Agency and Political Will in Scheduling Areas: An Interview with Dr. Saagar Tewari
The SLR Team sat down with Dr. Saagar Tewari to discuss his latest book, Islands Against Civilization: Anthropology, Nationalism and the Politics of Scheduling 1918-1950, a history of the demarcation in law of indigenous identities and homelands. In this part of the interview, our editors Abhinav Jha and Ritu Ranjan discuss various political pushes for tribal governance, and what these reveal about modern India as a whole. The first part of this interview is available here.
During your research, what specific instances or forms of agency did you observe that tribal communities exhibited during that period, and how did they shape or challenge the legal and administrative approaches to tribal governance? In what ways might these historical acts of resistance or negotiation inform how we understand contemporary tribal engagements with statutes like the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act (PESA), which are ostensibly meant to empower tribal communities, but are top-down in their approach and are often sites of contestation themselves?
When the Land Acquisition Act was being framed by the last Congress government, I once
heard Jairam Ramesh say that after the Act was drafted, both lobbies, which were contesting to get clauses favourable to them inserted in the draft law, were unhappy with him. He told himself that if both sides were unhappy, I must have done a good job. I think that is a good position to take. Law should not be lopsided. Law is required for strangers to work together. There is no necessity for law if we work only with our kin networks. Why does caste have such a stronghold over our minds? Because if you are of the same caste, you are not a complete stranger. Law is required when strangers try to cooperate and do something together. In case of a conflict of interests, there should be some way of dispute resolution.
This question can be dealt with in two ways. In the colonial period, there were bodies such as the Adibasi Mahasabha in Chhota Nagpur and the Naga National Council in the northeastern part of the country which were exhibiting agency and were speaking about tribal interests in a very modern parlance. Adivasi Mahasabha is a different kind of setup because it does not talk of one tribe or one kind of tribe. Even in the Naga National Council – ‘Naga’ is a generic term encompassing many tribes within its fold. Like ‘Adivasi’, it is an umbrella category, but these many groups are trying to form a united front to further their interests and advocate for recognition in the framing of future legislations. They are also carving out an idea of a territorial homeland, where tribes can function as autonomous agents.
Jharkhand, for instance, came into being in 2000, but the idea of it dates back to the 1920s, if not earlier. The earliest use of the word ‘Jharkhand’ that I have seen is from the late 19th century. So, what was the idea of Jharkhand then and what did it become in the 1930s-40s subsequently? The state of Jharkhand as it now exists, someone like Jaipal Singh Munda would say that it is a moth-eaten Jharkhand, in the same way that Jinnah said it that he received a moth-eaten Pakistan. So, this notion of interest representation and how do tribal communities, through modern leadership, try to interact and negotiate with it, the sense of future, and what lies in the future – all these are ideas which were not concretised when they first arose.
Our entire modern history is very deeply informed by the carving out of Pakistan. Pakistan was carved out in 1947, but the term itself was coined in 1933. It was taken up by the All-India Muslim League in 1940. Something was happening in that period, that a term which got coined in 1933 became a reality in 14 years. It is fantastic, I mean. There is a great Italian filmmaker named Pontecorvo, who made a movie named Burn! The film is set in the Caribbean islands, sugar plantation, and focuses on the imperial politics there. One of the protagonists says that sometimes a string of contradictions built up over 100 years gets played out in 10 years. So usually society moves with… relative stability. But such seeming stable conditions does not mean that contradictions have been resolved. They just get subsumed, and are ever-present under the surface of peaceful conditions. So whatever contradictions Indian society had in the mid-19th century onwards and into the early 20th century, got played out in 1930s and 40s, and that complex dynamic created Pakistan.
This creation of Pakistan then clouds over all other forms of territorial demands. In the case of Jharkhand movement, for instance, the other side, the people who are opposing the demand of Jharkhand, were saying that “ye toh Pakistan jaisi hi baat kar raha hai” [they are demanding a separate state like Pakistan]. In reality, the demand was of a separate state within the Union of India. It is not a separate state in the sense that we imagine today – fixed boundaries, borders, guns totting at each other. That was not the scenario back then. It became so because of a wide variety of reasons. So, my only advice is to see things in the context of the times that we are talking of and not let this creation of Pakistan hang over our heads for eternity. It was a very new idea even then, seven years is nothing. What is seven years in history? What was going on? The devil lies in the details!
