The following headlines will be familiar to an average newspaper reader in the Capital:
“12 members of Pardhi gang nabbed in city ” (The Hindu July 06, 2005) , “Cid forest cell looks for MP poachers”(A report on pardhi tribe on Times of India Jan 08, 2008), “Pardhi Tribe termed the biggest threat to wildlife” (PTI , The India Express , Jan07. 2008), “11 of criminal tribe held for dacoity in N-W Delhi” (Hindustan Times, January 17, 2000).
In recent years, a spectre of the so called “Criminal Tribes” has begun to haunt the middle class readers of newspapers in Delhi. There is a marked increase in news items which claim that a gruesome murder of an elderly couple was committed by a group of Sansis who robbed them of all their valuables, or that a woman living alone was brutally done to death in the dead of night by a group of Pardhis. There are also frequent television programmes on these communities putting the fear of the devil in the minds of the terrified spectator, and the very words “criminal tribes” have become synonymous with criminality of a mindless, violent kind.
Who are these so called criminal tribes – Sansis, Pardhis, Kanjars, Gujjars, Bawarias, Banjaras and almost 200 such communities? Is it just a descriptive label, or is it a category of some special new kind of criminals? Such a terror in the public mind is being fanned regarding these people that public lynchings of a hapless Sansi or Pardhi have already become acceptable to even civilised members of our increasingly brutalised society.
A visit to localities where most of these people drudge out their daily lives may reveal the grossest poverty and want, shocking even to those hardened eyes which daily witness sickly, hungry, unwashed, unclothed children at every major crossing in the Capital. The question then to be asked is this: if all members of such communities are merciless robbers, why then, does the community live in appalling conditions of poverty?
Moreover, even educated members of these communities, who constitute a few first-generation office-goers or professionals, are subjected to the deep suspicion and insults by the wider society when they set out to look for jobs, and at their workplaces: there is constant, relentless humiliation they have to suffer at the hands of “respectable” people. Swimming against the tide each day, they struggle to enter the virtuous cycle of education, work and respectability which has eluded them and their children for several generations. Since “criminal tribes” make such sensational headlines so frequently, the phenomenon needs to be examined historically in some detail.
The people mentioned above are a staggering 60 million in number, and fall in the category of today’s Denotified Tribes. The term “criminal tribes” was concocted by the British rulers, and entered the public vocabulary for the first time when a piece of legislation called the Criminal Tribes Act was passed in 1871. With the repeal of this Act (which was condemned by Pandit Nehru as a blot on the legal books of free India, and a shame to all civilised societies) these communities were officially “denotified” in 1952.
Intensive research on the issue shows that about 150 years ago, a large number of tribal communities were still nomadic, and were considered useful, honourable people by members of the settled societies with whom they came into regular contact. A number of them were small itinerant traders who used to carry their wares on the backs of their cattle, and bartered their goods in the villages through which they passed. They would bring interesting items to which people of a particular village and a little further away – spices, honey, grain of different varieties, medicinal herbs, different kinds of fruit or vegetables which the region did not grow, and so on.
Almost invariably, nomadic people were craftsmen of some kind or the other and in addition to their trading activity they would make and sell all sorts of useful little items like mats and baskets, brooms and brushes or earthenware utensils. Some like the Banjaras or Lambadis functioned on a larger scale, and moved in larger groups with pack animals loaded mainly with salt, and their women in addition to the salt also bartered the exquisitely crafted silver trinkets with settled villagers.
Some nomadic communities also became cattle traders, herdspeople or sellers of milk products, since they bred their own cattle for carrying their merchandise. The nomadic communities were not just useful to the villagers on a day to day basis – they were also acknowledged for averting the frequent grain shortages and famine like conditions in villages where crops 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.
There were several reasons for these communities first becoming gradually marginalised, and finally beginning to be considered useless to the settled societies. First, the network of roads and railways established in the 1850s connected many of the earlier outlying villages to each other as also to cities and towns.
The scale of the operations of the nomadic traders was thus drastically cut down to only those areas where wheel traffic could not yet reach. This was the single most important reason for the loss of livelihood of a number of nomadic communities. Further, under newly imposed forest laws, the British government did not allow tribal communities to graze their cattle in the forests, or to collect bamboo and leaves either, which were needed for making simple items like mats and baskets for their own use and for selling. These two developments had disastrous consequences for the nomadic traders.
