“The conspiracy theory according to the Munda legend is that this entire game plan was hatched by the Rajputs to bring about a demographic change in Chotanagpur, unseat the Mundas, and bring about their own rule in the land of the Adivasis,” says writer A. K. Pankaj, who researches indigenous history and human rights, as he sips on tea and smokes a cigarette in his home-cum-publishing house in Ranchi.
“So, what Bangladeshi infiltration and demographic change are they talking about?” he asks, referring to the alleged illegal Bangladeshi infiltration in the Santhal Parganas region in northeastern Jharkhand, which borders West Bengal. This “infiltration” has been one of the central BJP planks ahead of the Jharkhand assembly polls. “The Adivasis of this region have been victims of infiltration, demographic change and exploitation by outsiders for millennia,” Pankaj says.
As election season heats up in Jharkhand, which has a 26.2 percent Adivasi population according to the 2011 census, the anxieties over an existential threat to tribal identity, population and culture are once again dominating the poll discourse. While diminishing numbers of tribals and Bangladeshi infiltration are central planks of the BJP, creating a Sarna Code—a separate tribal religious categorisation in the next census—has been one of the major promises made by the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). This code has been a long-pending demand among the state’s Adivasi population.
Yet, as argued by Sushma Xaxa, a 26-year-old woman who works at a school in Chotanagpur’s Khunti district, “The discourse over tribal politics is so far removed from our identities and culture, it is unimaginable.”
“The people who speak or write on our behalf cannot even pronounce our names on most occasions. What will they understand of our aspirations?” she asks. “We have been reduced to reservations and reserved seats—everything you hear during elections is about tribal seats, not Adivasi people.”
Indeed, most commentaries on Jharkhand elections tend to see tribal politics through the lens of the 23 reserved assembly and five parliamentary constituencies. That only one of the 13 chief ministers of the 24-year-old state has been a non-tribal is also frequently brought up to underscore the importance of the “tribal vote” in the state.
As elections in Jharkhand—which has for at least a century been imagined as the land where tribal customs, system of governance and social organisation would exist unfettered by outside influence—commence in less than a week, ThePrint examines what really is the tribal identity that all political parties claim to protect? Is the tribal population really shrinking? What happened to the aspirations with which Jharkhand—literally, the land of forests—was carved out in 2000 after a decades-long agitation to have a separate state? And as attempts to “mainstream” Adivasis culturally, economically, politically and religiously continue, is the erasure of Adivasi life a near-certainty despite high-politicking in their name?
Also Read: Why JMM’s politics over Jharkhand domicile policy has BJP in a fix
‘Jharkhand’ older than ‘India’
The idea of a land of the Adivasis is much older than the idea of India, Pankaj says as he sits in his blue and white striped shirt, and printed dhoti. The fading green walls of his house are adorned with images and paintings of Birsa Munda and Jaipal Singh Munda.
“The Adivasis have always had oral tradition. According to that, Jharkhand was an abstract habitat—ilaka—not a state,” he says. “The imagined land of the Adivasis stretched from Rajmahal (the northeastern town in present-day Jharkhand on the border with West Bengal) to Narmada-Godavari…This land was, of course, cut up into many administrative units to break Adivasi unity.”
“The written word on Adivasis only comes from non-Adivasi sources,” he adds.
The first written word on Adivasis can be found in the Rigveda, in which the whole region, from the Ganga up to present-day Odisha, is called ‘Kikat’, Pankaj says. According to the Rigveda, those who lived here did not drink cow’s milk and had squashed noses. “It was obvious they are talking about Adivasis because Adivasis believed that only the child of the cow is entitled to her milk…Adivasis started having milk in their tea only about a 100 years ago,” says the writer.
It is from the 6th century onwards, with the emergence of Brahmin texts and granths, that Adivasis lose the status of human beings, and begin to be referred to as asur, rakshas, etc. The next time in history they get the status of human beings is in Persian texts during the reign of the Mughals, Pankaj says. “It was in fact the Mughals that called this region Jharkhand for the first time.”
While infiltration into Adivasi lands always existed—as Pankaj points out, urban settlements are not possible without infiltration into the forest—the systems of land management began to change under Mughal rule.
Breaking the tribal backbone
The Mundas followed a customary lineage-based system of joint land ownership, called the khuntkatti system, under which the clan that cleared the forest and made the land fit for cultivation would be made its owners.