As for internal contradictions, if you look at the whole geography of Indian subcontinent, Pakistan is in the northwest. In one sense, the northwest and the northeast are distinct from the peninsula of the tribal belt in the sense that they are situated on international borders. And when any community or group is situated on an international border, there are other state forms that they can negotiate with. You simply have to cross the border, go over to the other side and demand the fulfilment of a wish list. In return, we will do this which takes care of your interests. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. And such negotiations have usually happened all across human history. Imagine Second World War – for 200 years before the Second World War, the British were worried about the Russian threat. But the Russian threat was envisaged coming from the northwest… From Khyber Pass etc. and the northwestern part, which is now in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That was supposed to be the place where the empire was most vulnerable at. However, when the threat actually came, it came from the northeast. And not from the Russians, but from the Japanese. Japanese victory in the east was spectacular. This is not to emphasise the enormity of the Japanese threat from the Northeast but to highlight how quickly they transformed the landscape of the Second World War. To counter it, the British gave guns and ammunition and trained the Nagas to fight on their behalf. The Nagas fought and stopped the Japanese. Japanese could never cross Imphal-Kohima. But after the Japanese threat retreated and the Second World War ended, here you had a group of people who had guns, who had the training and who could negotiate because they were on the international borders with other state actors.
In Peninsular India, (and I am just giving this as an example to help you imagine the complexities of the time), there is no international order. So, the number of state actors are rather limited. You cannot deal in the same manner with a potential ally in the Peninsular India as you would do in the northwest or the northeast. It is a closed landscape surrounded by the Indian Ocean and all of it is under a single state. So that is why perhaps, at a certain point in time, princely states become important because they are state forms, and they have legitimacy in people’s minds. A lot of those rajas actually became member of parliaments and MLAs post 1947-50.
Similarly, if you talk of a later period such 1980-90s, what were the Maoists doing? They were also tapping into that vacuum, and some tribes did go over to their side as well. So, it is this lack of state actors in Peninsular India which creates a different kind of scenario than when you are at an international border. And it is this which constricts or enhances the agency of the tribes – their own position and geography. One of the greatest historians, Lucien Febvre, has a book called A Geographical Introduction to History, which argues that geography determines history. The first principle of diplomacy world over, which very often rulers do not pay enough heed to, is that you cannot change your neighbours. It is impossible to change your neighbours. If you have a bad neighbour, you have to deal with it because you cannot relocate and the human state forms still has to evolve a technology that would allow them to lift their land, populations and place themselves elsewhere on the globe. So, geography i.e. space determines human potentiality, agency and it creates a context in which the human drama gets played out.
Like scheduling, modern laws themed around control of populations also club disparate areas together; AFSPA, for example, covers a lot of areas where the majority of the population are scheduled tribes or religious minorities. How do you think that scheduling, with its logics of control and segregation, differs from such laws, or do these laws merely replicate scheduling in new forms?
I do not know enough about AFSPA to comment on it, but scheduling differs from other laws in the sense that scheduled areas provided territorial solution to a minority demand. Tribes are the only minority community, apart from the Muslims, to receive a territorial solution, that is, land enclaves as safe zones against the threat of a cultural genocide. Administrators like Hutton and Mills borrowed the model from Melanesian islands and superimposed it on India, proposing that all hilly and forested regions inhabited by tribal populations should be ring-fenced and excluded from constitutional reforms. Nationalists, despite their opposition to the idea of scheduling, had to ultimately accept it to accommodate minority rights in the emerging post-war world order. The territoriality aspect of the scheduling discourse offers a unique model of decentralised administration, making it a case worthy enough to study.
While the first list of scheduled areas published in the 1950s reduced the number of scheduled areas, subsequent decades saw significant additions, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. These additions happened despite the fact that Congress nationalists were in power at that time, the same people who had opposed the idea of scheduling in the first place. This expansion suggests the need to study scheduling beyond 1950, examining what political, social, or administrative contexts drove these changes. My work stops in 1950, but I hope others take up that story.
With respect to this book, I have a sense of satisfaction that I cannot do anymore. I gave it my best and I hope the best is good enough, that people read it for some time – at least 20-30 years, and that it stays in syllabus and people get interested. For example, youngsters like you have read it and engaged with it. If not anything, as future lawyers, if a case of a tribal will come to you, you will see it with a different lens. It will not be a continuation of the lens of the earlier Ghurye-Elwin debate. That is the misnomer that I attacked centrally, that it was not about two individuals, but it was about two lobbies, and they were both speaking on behalf of tribes. And when someone speaks on behalf of someone, then the presumption is that someone cannot speak for themselves. Now, that is again a misnomer. People always speak. It is just that you cannot listen perhaps. Englishmen perhaps could only listen to someone who could speak in English.