There was one other major historical factor responsible for the impoverishment of a very large number of nomadic communities. The nineteenth century witnessed repeated severe famines – during each successive one the nomadic communities lost more and more heads of cattle which were the only means of transporting their goods to the interior villages. The cattle were in fact becoming more crucial than ever, as with increasing network of roads and railways these communities had to travel longer distances to sell their wares. Loss of cattle meant loss of trading activity on an unprecedented scale.
The British government gradually began to consider nomadic communities prone to criminality in the absence of legitimate means of livelihood. There was a parallel process taking place all along. A number of tribal chiefs, especially in the north, participated in the 1857 events, and earned the title of traitors and renegades with the British government. Elsewhere, hill tribes determinedly resisted the attempts by the British to annexe their land for establishing plantations, and to try and use them as plantation labour. A number of tribal communities, thus, would not yield to the British armed forces and consistently fought back, though whole habitations were burnt down in retaliation by the frustrated British officers deputed to co-opt them. Generally, it began to be felt that most tribal communities, including nomadic ones, were dangerously criminal. The Criminal Tribes Act was born in these historical circumstances.
A large number of communities were officially declared criminal tribes from 1871 onwards. The British government subsequently ran special settlements for them where they were chained, shackled, caned and flogged while being surrounded by high walls under the provisions of the Criminal Tribes Act. In the name of the homegrown science of “curocriminology” it was declared that they would be cured of their criminal propensities if they were given work and such an understanding had an obvious corollary: the more they work, the more reformed they would be. They could be thus forced to work for up to 20 hours a day in factories, plantations, mills, quarries and mines all through the first few decades of the twentieth century. This was an era when the Factories Act had come into existence, but the British employers were officially able to do away with those provisions of the Factories Act which restricted the number of hours of work in a day, or number of days in a week, or allowed minimal facilities at the workplace.
An important point for our purposes here is that the British government was able to summon a large amount of public support, including the nationalist press, for the excesses committed on such communities. This is because the Criminal Tribes Act was posed widely as a social reform measure which reformed criminals through work. However, when they tried to make a living like everybody else, they did not find work outside the settlement because of public prejudice and ostracization. This curious logic and anomalous situation has continued to this day.
Once more we are at a juncture when the issue of “criminal tribes” needs to be reviewed so that the wider public, 130 years later, does not end up supporting measures to “flush them out” of the existing system. What needs to be emphasised here is that police harassment and rounding up of “criminal tribes” in the last few years has not improved the crime situation on the ground. Less obtrusively and much less glaringly, news items of the following kind have also appeared in print which were earlier asserting to the contrary, confirming that the worst criminal gangs are not constituted by the members of denotified communities: “Police still baffled by attacks on farmhouse” (Indian Express, January 21, 1998), “Many sensational murders remain unsolved” (Hindustan Times, November 27, 1999).
As has happened all through the history of denotified tribes, confessions are wrested out of “busted gangs” of Bawarias or Sansis or Pardhis through a variety of savage methods which often involve abuse of their women. The National Human Rights Commission, in a historic meeting held in February, 2000 has recommended repeal of the Habitual Offenders Act, which in effect replaced the Criminal Tribes Act after independence. The Habitual Offenders Act has spelt terror to these communities for half a century, as they can be still summarily rounded up whenever there is unexplained crime. The NHRC has also promised to take steps to monitor atrocities on these communities and reorient the police training systems to change the attitudes of the police towards them at all levels. It has also accepted the need to protect denotified tribes through a comprehensive package of welfare measure, including employment opportunities.
However, no welfare measures, or recommendations by a Human Rights Commission can create a more humane public opinion – that is an autonomous process which has to begin to take place among thinking citizens on their own. These communities have merely got caught in the web of relentless historical changes encompassing colonisation, modernisation and urbanisation and they need to be supported in their severe ordeal and distress. In addition to being hunted and hounded by the police, they remain on the periphery of society because of the suspicion and active hostility of the average mainstream person.
Six crores of fellow humans wait to regain the honourable place that they once held and lost.
By: Debashis
The author is the general secretary of Rationalists’ and Humanists’ Forum of India.
Courtesy: The Asian Tribune, Dated: July 22 2011
RATIONALIST DEBASHIS 