As argued by Victor Das in Jharkhand Movement: From Realism to Mystification, in 1585, a common “raja” of the Munda and Oraon tribes was made a tributary of the Mughals. A descendent of this raja was incarcerated by the Mughals for arrears of tribute and all his moveable assets were confiscated. When he was released from prison, the raja brought in a large number of Hindu courtiers and granted them the ‘jagirs’ of Munda and Oraon villages, who in turn, also appointed thekedars.
“These immigrant jagidars and thikadars introduced land rent in Chotanagpur and usurped many tribal lands when the tribals refused to pay the rent and render ‘begary’ (free and forced labour),” Das wrote. “These immigrant landlords took advantage of the Hindu police officials from north Bihar, who were brought in by the British administration after 1834, in exploiting the tribals.”
The backbone of the traditional systems of land ownership and governance of the Adivasis broke. Gradually and systematically, the Adivasis were alienated from their own land. Under the Permanent Settlement Act (1793), for instance, the zamindars—the outsiders or the dikus—were made the landowners, and the Adivasis, the tenants.
The missionaries, who had by now spread to the remotest parts of the tribal belts seeking to “civilise” the Adivasis through education and healthcare, became their unlikely spokespersons.
As Das writes, “When the tribals failed to regain their land through repeated armed struggles, they accepted the advice of the Christian missionaries, who entered the region in 1845, and tried to approach the British government legally for the repossession of their lands.”
But the help of the Mission came with a caveat—the tribals needed to convert.
“In 1875, when Birsa Munda was born, there was a situation of complete terror of the zamindars,” says Nirmal, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-affiliated doctor, who runs a hospital in Khunti. “There was a nexus of the British, the zamindars and the Church. The Church offered help, but converted people,” he said. “Even Birsa Munda was converted—his name was changed to Birsa David…But of course, he saw through all this,” Nirmal, known as the benevolent “langda doctor”—his left leg is crippled—says.
Tribal leader and freedom fighter Birsa Munda, whose story has got a new lease of life in the last few years—Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared his birth anniversary as ‘Janjatiya Gaurav Divas’ in 2021—soon gave up Christianity, and launched the Ulgulan movement in 1899, using weapons and guerrilla warfare to drive out foreigners. He implored the tribals to not comply with colonial laws and follow the Birsa Raj.
The next year, however, 25-year-old Birsa, who had been arrested by the British, died in prison. But the movement he launched led to the government repealing the begar system of forced labour by the tribals, and led to the Tenancy Act (1903) which recognised their old system of land ownership, the khuntkatti system. In 1908, the British passed the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, which banned the passage of tribal land to non-tribals.
But as Das writes, by then, nine-tenths of the original khuntkatti lands had passed into the hands of outsiders.
It was this Chotanagpur Tenancy Act, along with the Santhal Pargana Tenancy (SPT) Act, 1949, which Raghubar Das, the only non-tribal chief minister of Jharkhand, tried to tweak in 2016 in a bid to facilitate the transfer of tribal land for development work. The proposed amendments led to the famous Pathalgadi movement across the state, with then governor of the state and current President of India Droupadi Murmu, putting her foot down on the controversial amendments.
“For the Adivasis, everything is linked to their land—their identity, their culture, their livelihood, well-being—you take away their land, you kill the Adivasi,” says Lakshmi Narayan, a Ranchi-based tribal activist, as he recites lines from a poem by an aboriginal leader from Australia. “My land is my backbone. I only stand straight, happy proud, not ashamed about my colour because I still have my land.”
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Jharkhand—the Kikat of the Rigveda
On 1 January 1948, just months after the new nation-state of India was born, Kharsawan, a princely state on the southern border of Jharkhand and West Bengal, received an unlikely New Year’s gift—a deadly massacre.
Ruled by Rajputs, who wanted to accede to India and join Odisha—Kharsawan and neighbouring Saraikela had more Odia speakers than Hindi speakers, thereby making Odisha their preferred choice over Bihar—the princely state had a significant population of Adivasis. They did not want to go with either Bihar or Odisha, but to realise the long-cherished dream of having their own cultural, administrative and political unit—the ‘Kikat’ of the Rigveda, the Jharkhand of modern times.
On 1 January 1948, the day the princely state was to join Odisha, Jaipal Singh Munda, the president of the Adivasi Mahasabha, is said to have given a call for a huge protest meeting in Kharsawan. Thousands poured into the hilly town despite the winter following the call of “Marang Gomke (the great leader)”, as Munda was called. The meeting was seemingly a big success. Until it wasn’t.
“It is said that Jaipal Munda had a hint that something could go wrong, so he did not show up himself,” recalls Anuj Sinha, senior Ranchi-based journalist and author. “And things did go wrong, and how!”
