our democratic revolution. But whereever communists seriously addressed the peasant question, they evoked overwhelming response among the tribal population. Telengana in Andhra Pradesh, the tribal belts of Maharashtra and West Bengal, Tripura, Assam and even some parts of Manipur witnessed significant tribal participation in the communist movement. But the communists failed to build on the initial breakthrough. Telengana ended on a note of surrender and Tripura has been embroiled in a continuing tragedy with the CPI(M) betraying the key demands of Tripura tribals, like retoration of tribal land, introduction of innerline permit or giving more powers to the autonomous council of Tripura, demands championed by it while remaining in opposition.
The emergence of the CPI(ML) gave a new fillip to communist work among tribal communities. The CPI(ML) took a fresh look at Indian history, from the stories of kings and queens and bourgeois leaders the focus was shifted to ordinary men and women, to people’s heroes and tribal revolts came to be accorded their pride of place in the history of anti-feudal anti-imperialist struggles in India. From the margins of history, tribal movements had been rehabilitated in the mainstream of people’s history. Birsa Munda came to be treated as a national hero of the Indian people and not just a leader of a particular rebellion.
Secondly, the renewed emphasis on unleashing the revolutionary potential of the landless poor and treating the landles poor as the mainstay of the revolutionary communist movement built new bridges between the communist movement and tribal communities. The communist movement had now struck firm roots in Orissa, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh (especially in parts that are now known as Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh).
The CPI(ML) also redefined the communist approach to national unity. Rejecting the big bourgeoisie’s autocratic approach which seeks ‘unity’ through repressive laws and at gunpoint, the CPI(ML) visulaised a new democratic unity recognising the nationalities’ right to self-determination including secession in extreme cases. This sensitivity enabled the CPI(ML) to work out an appropriate policy response to even complex situations like the Assam movement in the late ’70s and early ’80s. While upholding the democratic content of a nationality movement against adverse economic discrimination and deprivation by the Centre, i.e., the Indian state, the party took a critical stand against the latent trends of chauvinism, not only vis-a-vis other developed nationalities and minority communities in general, but particularly towards the tribal communities of Assam. The powerful Autonomous State movement in the hill districts of Assam has been rooted in this programmatic understanding and direction of the Party.
In contrast to the Congress and the communists, the BJP and its predecessor Jan Sangh had little initial influence on the tribal people. But decades of relief work and a sustained communal campaign with a strong accent on Hinduisation and anti-conversion crusade have now established powerful pockets of BJP influence among the tribals especially in states like Gujarat, Orissa and Jharkhand.
There are of course also the regional parties. We see a plethora of them in the North East, and like regional parties elsewhere in the country they keep bargaining with the ruling national parties. It is also instructive to study the example of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha in this context. In the 1970s the JMM came up as a powerful movement with a strong thrust against money-lenders and the mafia. This was when the JMM worked with sections of the Left. Over the years, the JMM mastered the art of political compromises and corruption and today like the BSP it upholds opportunism as its only ideology.
Let us now look at the socio-economic and politico-cultural context of the tribal question. We can broadly take 1990 as a dividing line between the old milieu of nation-building and state intervention and the new gospel of free market and globalisation. In the earlier period the accent was on building heavy industries and mega developmental projects. These mines, industries and big projects displaced tens of thousands of tribal families the experience of which still remains a festering sore. Little has been done till date by the state by way of rehabilitation and the issue still remains a key question for the tribal people of India. For large sections of India’s tribal population, ‘national integration’ and nation-building thus came in the form of displacement and eviction from their traditional habitat.
The pattern has not changed much even in the new phase. Instead of big industry and big dams the focus is now on building expressways for foreign cars. Eviction continues with the difference that there is no ‘compensatory’ employment to look for. The environment remains a major talking point in the new phase and once again, it is the tribal people who have to bear the brunt of environmental preservation and protection as though they have been inflicting all the damages on the environment all these years. The new forest laws and fiats of the court and the government see tribals as ‘encroachers’ who have to be evicted as soon as possible.
In the first phase the policy of reservation had provided some employment opportunities to the tribal people. Now with the new policy of downsizing and privatisation, jobs have started vanishing and reservation is fast becoming an empty phrase. The undermining of economic plans and the deliberate retreat of the state from the economy and abdication of its social responsibilities – the social sector is being leased out to the network of NGOs – has left the tribal people at the mercy of the market and the giant corporations who are eyeing every natural resource including water for profit.
If national integration had brought repressive laws and state violence, international integration (globalisation) has further intensified the misery and insecurity of tribal existence with everything being sacrificed at the altar of insatiable corporate greed. The BJP makes political capital of this insecurity and misery to define a new enemy in the shape of either the ‘Muslim merchant or money-lender’ or the ‘Christian foreigner’, thus drawing the tribal youth into the vortex of its communal fascist campaign. The BJP has succeeded in making major political inroads in the process in Gujarat, Jharkhand and Orissa.
