Jarawa Baby Killing:
Open Letter to the Editor New York Times
From Prof. Vishvajit Pandya & Dr.
Madhumita Mazumdar
We write this in response to the article titled “ Baby’s killing
tests India
The article’s focus on the ethical and legal conundrum arising out
of the case might have been well conceived had it been backed up by deeper
research and understanding. Its conclusions based on comments from various
‘stakeholders’ too don’t shed any light on the complexities of the case. In
fact what the article has done is to sensationalize the issue and stoke an
uninformed debate about the Indian state’s policy of protection of its
Particularly Vulnerable Tribal citizens.
To avert this needless debate the authors would have done well to
focus not merely on the criminal investigation report and stoke the question of
Jarawa culpability in the crime but ask more pressing questions relating to the
series of immediate events and the larger conditions that led to it. In other
words it should have probed deeper into the role of the non-tribal offenders in
the case and asked why they should have entered the Tribal Reserve, supplied
alcohol to the two young Jarawa men and instigate them to abduct the baby and
kill it. If we assume that the practice of eliminating illegitimate children is
still pervasive among the Jarawa community, then the question would be why the
Jarawa would have needed the help of non-tribal intruders to carry out
the act this time? This question becomes particularly important if we go by
tribal welfare records of the practice over the last decade. First of all it is
clear that practice of killing illegitimate children among the Jarawas has
dwindled and almost stopped as a result of relentless sensitization of the
community by tribal welfare officers. Anup Kumar Mondol senior Tribal Welfare
Officer in the Kadamtala region has been at the forefront of persuading Jarawas
to end the practice and encourage adoption of such children by willing members
of the community. His and his team’s efforts have borne heartening results and
the practice of “shankhutayen” or the killing of illegitimate children has
almost disappeared.
In this context the sudden ‘revival’ of “shankhutayen” in certain
specific segments of the Jarawa reserve i.e. in the Tirur region (where this
incident happened) has to be probed more carefully. Particularly because it has
to be seen in the light of of the peculiar settler-Jarawas relations that have
manifested here both in their ‘collusive’ and in their exploitative aspects.
This is a troubling yet relevant question if one goes by the number of cases of
poaching, illegal intrusion and sexual exploitation of Jarawa women that have
been reported from this particular region over the years. There is ample reason
to believe that habitual sexual offenders who are often the cause of unwanted
pregnancies would have a vested interest in keeping alive a practice that has
the potential to shield them from both legal and social censure. It also allows
them to transfer blame onto a community that has no power to speak for itself
in a court of law. In this case Subramani the prime accused was the father of
the child and it is possible he instigated the killing in a cynical attempt to
remove evidence of his sexual offences in the Reserve.
It would therefore be a grave mistake to make easy assumptions of
culpability of the Jarawa man and bring him under the Indian state’s criminal
justice system without addressing the insidious role of the offenders in this
case.
In our opinion neither the assertion of cultural relativist
positions on Jarawa practices, nor the mobilization of old stereotypes of the
‘savage primitive ‘ nor even the invocation of labels such as ‘human heritage’
help in making sense of the events that led to the killing of the infant. The
authors should have focused not only the perceived crime but on the context
behind it. To suggest that the killing of illegitimate children among Jarawas
is a long held practice is not enough to assign blame on a community or assign
equal culpability on the Jarawa man. Prudence dictates that such instances be
understood in their own specific terms. The need of the hour therefore is to
unravel the nexus and modus operandi of the prime accused in this case and to
regulate further intrusions into the forest. In this context it may be useful
to note that tribal welfare administration has already initiated a process of
organizing young Jarawa men and sensitizing them to report cases of poaching
and illegal intrusions in the Reserve
Territory
To conclude, the question of the Jarawa man’s culpability and the
ethical and legal conundrum it has generated for the administration, remains a
needless distraction in a case where the prime accused has still a lot to
answer for. The authors of this piece would have done well if they chose to
pose the problem in ways that would have shed greater light on the
specificities of the case and the larger politics behind its slanted reportage
in the media.
Prof Vishwajit Pandya is Professor of Anthropology at the
Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology and is
also the Founder and Honorary Director of the Andaman and Nicobar Tribal
Research Institute (ANTRI).
Madhumita Mazumdar is Associate Professor at DAIICT.
