7 - 9 APRIL 2000
UPPSALA, SWEDEN
Indigenous People in India
Diverging concepts of rights, individual versus collective, were discussed at length at the workshop, 'Indigenous People: The trajectory of a contemporary concept in India', which was held at the Seminar for Development Studies at Kursg °arden, Uppsala University in Uppsala Sweden from 7 to 9 April 2000.
* By PETER B. ANDERSEN & MOHAN K. GAUTAM
Whereas human rights in India were originally formulated within the frame of individual rights against the background of liberal Enlightenment thought, Indian law has accepted different kinds of collective rights since Independence. The First Amendment Act (1951) of the Constitution of India specifically allows the state to make special provisions for any class of citizens considered socially and educationally backward. In the constitution, such classes are explicitly termed 'Scheduled Tribes'.
Reportedly, this classification has gradually been replaced by the term 'indigenous peoples' in informal speech in India, but has not as yet been officially recognized as the Indian Government has neither ratified the ILO Convention No. 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples, nor come to utilize the United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a key reference in public debates and publications. As stressed by André Béteille, the change of terminology from 'Scheduled Tribes' to 'indigenous peoples' shifts the focus from needs and rights of the oppressed to political rights and rights to power. Béteille and especially Roy Burman emphasized that, by following the principle of 'nation states', this could result in conflicts with the organization of Indian society. The potential for conflicts is geared to whether 'indigenousness' is understood in any of the three most common aspects that Roy Burman has identified: (1) chronological, (2) relational (i.e. poor and marginalized peoples), or (3) normative. By consequence the legitimacy of demands of being indigenous is highly dependent on the chosen perspective on indigenousness.
Marginalization
Most Scheduled Tribes seriously lag behind the majority population of India with regard to nearly any development indicator and, as was demonstrated by S. Thorat, have even come to be increasingly marginalized in the rural sector over the period from around 1971 to the mid-1990s. Among the many reasons for this marginalization, one should point to the built-in organizational limitations of the tribal development system as demonstrated by Amit Prakash in an analysis of the Jharkhand area.
Another more ephemeral, but perhaps as important a reason for their marginalization is the outsiders' visualization of tribal life as taking place in a realm of otherworldly beauty beyond the trivialities of everyday oppression. Such an image may suppress the felt need for actions that would lead to the creation of fairer and more equal chances for the tribals. These conflicting forces in India's tribal policy surfaced in the discussions on whether to celebrate 1993 as the Year of Indigenous Peoples, as declared by the UN. At the presentation of the International Tribal Meeting, at which it was at last decided to celebrate Pernille Ghooch, the message that was communicated read that, 'Indigenous people from foreign countries may have to fight for their political rights in national and international forums but [that] Indian tribals are content and happy as long as they are allowed to keep their cultural heritage of dancing and crafts'. Marine Carrin attacked such paternalist discourses of exploited people of India from a theoretical point of view, arguing that the agency of history should be assumed to rest with the peoples themselves.
Carrin's theoretical position is indeed supported by a number of case studies of tribals who are fighting to define themselves as indigenous people as a part of their social mobilization in Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and South India. It should be remarked that Ram Dayal Munda's paper on the tribal strategies of organization in the Jharkhand did receive external support for its analysis after the workshop had finished.
On 2 August 2000, the Lok Sabha passed the Bihar Reorganization Bill 2000, which provides for the creation of Jharkhand, out of eighteen districts of south Bihar, as a new constituent state. The bill is still pending before the Rajya Sabha, but it may only be a matter of time until Jharkhand will be created as the twenty-eighth state of India. Whether, however, the act of reclaiming self-determination in geographically defined areas such as Jharkhand will solve the problems of social redistribution remains to be seen. Ranjit Bhattacharya warned about internal divisions created within the scheduled groups when their elites managed to claim the benefits targeted at the community at large.
Turning the wheel to return to local agency, instances from the comparative papers covering regions in the United States, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and the Saami people of Norway, Sweden, Suomi Finland, and Russia could be seen as scenarios of bogeys or utopias depending on the of point of view adopted. The existence of the Saami Council (Saame Tinget) in Sweden, that offers the Saami people a common voice when asked, may be seen as an acceptance of indigenousness, even when Sweden has not ratified ILO Convention No. 169. Several participants discussed the possibilities of whether a globalization of societies will lead to democratization and an increase of local self-determination that would result in allocation of agency to indigenous peoples. The case of India seems to indicate that democracy by itself does not allocate agency to those indigenous peoples on the fringes of society. They will have to fight their claims by themselves and rally around those emblems on which they decide collectively. To decide to rally around one's being indigenous may well be the most specific term by which to address a national majority which managed to carve out a nation state from a colonial power half a century ago.The workshop was not planned for participants to reach any simple conclusions or recommendations from the discussion on indigenousness and other forms of legitimizing solidarity. A number of papers served to increase the level of the analytical conceptualization and clarity around indigenousness, while still other papers gave ample evidence of the problems still faced by the Indian development administration in integrating most of the groups to be defined as Scheduled Tribes in the economic development of India.
The workshop was convened by Dr B.G. Karlsson, Seminar for Development Studies, Uppsala, Dr Peter B. Andersen, University of Copenhagen, and Dr Mohan Gautam, Leiden University. Two complete volumes based on papers presented at the workshop are scheduled for publication. The first volume will be edited by B.G. Karlsson and A. Baviskar and will focus on the definition and politics of indigenous peoples. The second volume will be edited by P.B. Andersen and M. Gautam and will deal with indigenous peoples in the context of the Jharkhand region.
Dr Peter B. Andersen is lecturer at the Institute for the History of Religions (Institut for Religionshistorie) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
E-mail: peterba@hum.ku.dk
Dr Mohan K. Gautam is based at the Department of Languages and Cultures of South and Central Asia, Research Cluster Intercultural Study of Literature and Society, Leiden University, the Netherlands.
E-mail: gautam@let.leidenuniv.nl