The staggering numbers of people who came to attend the meeting spooked the Odisha Police. “They opened fire on the Tribals with their Sten guns,” he said. “All of Kharsawan looked like a police camp. Dead bodies were littered all over…Imagine, these were the first few months of Independence.”
The book Shoshan, Sangharsh aur Shahadat, which Sinha wrote, lies in the front of his large desk in the office of XYZ Patrika, the daily he edits. “This book is a compilation of all the massacres that occurred in Jharkhand over the decades. There is no history of tribals without the history of their cold-blooded murders.”
In 2000, after almost a century-long movement, the idea of a separate state of Jharkhand was crystallised. “It is a movement that has been soaked in blood,” Sinha says.
“It is debatable when the Jharkhand movement actually started,” he adds. “Some say it started in 1912 with the separation of Bihar. It was felt that all the reasons Bihar was separated from Bengal stand true for Jharkhand—cultural, financial, political subjugation.”
But for several years, the movement remained rudderless, Sinha argues. “The missionaries were the spokespersons of this movement. They even gave the Simon Commission an official memorandum for a separate Jharkhand in 1928. But the movement did not gather any steam.”
Over the next few years, several organisations—Chotanagpur Unnati Samaj in 1928, the Kisan Sabha and Chotanagpur Catholic Sabha in 1935-36—were formed.
But the scattered and even culturally disparate tribals could not be brought on one common forum—a fact exploited pointedly by the state to not allow any tribal unity to emerge. “The idea of Jharkhand initially included present-day Jharkhand and significant parts of West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. It was the forests of Central India—the Kikat of the Rigved,” Sinha said. “But states’ boundaries were created such that they sliced through the forest ensuring a land of the tribals could not exist.”
The Tribal nation
In 1938, the Chotanagpur Adivasi Mahasabha—an alliance of several tribal organisations of the region—was formed in order to give one, coherent voice to the demand of a separate state. In 1939, when Jaipal Singh Munda, the Oxford-educated hockey player assumed the leadership of the Mahasabha, the Jharkhand Movement gained momentum.
“Jaipal Singh Munda’s arrival on the scene was a turning point for the Jharkhand Movement,” Sinha says. “Under him, the movement spread all over.”
It was under his leadership that the movement was transformed into a political party. “Over the next few elections, the party swept through tribal seats. All of South Bihar was with the Jharkhand Party,” Lakshmi Narayan, the activist, says. During the first elections in independent India, the Jharkhand Party swept all the 32 tribal constituencies in Bihar.
It was a time of sudden influx of outsiders into tribal lands. Almost overnight, government offices staffed with outsiders were coming up across the region. Industries were springing up in large numbers, thereby increasing competition for local jobs. Tribal lands were being acquired and Hindi was being imposed on the Adivasis.
The main slogan of the Jharkhand Party in the 1952 elections was “Jharkhand abua dahu diku senoa (Jharkhand is ours, the dacoit outsiders must go)”.
Further, a fundamental question began to be raised—how is the most mineral-rich region in India also one of the most backward? By most government accounts in 1982, the region of Chotanagpur produced 48 percent of coal, 40 percent of bauxite, 45 percent of mica, 100 percent of kyanite and 90 percent of apatite of the country apart from iron, limestone, soapstone, copper, manganese and gold. Besides, it had 79 percent of Bihar’s forest area, with Singhbhum alone having Asia’s richest sal forest.
“And despite all this, you remained backward,” says Lakshmi Narayan. “That is the main point Jaipal Singh Munda was able to drive through into the minds of the Adivasis,” he said. For the still-young, Indian state, the tribal assertion posed a major threat. “Nehru knew that if he had to stymie the demand for a tribal state, Jaipal Singh Munda had to be reined in.”
In order to make the movement more pliable and less hostile to the nation-state, and also to enable the Congress to make inroads into the tribals, Nehru brought in Kartik Oraon as a parallel tribal leader to Jaipal Singh Munda, Narayan says. “It was to split the tribals.”
Incidentally, Oraon is now particularly popular with the RSS as he was the first to articulate the demands for ending reservations for tribals who have converted to Christianity.
Over the next few elections, the performance of the Jharkhand Party indeed declined. By 1963, the party, already a pale shadow of itself, merged with the Congress. “It was a betrayal of the cause,” Lakshmi Narayan says. “The movement splintered away.”
The Jharkhand movement would have to wait for another decade to gain momentum. This time, it would emerge from the jungles of Santhal Pargana, where in 1957, the father of a 15-year-old school-going tribal boy was killed by moneylenders.
