By Sujoy Dhar, IANS
Port Blair : A group of tribal settlers collected at a spartan room in this capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands one evening recently to chart a course for a movement demanding the same rights as their counterparts in mainland India.
The settlers, mainly from the Jharkhand and Bihar states, stressed that their movement would be peaceful. But as they sounded the bugle of the demand for Scheduled Tribes (ST) status the scenic Bay of Bengal archipelago became a new spot of bother for the Indian government.
It is a demand that the government already confronts in several parts of the country, from Assam in the east to Rajasthan in the west.
In Assam, tribals across the state called a 36-hour shutdown from Monday to press their demand for ST status after one person was killed in street clashes in Guwahati. In Rajasthan, the Gujjars have been on the warpath for the same demand for special constitutional protection that they think will open up employment and job opportunities for the community.
Far away from the two geographically extreme states of the mainland, the demand found an emotive echo in a two-day convention here earlier this month. The Ranchi Association, as the group’s body has been known in the Andamans for decades, focussed on finetuning their demand and thereby giving the marginalised community recognition and rights.
If the huge procession taken out by the community through the roads of Port Blair before converging on the convention venue is any indication, the settlers indeed could indeed pose a problem for the government.
“Because we don’t get reservations like the Scheduled Castes (SC) and ST community in mainland India we are called encroachers here. But we were brought here for work. Now we are being asked by the government to vacate land ,” Sylvester Bhengra, general secretary of the association, told a visiting IANS correspondent.
The association has also asked for occupancy and forest rights (now denied under tribal laws), inclusion of all settlers in electoral rolls of the parliamentary and panchayat elections, primary education in the Oraon and Santhali languages, healthcare facilities and implementation of the Scheduled Tribes and Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2005.
The Act recognises the rights of STs and forest dwellers and provides a procedure for verifying and recording of the rights of the community.
“We have no ‘patta’ (land ownership document), and we cannot even take loans to start a business as banks ask for security,” said Bijay Kujur, coordination secretary, Ranchi Association.
“Right now we want people in Jharkhand, Bihar, Northeast India and in the capital to agitate for us. We can’t do it in the Andamans because this is a union territory,” he added.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands is home to diverse communities and more than half its population is made up of settlers from the mainland.
During British rule, people from the Chhota Nagpur tribal belt were brought to work here as forest labourers. They included people from the Oraon, Kharia and Munda tribes who collected here from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh. In the Andamans they are called Ranchis, after the city that was their recruiting centre.
According to the NGO ActionAid India, the community of 65,000 that comprise 13 percent of the population has been extremely marginalised.
“We think their demand is genuine. This group is 13 percent of the island’s total population but is deprived of the ST facilities. Despite their significant contribution to the Andamans’ development, they have been ignored,” said Harjeet Singh of ActionAid.
According to the group, the administration was asked by the union government to fill up ST posts with migrant tribes but it never got implemented.
Striking a dissenting note, Manorajan Bhakta, Congress MP from the region, said the settlers could be given special benefits such as government jobs but granting them ST status was not constitutionally feasible.
“When the OBC (other backward classes) status was offered to them two years ago, they did not take it. Now if we give them ST status, people from the ST community living outside their own state would also make the same demand,” Bhakta told IANS.
Virginius Xaxa, sociology teacher in the Delhi School of Economics who is manning the Rajiv Gandhi chair in North Eastern Hill University (NEHU), added: “It is a very complicated process and a lot depends on the pressure these people could exert on the government.”
(Sujoy Dhar can be contacted at [email protected])