The BJP also claims to have heralded a shift from the earlier accent on suppression of nationality movements to the new emphasis on cease-fires and accords. This is nothing but the old colonial policy of divide and rule. The BJP game plan is to deepen its own political penetration and pit one community against another. The ceasefire with NSCN(IM) has set Manipur afire. Similarly, the ceasefire with the DHD has led to tragic clashes between Dimasas and Hmars. The Bodo accord has created a major unrest in Karbi Anglong. While no problem has been solved, more problems have been created, but the BJP has overnight made its political appearance in the North-East. It now has a friendly government and five MLAs in Nagaland, an allied government in Mizoram and now its ‘own’ government in Arunachal Pradesh.
The BJP’s agenda of Hindu rashtra poses a particularly serious threat to the cultural diversity and democratic aspirations of the North-East – yet in an atmosphere of depoliticisation and piecemeal bargaining, most organisations in the North East are trapped in the illusion that they can secure their own specific interests without bothering about the general question of democracy and pluralism.
How do we communists propose to carry forward the tribal movement or in other words how do we propose to achieve a genuine democratic resolution of the tribal question? As indicated by the very theme of this workshop, tribal question and the Indian revolution, we seek to find a real answer to the former in the latter. The agrarian revolution, the axis of India’s democratic revolution, has a crucial tribal component, because the tribal question is in essence an agrarian question. The agrarian revolution is the key to unlocking the full productive potential of the people and making them the real owners of the productive resources of the country. The political vision of people’s democracy entails a reconstitution of India’s national unity on a thorougoing democratic basis and empowerment of the people with genuine and comprehensive rights. Equally important is the revolution’s agenda of democratisation of Indian society and culture which alone can give the tribal or indigenous people their rightful place in their own homeland.
As Marxists, we do not look at tribal identities as something static or frozen in time. We look at every tribal identity in its internal motion, as a live, developing and dynamic feature. We consider it neither possible nor desirable to preserve the so-called pristine isolation of tribal life in an age of increasing socialisation of production. We therefore reject the revivalist approach which harks back to the past and seeks to resurrect the presumed glory of the past. No amount of past glory can be a solution to the problems of the present. We also reject the coercive and deceptive ways in which capital seeks to integrate tribal people into the so-called mainstream.
In opposition to the coercive and deceptive integration advocated by the big bourgeoisie and the revivalist isolation glorified by many insurgent groups, we stand for equal participation of the tribal people with their non-tribal counterpart in the process of democratisation of the entire society, economy and polity. In short, we take the tribal people as an integral part of the redefined Indian mainstream and also an integral part of the process of redefining it through genuine empowerment of the real majority of the Indian society, the working people and the intelligentsia and a thoroughgoing democratisation of the society and the state.
The present juncture marks a turning point. We are facing a major crisis in our national life and we must try to convert into an opportunity to carry forward the people’s democratic movement. The freedom movement was the first major hour of awakening and in a limited way the tribal people too won their first victories against the decadent feudal kingdoms and brutal imperialist rule in the course of this movement. Between 1967 and 1977, that is to say, between Naxalbari and the defeat of the Emergency proclaimed by the Indira autocracy, we had another great period of advance for the democratic movement and the tribal autonomy movements of the North East too grew in this atmosphere. Today we have yet another juncture – on the one hand the BJP backed by the might of the US imperialism is desperately trying to impose its fascist agenda and the disastrous pro-market anti-people economic policies of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation while, on the other hand, the Indian people are bracing up for a major anti-fascist anti-imperialist showdown. The tribal movements can make a major advance at this juncture in partnership with this broader national movement.
To do this we have to formulate the tribal question as a comprehensive democratic agenda of the tribal people. The question of autonomy or the political right to self-determination and self-rule is of course central to this agenda, but no less important are the other questions of livelihood and democracy, dignity and diversity. The bid to evict tribal people from their traditional habitat and deprive them of their traditional rights on forest produce is hanging like a sword of Damocles which has to be thwarted by all means. The question of restoration of tribal land to the legitimate owners remains a key issue. Equally urgent are the questions of expansion of the public distribution system and guarantee of education, healthcare, employment, living wages and social security. And we must remember that the Hindu Rashtra envisioned by the RSS with its attendant paraphernalia of religious and cultural regimentation, denial of democratic rights and unmitigated domination of big capital over every natural resource and in every sphere of public life, is all the more detrimental to the basic needs and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the tribal people. Battle lines are aleady drawn and the battlecry ‘Save Democracy, Save India’ is an invitation for all of us to join the battle and win it. As Mao used to say, we must dare to fight and dare to win.