"Criminal Tribes"

I have been struggling to find a home for this baby since 25 Sept 2007. Sent the piece to several magazines without getting a reply. Each time, I edit the piece before sending it to a new address. It looks good to me. Finally a piece of good fortune. InfoChange India publishes this piece on 26th October 2007

Presumed guilty: India's denotified tribes

In September, a mob in Bihar lynched 10 members of a denotified tribe, taking them for thieves. A probe later revealed that they were not thieves. Sixty million people in India belonging to denotified and nomadic tribes continue to suffer such discrimination

A September 13, 2007 PTI report that was carried in a number of newspapers and periodicals stated: "Exacting savage retribution for thefts in their area, a mob in Bihar's Vaishali district today lynched 10 thieves and critically wounded another, allegedly in the presence of the police, in yet another case of people taking the law into their own hands."

The story continued to unfold in the media in the days that followed. The victims were identified as Kureris, a semi-nomadic community belonging to Tajpur Banjara village in Samastipur district. There was brief national outrage when television channels beamed images of several half-burnt bodies, washed onto the banks of the Ganga, being eaten by dogs. It was later established that these were the bodies of victims of the lynching. The priest appointed to preside over the state-organised cremations of the victims revealed that police and administration officials had just dumped the bodies into the river. A high-level probe by the state police later found that the men were not thieves; they were just passing through the village when they were attacked by a mob.

The National Commission for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes sent a team to investigate the incident. The team found that there was no evidence to suggest that the people lynched had committed a robbery or were thieves. The commission was not surprised to find that the local police had extorted a 'confession' from the traumatised lone survivor of the lynching, to quickly 'solve' the case. It said in its report: "In the commission's view this is a very common occurrence among nomadic communities. Whenever a burglary or a murder takes place, the police raids the habitations of nomadic (and denotified) communities and their members are arbitrarily picked up by the police to show immediate 'results'." The commission, however, found it shocking that not just the police but the media too initially reported that the victims of the lynching were thieves.

This gruesome incident raises several questions. Who are these communities of nomads and semi-nomads? How do they survive? What lies beneath the apparently deep-rooted prejudice against these people that seems to pervade villagers, police and the administration? One must turn to history for some clues.

According to some estimates India has over 200 tribes and communities, comprising at least 60 million people who fall under the government-assigned category 'denotified and nomadic tribes' (some figures put the number as high as 120 million; there has as yet been no census of India's nomadic population). While some of these communities are also classified as scheduled tribes, scheduled castes and other backward classes (OBCs), others are left entirely out of these categories (the Kureri nomadic community is also classified as a scheduled caste in Bihar).

In pre-colonial times, nomadic communities sustained themselves through a number of livelihood options including cattle-rearing, itinerant trade, and crafts. Carrying items for barter -- spices, salt, honey, herbs, trinkets crafted out of silver, earthenware, mats, etc -- on the backs of their cattle, they traded with whoever they came across on their travels. (The traditional occupation of the Kureris is reported to be catching birds and collecting honey.)

The nomads had a good relationship with most villagers. Dr Meena Radhakrishna, an anthropologist who has researched nomadic tribes, writes in The Hindu (July 16, 2000) that "the nomadic communities were not just useful to the villagers on a day-to-day basis, they were also acknowledged for averting frequent grain shortages and famine-like conditions in villages where the crop had failed. In addition, among them were musicians, acrobats, dancers, tightrope walkers, jugglers and fortune tellers. On the whole, they were considered a welcome and colourful change in routine whenever they visited or camped near a village."

Colonial rule had a disastrous effect on India's nomadic communities. Their trading activities were badly affected by the introduction of the railways and the expansion of both the road and rail network by the British, in the 1850s. In the 1860s, the British began taking control of the forests and common pastures, armed with the Indian Forest Act of 1865. With this, nomadic communities lost access to grazing lands as well as minor forest produce needed for their sustenance and their craft.

The British colonial state looked with extreme suspicion at tribal communities that did not participate in settled commodity production. The resistance of some forest-based tribal communities to occupation of their forests also made them enemies of the state. In 1871, the colonial state passed the notorious Criminal Tribes Act to deal with these 'suspect' communities -- nomadic or forest-based -- and prepared a list of communities that were 'notified' under the Act as being 'criminal'. Members of these communities were seen to be "addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences". The Act provided for registration of members, restrictions on their place of residence, and their 'reform' by confinement in special camps where low-paid work could be extracted from them. By 1921, the Criminal Tribes Act was extended to all parts of India and new communities were continuously added to the list of 'criminal tribes'.

After Independence, the government, realising that the Criminal Tribes Act was a shameful colonial legacy, repealed the Act in 1952. Tribes that were 'notified' became 'denotified'. However, the government did not simultaneously take any steps towards finding a livelihood for members of de-notified and nomadic tribes. They were left to their own devices.

In a retrograde step, in 1959, new laws in the form of the Habitual Offenders Act were introduced in various states. Even whilst eschewing branding people of certain communities 'born criminals', these Acts retained many of the provisions of the Criminal Tribes Act such as registration, restrictions on movement, and incarceration in 'corrective settlements' earmarked for 'habitual offenders'. The bias against nomads lingered, as is apparent in the way the Acts enjoined the government to look at whether a person's occupation was "conducive to an honest and settled way of life... not merely a pretence for the purpose of facilitating commission of offences," while exercising its power to restrict the movement of the person. The police routinely used the Habitual Offenders Act against members of nomadic and denotified communities.

In February 2000, the National Human Rights Commission recommended that the Habitual Offenders Act be repealed. More recently, in March 2007, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination stated: "The Committee is concerned that the so-called denotified and nomadic tribes, which were listed for their alleged 'criminal tendencies' under the former Criminal Tribes Act (1871), continue to be stigmatised under the Habitual Offenders Act... The Committee recommends that the State party repeal the Habitual Offenders Act and effectively rehabilitate the denotified and nomadic tribes concerned." The offensive Act has not been repealed till date.

Their being branded as 'criminals' during the long period of British rule, and the absence of rehabilitation following Independence, has left a mark on the way most Indians continue to view nomadic communities. They live as outcasts, outside villages; their children are not allowed into schools; they are denied steady jobs. Villagers and even administration officials consider them criminals, and they remain easy targets for the police.

This then is the backdrop to incidents such as the lynching of the 10 Kureri youth. The government will no doubt fix the blame and 'punish' local police officials through transfers. Perhaps a few individuals from the 'mob' will also be punished. But what is needed is action and redress at a much deeper level by the State to end the prejudice, discrimination and abuse of nomadic communities, including repealing ancient colonial laws. More importantly, these communities must be afforded proper economic rehabilitation as a pre-condition for their social rehabilitation. Can we afford to let 60 million of our compatriots remain "the suffering spectators of the India travelling towards the 21st century," as writer Mahasweta Devi puts it?