Victims of prejudice

Branded by Law: Looking at India's Denotified Tribes by Dilip D' Souza: Penguin Books, 2000; pages 224, Rs.200.

AN issue that has dominated socio-political discourse in the country since the mid-1980s is violence against Dalits and the growing assertion of their rights by these victims of centuries of oppression and social ostracism. Of late, another problem, of the same nature and magnitude, has been engaging public attention. This relates to the sufferings of people belonging to over 160 communities, mostly nomadic, which were notified as ``criminal tribes'' under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), 1871 by the British Raj. They were ``denotified'' in 1952, five years after Independence, following the repeal of the Act. Treated as ``born criminals'' under the CTA, members of these communities suffered torture and humiliation at the hands of the administration and the police for eight decades.

Things have not, however, changed much for them. There has been no great improvement in their living conditions. The police, which developed a vested interest in retaining their ``criminal'' tag, continue to treat them as ``suspects'', under the equally harsh Habitual Offenders Act, 1959. Nor has there been any marked change in the attitude of society, which continues to be prejudiced against these communities.

Several cases of police brutality against people belonging to the Denotified Tribes, such as Pardhis, Sansis, Kanjars, Gujjars and Bawarias, have been highlighted the civil rights organisations during the past five years. Among the social activists fighting for their cause is the Jnanpith-winning Bengali writer Mahashweta Devi.

Although there is a lot of material in the form of police records and reports of inquiry commissions on what led to the enactment of the CTA, serious sociological and anthropological studies on the subject appear to be few. A recent, valuable addition to the works in this field is Meena Radhakrishna's Dishonoured by History: `Criminal Tribes' and British Colonial Policy (Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2001), which examines the colonial rulers' attitude to native communities and the circumstances that led to the branding of a substantial section of people as criminals. Coming close on the heels of this major study is D'Souza's book, whose principal purpose is apparently to document the continuing police atrocities on these people in independent India.

Until the mid 1850s, people belonging to these communities, most of which were either hill-based or nomadic, were largely loved and respected by the rest of society for the many-sided roles that they played in the day-to-day lives of settled communities. They bartered with people of the surrounding villages goods such as honey, fruits and medicinal herbs, besides spices and species of grain that were not grown in the plains. They also sold articles such as mats and baskets, which they made from bamboo and other materials available in the hills and forests. As fortune-tellers and entertainers (acrobats, jugglers, dancers, singers and so on) they had the best of relations with the settled communities. The role these tribes played in minimising the hardships of the plains people during the many famines that visited the region in the 19th century, by keeping their supply lines open, has been commended by social historians.

How then, did members of these communities become so ``useless'' to the settled societies that it warranted state intervention? These tribes fell victim to the process of modernisation and urbanisation that was set in motion by the colonial rulers and were marginalised. Meena Radhakrishna, a Delhi-based social anthropologist, attributes this phenomenon to three major factors: the construction of the road and railway network which interlinked villages and connected them to towns and cities and, in the process, cut down the scale of the trade operations of these tribes; the rigid rules under the Forest Act that uprooted them from their traditional habitats and robbed them of their sources of livelihood; and the impoverishment of these people following the heavy loss of cattle during successive famines. ``Loss of cattle meant loss of trading activity on an unprecedented scale,'' since they depended mainly on their cattle to transport their produce to the villages. The tribal communities were left with no option but to leave the hills. Most of them were pushed into nomadic life in the absence of any knowledge or training in agriculture or other occupations. ``The British Government gradually began to consider nomadic communities prone to criminality in the absence of legitimate means of livelihood,'' says Meena Radhakrishna.

The other factors that led the British rulers to be tough with these communities include the participation of some tribal chiefs in the 1857 war of independence against British rule, for which they were called ``traitors and renegades''. And, the protest by the hill tribes against ``the Britishers' attempts to appropriate their traditional land for establishing plantations and to use these people as plantation labour'' earned for them the rulers' displeasure, which eventually turned into prejudice. "A number of tribal communities... consistently fought back, though whole habitations were burnt down in retaliation by the frustrated British officers deputed to co-opt them," says Meena Radhakrishna. According to her, this marked the beginning of the branding of certain communities as "criminal".

Studies have identified a few more plausible reasons for the hostility of the colonial rulers towards the nomadic communities. The police perceived members of these communities as criminals of a violent nature, who posed a serious threat to the crime detection and law and order machinery. Secondly, the revenue administration found that their nomadic life enabled them to escape the tax net and that a settled life for them would mean more revenue for the state. That was why the CTA provided for the establishment of special settlements for communities notified as "criminal tribes". The stated purpose was to "reform" them and enable them to get rid of their "propensity to commit crimes", with the help of the Salvation Army which had made similar experiments with gypsies in the United Kingdom.

Restrictions were placed on their movements and they were asked to sign at police stations at regular intervals. More than "reforming" them, the police were keen on making them "scapegoats", very often to cover up their own failures. After being operational for about 80 years amidst protests by nationalist leaders, the Act was found to be "unwarranted" and "useless" by a number of committees, and repealed.

DILIP D'SOUZA examines the conditions of the people of these communities after the repeal of the CTA. What he narrates in his immensely readable book, in effect, is a "story of the victims of prejudices". It shows how a section of the people, who were first marginalised and then labelled as "criminal tribes" under the CTA, continue to carry the stigma and suffer insults. The police, and society at large, which internalised the prejudice during the eight decades when the CTA was in force, could not come out of that mindset, even in the absence of the Act.

D'Souza narrates the dehumanised conditions under which large sections of communities, such as the Pardhis of Maharashtra and the Sabars of West Bengal live, whether in metropolises or in remote villages. (The DNTs account for about 25 million people in the country.) The people, whom the journalist-author interviews for the book, relate the misery that social and legal prejudices have brought to them in the last 50 years. Their life is marked by penury and police brutality, and they continue to be "suspects" in the eyes of the police. These people are unable to find decent jobs. Even when they manage to get some employment, they are haunted by the old stigma. A look at their abysmal living conditions would convince anyone that charges of theft, burglary and robbery often levelled against them, can seldom be true.

On relations between the people of these communities and the police, D'Souza writes: "Police attitudes towards them, towards the whole business of policing, have defined the condition of DNTs. The very word `criminal', in that it implies breaking of laws and thus requires the attention of the police, speaks of this relationship. Members of these communities talk about the police all the time; the men in uniform are a constant, nagging, threatening presence in their lives. And often enough, the relationship brings violent encounters of one sort or another, in which DNTs die."

In an interesting chapter, "Parallels in distrust", the author explains that such harassment of primitive and nomadic communities has been a "universal" problem. He quotes from reports by early explorers, and from contemporary newspaper articles to point out that the conditions of nomads in Western countries, such as the Romos, are no better than those of the Pardhis or the Sabars.

D'Souza's book is not all despair and gloom. He also records signs of growing awareness among the enlightened sections against the social discrimination against the DNTs and the active role played by a few non-governmental organisations working among them to bring to light their sufferings. Besides, he mentions instances of strong, affirmative interventions by the National Human Rights Commission and the judiciary on behalf of these victims of prejudice. Although D'Souza's book cannot claim to be a scholarly critique of the issues involved, it effectively presents the case of the deprived, often ignored by the mainstream press.