Jhum (Slash and Burn Shifting Cultivation)

Jhum: Rural Sustenance under Conflict in Northeast India

[To be published in India Together http://www.indiatogether.org/ in June 2008]

Due to its intimate integration with rural society in Northeast India, it is important to understand jhum, a form of slash-and-burn shifting cultivation, as well as the salient issues surrounding this practice. It is primarily a pre-capitalist livelihood generation activity for food sustenance, and constitutes a large chunk of the labour performed by rural folk in the hilly regions of Northeast India. The system has also been affected by the numerous ongoing conflicts between the Indian state and various insurgencies in the region, causing immense hardship to those people dependent on it. In addition there are certain negative viewpoints on the impacts of the practice on the local ecology, which need a brief examination as the vested interests behind some of those arguments need to be exposed.

Introduction: Unlike many other parts of India, where even villages are in some way or the other connected to the capital market, albeit through informal means, people in the rural hills of Northeast India for the most part engage in pre-capitalist sustenance activities, with surplus produce sold in nearby bazaars. The most important and widespread activity is shifting cultivation, of primarily the slash-and-burn variety along the hill slopes. This practice usually ensures enough grains and vegetables for the entire year. Along the lines of the egalitarian functioning of most tribes in the region, this form of cultivation has men and women playing equally large roles, with women often even playing a dominant role especially in deciding the distribution of the produce and the selling of the surplus.

Now, anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is tough work. Jhum requires far more hardiness and consists of chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (often uphill) back to ones village in the evening for cooking fire. This gives an idea of how, by sheer dint of hard physical labour, the rural poor find sustenance in the region. It’s a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest, completely devoid of feudal fetters.

The timeframe for jhum is fairly strict, especially keeping in mind the heavy rainfall in the area, requiring the land to be cleared and seeds sowed in time for the monsoons. The forest land is usually cleared in December and January by slashing at shrubs, and cutting trees, while leaving tree stumps and roots. The slashed vegetation is then allowed to dry for a month or two before burning the tract of land in March. In addition to clearing the land, the burning of the leftover vegetation returns nutrients to the soil through ash and the killing of microbes allowing relatively higher yields. Seeds are then sowed, which mainly consist of cereals, vegetables and oil seeds.

The practice is usually driven by sustainability and the village or group of villages practicing jhum on one particular tract of land continue until the soil is depleted of nutrients and then move on to another allowing the former tract of land to regenerate. In earlier times, with lower population numbers, the land would be cultivated on for 10-20 years, but now it rarely goes beyond 3-5 years, due to greater pressures on the land for food. The acute time-sensitivity of the cycle is important to note as it’s the feature of the practice that is most affected by the various ongoing conflicts in the region.

Effects of the Conflict: Large sections of rural Northeast India, and their modes of commerce, now function under the sway of Indian military cantonments, which have usurped expansive tracts of land and harshly affected rural livelihood activities. Furthermore the villagers often find themselves caught in between the military and the insurgencies. Thus the practice of jhum has started getting badly affected in many parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.

Mokokchung in Nagaland is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in the town, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.

Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would practice jhum on are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.

Indian state hegemony hampering rural modes of sustenance can also be witnessed in numerous rural areas in Manipur, Upper Assam as well as regions like the Garo and Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. Rural areas in these states also often face the brunt of the extraction industry which, again, usurps or completely destroys land previously used for sustainable cultivation systems like jhum.

Intellectuals and activists in the region point out that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland and other states in the Northeast is the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, states like Nagaland, Assam and Meghalaya, become critical as gateways to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. But as a result local modes of sustenance such as jhum get affected in a very negative manner.

Interestingly, the present disruption of rural modes of production in Northeast India has just been a continuation of pre-independence British policies. This form of agricultural production and organic rural commerce has faced a history of upheaval from colonial times onwards, when British colonisers effectively severed the region from its traditional trading partners, including present-day Burma and other parts of Indo-China. With the creation of the Northeast Frontier by the British in order to protect their Indian dominion, it effectively cleaved what was once an organic commercial pre-capitalist trading region, resulting in the loss of a bazaar-type commerce, and hampering cultivation practices; something which has continued till date under Indian state-hegemony.

Impact on ecology and differing viewpoints: Ecologically, the practice of jhum has had certain experts convinced that it has a deleterious effect on the local environment, while others have often thwarted those arguments and proved that jhum in fact is a sustainable form of agricultural production best suited for the specific ecology of the hill regions.

The negative arguments against jhum have included projecting it as an unsustainable practice that depletes the soil of nutrients, reducing the forest cover, causing landslides etc. They’ve tended to come from a few specific parties, which also showcase a clear vested interest. Arguments against jhum have come from state forestry departments, development ministries like DONER (Development Of North East Region) or trade promoting entities like the NEC or the World Bank who would like to usurp forest resources of the region for the benefit of national and private capital. In addition, private entities wishing to utilise the land for specific profit-making ventures, like extraction industries, utilise these arguments to push the state to wean away local villagers from practicing jhum in order to lease the land. This has happened in the hill regions of Meghalaya and Assam where corrupt or gullible village councils leased out land to private and national corporations for extraction industries including coal, limestone, and uranium in the future. In addition, the paper industry has pushed for the growth of bamboo by villagers as a cash crop replacing an egalitarian cultivation system with one that has created a small mercantilist class controlling all bamboo production.