Even in independent India, the situation of tribals has not drastically improved and along many parameters, their living conditions have worsened. The tribal predicament is pretty bad in terms of human development. It presents an abysmal state of affairs. So, there is something that we have also not done right since independence and constitution. We need to change something. And as one of my teachers used to say, to understand the thing is to change it. So, I have tried to understand and that is my contribution. However, someone else will have to track the story for later periods, for specific regions, and it is on youngsters like you that we all depend. There is a saying – If only the young knew… If only the old could…
1931 was the last time India saw a caste census. However, this time, the central government has agreed to include caste enumeration in the next Census, which is the delayed 2021 Census. You mention the debate surrounding this in the epilogue as well. What can a history of scheduling expose about this debate and its reliance on colonial frameworks that ascribe fixed identities to its subjects?
A history of the scheduling in the sense that you are talking about is scheduling of communities, as distinct from territories. While my book primarily focuses on territorial scheduling, I had to inevitably engage with community lists, especially while exploring the idea of backwardness and the transition of identities from ‘Aboriginal Hill Tribe’ to ‘Backward Hindus’. And that led me to the census, because in there cognitive categories were witnessing changes and shifts. And if you look at the book chapter on framing backwardness, that is precisely what I have tried to do. There is this – the committee members were mainly Indians, though there were two members who were Europeans. It sought to create inventories and lists of different communities, and for the first time it created 3 lists of Depressed Classes –, Aboriginal Hill Tribe and Other Backward Classes. It is my contention that it is this tripartite division which then becomes Schedule caste, Schedule, Tribe and OBC. Though the idea was to take them together, but separate lists were required for administrative and bureaucratic reasons such as for education – for giving them scholarships and admissions grants. And to my mind, this moment and what happened subsequently also arrested the very natural slow gradual process of caste formation.
From the early Vedic period with its fourfold Varna society, the number of castes has proliferated in this long phase of human history in India. So, from maybe a few communities to now, literally thousands of jatis. And it is this very complex landscape of identity formation that the state has now become the final arbiter of. It is these lists by the Indian state and the provincial state governments which decides who will get affirmative action benefits. So, in a sociological sense, the Indian State system has arrested a very gradual flow of caste formation. The evolution of the system has been dammed. How did a few communities from the early Vedic and later Vedic period ended up divided into thousands jatis? It is a complex story. I have only tracked a little bit of it in the twentieth century, and I came to it by accident, because of the attempt to historicise the transition from ‘Aboriginal Hill Tribe’ to Scheduled Tribe’.
The broad argument of my book, as also discussed in the first few pages of the Epilogue, is about how Aboriginal and Hill tribe is a geographically informed category. Hills and Forests of India are the abodes of Aborigines – aboriginal people. My contention is that Ghurye’s intervention and the nationalist espousal of that theoretical framework resulted in the Indian constitution willy-nilly seeing the categories of schedule tribe, schedule caste, and OBC as part of the Hindu civilisational matrix, even though the constitution is silent about it. However, my data was Western India heavy. Other parts of India can reveal different trajectories and fermentation processes at work. Essentially, I have suggested that cognitive categories in the late colonial period were not stable.
So, if I take the example of depressed classes, the category was not coined by Ambedkar. It was perhaps coined by Vitthal Ramji Shinde and Justice N.G. Chandravarkar of the Bombay High Court, when they started the Depressed Classes Mission in 1906. Ambedkar inherited this category, but he was not happy with the term. Who wants to call themselves ‘depressed’ ? Why are we depressed? What connotations did the term carry? So, in the early Round table conferences, Ambedkar even said that they were not happy with this term and want to change it. He said they would rather prefer being called ‘Protestant Hindus’ or ‘Non-conformist Hindus’. Now this suggests that up until that period, when Ambedkar made that suggestion, he had not taken a clean break from Hinduism. In fact, if you look at Mahar Satyagraha, or being at the forefront of a temple entry movement. So, he was very much considering his community people, Mahars, as part of the Hindu fold.
