Power
to the Native
The
Jarawas in the Andamans need to be protected as well as empowered to choose
their own modernity. A new, more imaginative policy framework might help.
By Zubair Ahmed
There are two thousands square miles of
country teeming with food for the Jarawas and unoccupied by any human being.
Why must they keep coming over to our hundred square mile settlements and keep
killing our wretched convicts?
Lt. Col. Michael Lloyd Ferrar
Chief Commissioner (1921-33) Andaman
Islands , writing in March 1926
The advent of the British colonialists in 1858 to set up a
penal settlement in Andaman Islands posed a
challenge to the tribals inhabiting the islands. The Jarawas resisted attempts
to colonise their land and lives. Even after Independence
A policy of “isolation with minimal intervention” was
brought into force in 2004, an important contemporary watershed. With the
passage of time, and an ineffective implementation of the policy, the Jarawas
remain caught between two worlds — and secure in neither.
While the murder of a Jarawa child by a fellow tribesman in
Tirur and the associated legal conundrum is making headlines worldwide, one
pertinent question not being dealt with is the ongoing sexual exploitation of
the Jarawa women by outsiders. It obscures the fact that first, a crime has
been committed by someone who breached the reserve and sexually exploited a
Jarawa woman.
In all these years, the state has failed in securing the
reserve against poachers, who exploit the tribe as well as prey on forest
resources. More unfortunate has been the inability to sensitise the settlers
living along the fringes of the Jarawa Tribal Reserve and even the islanders
about the rich “human heritage” and the particular vulnerabilities of the
Jarawa community. This has been an opportunity missed to rope in the large
settler population of the islands as the protectors or at least well-wishers of
the tribe.
In contrast, the level of illicit contact has increased
manifold in all three sectors — Middle Strait
The changed realities and the bad press the Andaman and
Nicobar administration got from across the world, particularly after a video of
Jarawas dancing for tourists in lieu of food surfaced in 2012, did force a
re-look into the policy. A committee of experts set up in 2011 went on to make
the rules, regulations and laws governing the tribal reserve more stringent to
ward off “undesirable” elements. An overenthusiastic administration tied itself
up in knots in creating an unrealistic 5-km buffer zone for the tribal reserve.
It turned the settlers firmly against the administration and also the Jarawa
community.
The appointment of anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya as the
director of the Port Blair-based Andaman and Nicobar Tribal Research Institute
(ANTRI) in 2013 was a significant one. Pandya not only convinced the reluctant
and over-cautious administration of the islands to look beyond the existing
policy framework, but he also played an important role in bringing drastic
changes in the tribal welfare agency, the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti
(AAJVS), and in empowering and re-orienting the grassroots workers who deal
with the Jarawas on a daily basis.
Earlier, the trained social workers of AAJVS, fairly
competent in special tribal languages, were only meant to do the bidding of
bureaucrats. Under Pandya, they went back to listening to the Jarawas and
implementing policies with their informed consent. For instance, though the
Jarawas preferred to be in their “traditional attire, when they are assisted by
the AAJVS to move from one place to other by jeep or boat, they are keen to
cover their body. It is, perhaps, a way of resisting the tourist experience and
expectation of the Jarawa as a “naked exotic” people.
An educational project, ang-katha, was also implemented
inside the tribal reserve for Jarawa children, primarily aiming to prepare them
for a bi-cultural future, where a Jarawa child could operate in the
“mainstream” but also be able to retain her own identity with pride and
dignity.
Two additional points also need to be made here. The first
is about the Indian media, which in the case of the islands and the Jarawas,
always seems to be taking a cue from what the foreign media publishes. It needs
to play a far more pro-active role, including that of a watchdog. The second is
the lacuna in the local education system where there is little, if anything,
about the local geography and history of the indigenous people. When what is
proximate is made so alien from the very beginning, a long-term and meaningful
resolution is not going to be easy to come by.
Looking at the current incident in a larger context will
also help to identify that which is more important and relevant. We have
miserably failed in dealing with the honour killings by khap panchayats of
Haryana and the Dalit killings in Tamil Nadu despite a whole gambit of laws and
constitutional protection. So, instead of discussing the honour killing by a
Jarawa, a tribe that occupies a very special position due to its geographical,
historical, cultural and social condition, the focus should be on a policy
framework, where the Jarawas are protected from the evils of “civilization” and
be allowed the time and space to decide their own future.
The writer is a Port Blair-based
journalist and researcher.