In classic revenge-thriller style, this boy pledged to end the terror of the moneylenders and zamindars. And thus, started the political journey of Shibu Soren.
“Shibu Soren brought a radical streak to the movement,” says Ranch-based author Sinha. “The Mahajans (moneylenders) would not allow the tribals to cut their crop, and Shibu galvanised them to do exactly that,” he said. “The lofty, imposing Parasnath mountain in the Chotanagpur plateau was his thikana. At some point, the police couldn’t enter this area. These were ‘liberated zones’.”
Soren, Sinha adds, had his separate council of ministers, held his own courts, would reallocate land to Adivasis and teach them at night in schools. “Unka alag shaasan tha.”
In 1972, along with advocate Binod Bihar Mahato and communist leader A. K. Roy, Soren formed the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM).
Over the next few decades, the movement went through several ups and downs, taking a particularly violent turn with the emergence of the All Jharkhand Students Association (AJSU), modelled on the All Assam Students Union (AASU) fighting for a separate Gorkhaland.
“In the late 1980s, nakabandis, train and truck bombings became routine,” Sinha says. “Bandhs, violence became the order of the day. The Indian government could no longer ignore the demand for a separate state of Jharkhand.”
Yet, as the movement for Jharkhand became more noticeable at the Indian level, it paradoxically became increasingly cut-off from the tribals. As Victor Das wrote in 1990, “The movement in the present scenario has proven to be a hallucination for the downtrodden. They listen to the harangues of their leaders during election campaigns and then go back as usual to their places of work to further inflate the wealth of their exploiters.”
In 2000, nevertheless, Jharkhand was officially born.
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The disappearing tribals of Jharkhand
“Aaj humare paas Advivasiyon ka rajya hai lekin Adivasi kahin nahi mil raha (Today we have a state for Adivasis but one cannot find an Adivasi anywhere),” says Satnarayan, a young boy in his twenties from the Oraon tribe.
Sporting curly hair and a boyish beard, Satnarayan raises an alarm. “Tribal villages are hollowing out. All the men are going to work as labour to other parts of the country because there are no jobs, no work here,” he says. “There will soon be a day when tribals will be found only in museums.”
Satnarayan, who lives in Rajmahal district of Jharkhand, himself worked in Kolkata before he had to return to take care of some family matters. His two brothers are in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
“Everyone wants to win reserved constituency seats. But nobody wants to talk about what happens inside those seats,” Satnarayan says.
According to the socio-economic caste census of 2011, in Jharkhand, only about 7 percent of tribal households had a member earning more than Rs 10,000 a month, only about 13 percent of tribal households owned two, three, or four-wheelers, or fishing boats, and only around 5 percent of households had members paying income tax.
“It is a matter of record that the tribal population has shrunk. What are the reasons? Does anybody want to truthfully look at the impending extinction of the original inhabitants of this land?”
The fall in the tribal population in Jharkhand is easily corroborated by data. In a paper published in 2004, titled Demography of Tribal Population in Jharkhand 1951-1991, Arup Maharatna and Rasika Chitke wrote that while tribal people constituted around 36 percent of the total population of the region in the early 1950s, by the beginning of the 1990s, their share had already declined noticeably to around 27 percent. In the subsequent two decades, their population witnessed a further, albeit marginal, decline to 26.2 percent.
The decline, Maharatna and Chitke argued, was accompanied by a rise in the share of the Scheduled Caste (SC) population during this period. The decline in the numbers of the tribal population has to be attributed to “regional failures”, they further argued, as the decline in their population in Jharkhand or erstwhile Bihar does not “tally with the (highest) growth rate of the ST (Scheduled Tribes) population at the all-India level”.
The authors attributed this paradox of the declining tribal population in Jharkhand to substantial tribal outmigration and slower declines (or even sometimes increases) in mortality levels of the tribal population in the region.
The BJP, however, insists that the reason for the decline in tribal population is unchecked, even state government-supported, infiltration from Bangladesh.
Addressing a rally in Hazaribagh last month, Modi said, “Demography mein itna tej badlaav, Adivasiyon ki, Hinduon ki ghatti hui abadi, main aapse poochta hoon, Jharkhand mein ye badlaav aap logon ko dikh raha hai, ki nahi dikh raha hai? Bangladeshi ghuspaithiyon ki sankhya teji se badhi hai, ki nahi badhi? (The huge change in demography, the declining population of Adivasis and Hindus, I ask you, is this change in Jharkhand visible to you or not? Are the numbers of Bangladeshi infiltrators increasing rapidly or not?).”