However, around the time of 1930-33, he snapped and decided to demand a separate electorate even if it meant categorisation as non-Hindus. This created grounds for another category called the scheduled caste to emerge. He changed the name of his organisation from Depressed Classes League to Scheduled Caste Federation in 1942. In between, Gandhi had come up with the category Harijan. And by no stretch of imagination can one think that he is talking of a group which is firmly outside the Hindu fold. No Islamised untouchable or Christianised untouchable, and there is untouchability in all religious groups, would ever call themselves as Harijan which means ‘God’s people’, but Hari has a distinct Vaishnavite connotation. So already in this very short period, one can see three different categories.
I am deliberately taking the example of a non-tribal community. Categories were unstable and not fixed. People, especially political leaders, were making competing claims and that leads to a confusion. That confusion is sought to be settled in independent India by creating these separate lists of scheduled class, schedule tribe, and OBC with the state becoming the final arbiter. But somewhere it is arresting a very gradual flow of sociological evolution which has long continued in our society. It also feeds into this recent debate on the recent Supreme Court judgement on sub-categorization within each of these categories. It is part of that history where we have to look at the epistemic shifts in knowledge and also how the taxonomies then change or are tweaked. Who is changing them? What interests are propelling such innovations and neologisms? What do they mean? These ideas are coming from somewhere and that process has to be historicised, and then perhaps we can also track it sociologically for more recent periods. Arguably, such a methodological approach creates fertile ground for coming together of history and sociology.
Sociological field methods can collect more recent data through interviews, questionnaires, and focus group discussions. That is the field method of collecting data which is synchronous – you get into a field, collect data, and analyse it. But that synchronous data has to be seen in relation with the time that has gone past. There the archive comes into play because we cannot track such changes as the dead cannot speak to us in this world. The dead can only speak to us by the documents that they have left. This creates opportunities for even legal studies scholars to take a more holistic approach of combining history and sociology.
Change has to be tracked through time. Although invisible, the hand of history is always there in the present, whether we realise it or not. Continuities and changes have to be looked for and an archival enquiry has to be conducted. Interestingly, the root word for history is the Greek istoria which means ‘Enquiry’. There is a process of establishing something as a historical fact and to arrive at a plausible argument we require hard evidence. These evidences, which also constitute building blocks of historical argument, appear as footnotes in all historiographical studies. That is how history as a discipline is different from other disciplines. We cannot say anything without a footnote. Whatever I am saying, I have to footnote and say this is coming from the time that I am speaking of. So, if Simon Commission 1930 is saying something, I have to cite Simon Commission, part, volume, whatever page number will go into a certain footnote number. Only then it travels from being my opinion to an argument. And it when that argument is widely accepted that it becomes a historical fact. So, it is a slow and gradual process which is incremental in nature. But as Marc Bloch used to say, we cannot assume the causes in history. We have to look for reasons, look for evidence and piece them together to have a relook at the past and it is this relook that I have tried to do in the book.
You describe scheduling as a form of ‘legal technology’ through which disparate groups and areas could be clubbed together. It allowed the bundling of land with similar terrain and population for ideological and governance reasons. How relevant is it today when only about 35% of the Scheduled Tribes reside in the Scheduled Areas, and about 53% of the population in the Scheduled Areas belongs to the Scheduled Tribes? What do you think is the future of this device?
Even when the British Parliament was debating the extension of scheduled areas, then called partially excluded areas, it came up in the debate somewhere that eventually these areas will become more like other areas. Thus, Scheduling was an interim measure to enable the tribes to come into their own, to adapt, and to give them more time to adapt. So, when that situation comes, then perhaps it may go. However, that must be decided by people themselves. It should not be a top-down decision.
One of the changes that was made in the text of the Fifth Schedule was, and this was introduced by Ambedkar no less, that the Parliament with a simple majority can take an area out of Fifth Schedule or it can simply say Fifth Schedule does not exist. It was not there in the earlier draft, but then the modification was introduced. This already suggests that the Constitution makers envisaged the scenario that sometime, in the distant future, this step may have to be taken. That is why it is a clause requiring simple majority even though there are many clauses which require 2/3rd majority. So, this aspect of our Constitution, if the Parliament decides, can be taken out in an instant – create a joint session of the parliament and the Fifth Schedule can be relegated to history even by 1 majority vote. I do not think that would be wise because the schedule has not been given enough leeway to work in the areas that it was envisaged to work in. Dr. Brahma Dev Sharma, whom I had the good fortune of knowing, used say that Fifth Schedule is a constitution within the Constitution. It is a constitution within the Constitution because it gives Gram Sabhas very extensive rights to decide what will happen on their land. The PESA extension is part of that imagination., Therefore, it would be a travesty if something like this can be done away with one simple majority vote. This also suggests that maybe the Constitution makers were wary of the potentiality of trouble the tribal communities can make, perhaps sometime in the distant future.
