What does independence really mean to them?

Sukumaran C. V.

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh wathced over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god has been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ. —Arundati Roy (Broken Republic)

                                               A Dongria Kondh young man in the Niyamgiri Hills

Our Constitution begins with “WE, the people of India,…” and 'WE' have celebrated  one more Independence Day. We do have enough achievements to be proud of as an independent nation, even if our bickering in the name of religion and caste still haunts us. We are the world's largest democracy and whatever its shortcomings are, of course there are many, our democracy is certainly not a failing one. Its moorings are strong and safe.

But instead of being conceited on our achievements, we have to look into the issues that mar the democratic nature of our democracy. We have to include the marginalised sections of people into the ambit of “We, the people of India”. Many people, especially the tribals and the dalits (and the females too?) are still not included in it. They are kept in the periphery of the democratic space by the privileged ‘WE’ category of people and WE plunder their hills and vales as the colonial masters have plundered Us! 

Arbitrariness is anathema to democracy. To show how arbitrarily Indian democracy behaves with its own people, I am quoting from the paper Dams, Displacement, Policy and Law in India prepared by Harsh Mander, Ravi Hemadri and Vijay Nagaraj: 

Nanhe Ram did not know then that a gigantic thermal power complex was being planned in the neighbourhood of his village, at Korba, for which the two rivers of his ancestral habitat, the Hasdeo and Bango, were to be dammed. Fifty-nine tribal villages like his were to be submerged, 20 completely and the rest partially, along with 102 square kilometres of dense sal forest, to create a vast new reservoir of 213 square kilometres. No one consulted with or even informed the 2721 families of these 59 villages, who had been condemned to be internal refugees to the cause of `national development’, about the project and how it would alter their lives so profoundly and irrevocably. Some 2318 of these families, or an overwhelming 85 per cent, were tribals or dalits, who like Nanhe Ram were the least equipped by experience, temperament or culture to negotiate their new lives amidst the ruins of their overturned existence.

A democracy should not push the people who don’t follow the lifestyle of the mainstream society into the woes described below:

When I am on a boat in the middle of the reservoir, and I know that hundreds of feet below me, directly below me, at that very point, lie my village and my home and my fields, all of which are lost forever, it is then that my chest rips apart, and I cannot bear the pain….[A record of Nanhe’s  story as told to the paper writer in resettlement village Aitma in 1997] 

Natural resources should be used democratically and in a sustainable manner. But ‘WE’ deprive the tribals of their natural resources for the 'progress' of our consumerist economy and WE don’t mind whether the vulnerable people survive or not. After having submerged thousands of tribal villages by building big dams, now WE let the corporate mining giants like the Essar, the Posco and the Vedanta to devastate the still remaining rivers and hills and forests of these hapless people. WE are least bothered when the manifold flora and fauna and the different tribal cultures which see the hills and forests as living deities are bulldozed by the corporate mining greed. The world's biggest democracy makes a huge number of tribals  refugees on their own land and these people who do have a sustainable life style are being shot at, looted and raped by the biggest democracy which worships the Free Market as its Supreme Deity.

                                                             Inside the Niyamgiri Forests

If the tribals in other parts of India are displaced by our undemocratic ‘development’ projects and the biggest democracy's innumerable secret MoUs   with the corporate mining business; in Kerala, it is the 'civilized' settlers who virtually eliminated them by appropriating their lands. In 1975, the Kerala Legislative Assembly passed a Bill to restore the alienated lands to the tribals, but till date it is not implemented because the settlers belong to the WE category of people and their victims don’t. The pauparised tribals are now a hapless lot infested with myriad grievances like the increasing number of unwed mothers and alcohol addicted menfolk—the handiwork of the 'civilized' WE, the people of India! None of their arable lands is now in their possession and almost all their fruit and tuber yielding hills have been encroached and deforested. They dwell in the periphery of our democracy as outcasts or rather as an eyesore to the mainstream 'WE' the people. 

(When a book named Keralathile Africa was published in 1963 depicting the pathetic condition of the enslaved Adivasis of northern Kerala, the then Kerala government tried to initiate disciplinary action against the author K. Panoor, who was a government employee, by invoking the Defence of India Rules! In the book you can see a graphic description of a sort of annual slave market from which the feudal lords selected their slaves to toil in their fields for one year, till the time of the next market. Can you believe it? But it is not fiction. (The book is still available in print. It is published by the SPCS)

On May 22, 1981 eighteen actors of the street play Naadugaddhika (the title indicates a tribal art form), including its author K. J. Baby, were arrested and jailed and the play was banned. (The play tells the story of how the Adivasis have systematically been deprived of their own forest lands and virtually degraded into the status of bonded slaves by the 'civilized' society.)  

If the environment, the tribal and dalit people and the females in the biggest democracy continue to be at the receiving ends and if the democracy denies space to these space-less sections of the nation; and declines to hear their voice, our celebration of Independence Day each year will only be a meaningless ritual. Arbitrariness has no place in a real democracy. ‘WE’ have to cleanse our democracy of its rot within by making it all-inclusive and really democratic. Now it has a tinge of fascism in its heart and that will ruin it if allowed to continue.

Can "WE" deny the plain and simple (or rather the terrible) truth Arundati Roy points out in her Broken Republic?

If you pay attention to many of the struggles taking place in India, people are demanding no more than their constitutional rights. But the Government of India no longer feels it needs to abide by the Indian Constitution, which is supposed to be the legal and moral framework on which our democracy rests.