In July this year, BJP MP from the state Nishikant Dubey went so far as to demand that parts of Jharkhand that fall along the border with Murshidababd and Malda districts in West Bengal, and Kishanganj and Katihar in Bihar, be declared a Union territory in order to deal with the increasing number of “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh” in the region. This, he said, has led to a fall in tribal populations.
In September, the Jharkhand High Court ordered that an independent fact-finding committee be constituted to probe the “infiltration of Bangladeshi immigrants” in the Santhal Pargana region. Meanwhile, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) lodged a money laundering case to investigate the “syndicate” behind the alleged infiltration and trafficking of tribal girls by Bangladeshi men.
The old ‘Naya Basti’
“There is a full syndicate behind this infiltration, madam,” says Kalicharan Mandal, an RSS functionary in Rajmahal district, which lies on the Jharkhand-West Bengal border. “They cross the border, stay in madrasas and masjids here for a month or two, where they are provided voter-IDs and Aadhar cards.”
“They then start some small shops or start working as labourers here,” he says as he sits in his two-story home with bright, saffron walls. The walls are adorned with images of V. D. Savarkar and B. R. Ambedkar. “All this while, they keep an eye out for young tribal girls. They go to their homes, make acquaintance, and before you know it, these girls marry them and start having children with them.”
“Poore ilake ka demography change ho gaya hai (The demography has changed entirely).”
A few kilometres from his house, Mandal points to the “Naya Basti”, a Muslim village on the outskirts of Rajmahal. Most people in the village walk barefoot on vast, muddy, green pastures of land.
“They have made a lot of money,” says Mandal. “This entire basti is new—that is why it is called Naya Basti. They have come and captured the whole area, and built illegal houses right next to the railway track.”
A few steps from the railway track Mandal is talking about, against which dozens of kuccha houses stand, a group of women, some with infants in their laps, are making beedis in a huddle. “We make 170 rupees or so for 1,000 beedis,” says 18-year-old Zubeida. “It takes up to 3 days to make 1,000 beedis.”
How long has she been staying in this village for? “All my life, I was born in this village,” Zubeida, the most articulate of the women, and also the most fluent in Hindi, says, before she walks towards her home.
“They want to know how long we have been staying here for,” she tells her father, who pulls out a tattered charpoy for everyone to sit. “I was five years old when I came here. It has been about 50 years since then,” Mohammad Misar, a small-time farmer, says. “My parents are buried here.”
But where did they come from? “My place of birth was here in Sahibganj itself, less than 40-50 km from here,” he says. “What do I say about why we had to come here? We had large swathes of land there, which were occupied overnight by the refugees who came from Bangladesh after the 1971 war,” he adds. “And now, years later, they say ‘Mias’ are infiltrators. Who are the real Bangladeshis?” Misar says as he summons one of his daughters to bring a green file with documents stacked carefully to corroborate his claims. “See these papers,” he says.
At a short distance from the Naya Basti is Satnarayan’s village inhabited by the Oraon tribe. “There is no Bangladeshi infiltration in this area,” Satnarayan says. “We have only heard of it on TV.”
Erasure through the Census
At a time when the demand for a separate religious code for the tribals—the Sarna code—is at an all-time high, the narrative of conversions to Islam and Christianity also questions the basic intelligence of the tribals, Lakshmi Narayan says. “Tribals are saying in one voice today that we are not Christian, Hindu or Muslim. We are Sarna—the worshippers of Nature.”
The RSS, which started its work in the region in the 1960s in order to combat the influence of the Church—often by mirroring their modus operandi of working through healthcare and education—is extremely patronising towards the tribals, Narayan says.
“For them, the Adivasi is forever illiterate, innocent and vulnerable. The Adivasi always needs saving,” he says. “When we are speaking for ourselves, our voice is brushed under the carpet.”
The RSS and the Sangh Parivar have always maintained that Sarna is not outside the Sanatan Dharma, that all Adivasis are, in fact, Hindu.
Religious categories have been documented in the Indian Census since 1872. However, while in the pre-Independence censuses, the data on religion was being presented under nine major religions namely Hindu, Muslim, Tribals, Christian, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Parsi, Jew, and others, since 1951, ‘Tribals’ as a religious category was removed, and clubbed under the category of ‘Others’.
“This was basically a grand conspiracy to turn Adivasis into Hindus,” Satnarayan says. “Why blame the RSS for Hinduising the Adivasis now? The Congress did exactly the same.”
“Nobody in this country has the right to show concern about the decline of the tribal population,” he adds with deep cynicism. “They all want Adivasis to be in a museum.”
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