In any case, getting rid of the schedule will not be that easy. Let alone the Fifth Schedule, difficulties cropped up when the Raghubar Das government tried to amend the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act to make the transfer of land to non-tribals easier. As per the law, only tribal people can take up tribal land. For non-tribals, there is an elaborate process. So, the last NDA government in Jharkhand was seeking to make the process easier. There was intense mobilisation on the ground and despite being passed by the Legislative Assembly in Jharkhand, the bill was finally not assented to by the governor. India’s current president Draupadi Murmu was the governor back then, who is herself a Santhali. When the bill came to her, she sent it back and then it died. One can see it as an instance of adivasi agency. Even though she is part of the ruling dispensation, she took a commendable stance. To go against her own party line, she must have had thought long and hard about it and would have realised, being from that area, that the resistance that the amendment was causing would perhaps mean greater troubles if she had assented to it.
Public pressure does work. People in power are wary of public pressure. If people unite together and raise a high-pitched demand, few in the ruling dispensation would not hear at all. In a democracy, that is how things work. I think it was Lohia who said that ‘jab sadakein viraan ho jaati hain toh sansad aawaara ho jaata hai’ (when the streets turn empty, the parliament goes rogue). So, as long as the roads are filled with people and they are democratic and they are supporting or resisting, then there is a check on the legislature. If that does not happen, then the democracy will turn amok, something that has happened in our country in many instances. So, we should hope for good sense to prevail and for the voice of the people to be heard, for democracy, essentially, is about consensus. Democracy does not mean that if one has the numbers, they can do whatever they want. The word ‘Parliament’ comes from ‘parley’. To Parley means to talk. People talk, present their interests, seek modifications in drafts, and it is that consultative process, deliberation, coming together, and debate whether acrimonious or in good humour, that has the potential of creating good laws.
Good laws, if well implemented, are good for society. But good laws are hard to come by. It is a difficult process. As Jairam Ramesh says, you must take care of opposites and find the middle ground. If you tilt too much towards one side, there is a potentiality of it being a lopsided legislation and lopsided legislation does not do any good. It only creates further trouble. If the legislative process is consultative, deliberative, if people talk to each other, and if consensus is sought, then it is a well-functioning democracy. However, if consensus is done away with, that is an ominous sign for any democratic setup.
Finally, could you please tell us how we can get this book and which audiences you think would benefit from reading it?
The title of the book is ‘Islands Against Civilization: Anthropology, Nationalism, and the Politics of Scheduling 1918-50’, and it has been published by Orient Black Swan, Hyderabad. It came out in March, and it has a paperback edition which is available on Amazon. In the book, I have basically tracked ideas which went into the making of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules and tried to recreate the context in which these ideas found a life in our constitution. The book is basically an intellectual and constitutional history, so anyone who is interested in history, sociology, anthropology, law, constitutional studies, intellectual history would benefit from reading it.
The Constitution as we know is a living document. It gets amended, turned into a symbol and also consists of the schedule list in which new areas get added. A lot of current movements are also demanding extension of scheduled areas. For instance, Sonam Wangchuk has for long been demanding that Ladakh be given Sixth Schedule status. Even some of the Fifth Schedule areas in central India desire a Sixth Schedule status. The Bodoland Autonomous Council in Assam has become an example of how the Sixth Schedule can also provide for a model which can take care of tribal as well as non-tribal interests. Most of the members of the Council are Bodos, but there are some non-tribal members as well. These enclaves have become fairly progressive models of governance, even in a state as fraught and porous as Assam with its cauldron of people of many identities. So, if anyone is interested in policy studies, forest and Adivasi rights, issues of underdevelopment, internal colonialism, and the impact of Fifth and Sixth Schedule in relation to other legislations like PESA and FRA, this book can add to that conversation.
We must acknowledge that we have not treated our own people very well. I acknowledge my complicity, and my own people’s complicity in not giving the tribal population a square deal. So, I think, this book can also be a good entry point to self-reflect. We must commend the freedom fighters, nationalists, scholar administrators and Adivasi leaders, who were part of the process which created these frameworks of scheduled and tribal areas. However, we also need to see how well or not so well it panned out in independent India. So, if my book enables people to think on these issues and take the bandwagon forward, I will be a happy scholar.