Apart from the obvious vested interests at play, these arguments have further been thwarted by many scientists, including studies by organisations like the Indian Institute of Science, Tata Energy Research Institute and UNESCO who have proved in different ways that jhum is indeed a sustainable form of agriculture best suited to the rainy hill regions of Northeast India, over other forms of agriculture such as valley or terrace cultivation. Studies have further proved that, contrary to arguments of soil infertility, the practice of jhum ensures that fallowness in the soil is not compromised on, and often rapid regeneration of the vegetation takes place once a tract of land is abandoned after cultivation. The connection between forest loss and jhum is tenuous at best as there are numerous other factors at play including areas where jhum is practiced, the type of vegetation regrowth and fallowness of the land. The soil erosion argument too has been disproved as soil erosion would happen with any cultivation along hill tracts, and if anything is minimised with jhum due to the retention of strong roots when the land is cleared.

This is not to completely discount the actual arguments being made against jhum. There has indeed been a small reduction in the forest cover, and certainly the food pressures have increased in the region due to greater population. However it is the source of these arguments, their vested interests and the lack of viable alternatives provided that cause eyebrows to be raised. There is no guarantee that if jhum were to be stopped, there would be an increase in forest cover and soil fertility or a decrease in soil erosion. If anything, all these problems are likely to continue with even more intensity along with the added food insecurity of the local population due to the wrenching away of their primary mode of sustenance. The arguments are all the more problematic because the region still continues to have one of the highest per-capita forest covers in the world, and its people are for the most part not found wanting for food, primarily due to practices like jhum.

If the arguments are being made mainly for legitimising the usurpation forest land for national and private capital, then those arguments need to be seriously questioned. Furthermore, it would be prudent to ensure the continuance of the basic level of food sustenance that the people in these regions have created for themselves through cooperative cultivation without any feudal fetters, rather than force the capital market upon them via land leases and cash crops, placing them in the precarious position many farmers in other parts of India often find themselves in.

Looking Ahead: As mentioned before, the practice of jhum is intimately integrated with the socioeconomic fabric of rural society in Northeast India. It’s sustainable and generally accepted as a rather egalitarian mode of production, with women playing an important economic role, and almost completely lacking in feudal fetters (unlike many other pre-capitalist modes of production). The practice plays a central role in uniting villages and clans, as well as integrating the people with local modes of commerce. Furthermore it provides food sustenance for the people, and prevents them from being subject to the whims of the larger capital market.

Ideally the state would need to work with local populations on jhum to mitigate the potential deleterious effects to the ecology rather than prevent shifting cultivation per say. This seems to be the increasingly accepted viewpoint by state governments in Northeast India and other countries where the practice is widespread, and is certainly a positive trend. The Shillong Declaration on shifting agriculture in 2004 was extensive in its coverage of jhum agriculture and several governments in the participating countries placed it on their agenda then. The governments of Nagaland, Meghalaya, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam have indicated at different levels that they would not like to suppress shifting cultivation, but rather work on ways in which it can be integrated with ecological and conservation concerns. Among the more prominent of these initiatives has been the government of Nagaland pursuing a policy from 2006 onwards of procuring horticulture produce from people practicing jhum and training government extension staff in participatory mapping, the Meghalaya government stating in 2004 that it would examine ways in which jhum can be integrated with soil and water conservation measures, and the Tripura government initiating shifting cultivation development projects from 2007 onwards. Even the central Ministry of Environment and Forests set up a task force on “Rehabilitation of Shifting Cultivation (Jhum) Fallows”.

These are positive trends, and need to continue considering the importance of jhum to rural populations in Northeast India, as well as the central role it plays in ensuring food sustenance through an egalitarian cooperative mode of agricultural production.

Revisiting Palestine in Mokokchung and Understanding the Naga Struggle

I had been to Palestine in 2005 as part of a solidarity delegation, and saw life under occupation for the first time. The Israeli military state, occupying the whole of historic Palestine since 1948, could be witnessed taking over the best land in many cities in the West Bank and Gaza, subjecting the local people to humiliating checkpoints and blockades, denying them access to grow olives on soil, which they had been cultivating on for centuries, usurping resources and sovereignty, and of course, brutally suppressing any resistance.

I never realised that I would see much of the same in a region that’s not too far away from my own homeland in South India.

Militarism in Mokokchung: Mokokchung is in the Naga Nation, as a friend told me, and it must strenuously be clarified that the Naga Nation is different from Nagaland, a state within the federal union of India...part of India’s Northeast region. The Naga Nation doesn’t have any sovereignty or realisation of an honest national aspiration…a struggle that many intellectuals and activists call the longest standing international conflict of modern times. The Indian state has ensured the complete oppression of the Naga people through what can only be termed as an occupationary presence.

Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in Mokokchung, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains of the park is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.

Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would often practice cultivation on for their sustenance, are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.

My friend said that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland was the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, Nagaland, especially the frontier town of Dimapur, becomes critical as a gateway to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. Indeed in Northeast India, the region’s first two Special Economic Zones (which are separate deregulated enclaves started by the Indian Government for promoting private company-led exports) have come up in Dimapur. Thus there are strong economic and commercial overtones to the occupationary presence of the Indian state.

Mokokchung itself is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. My friend said that last year, locals in Mokokchung agitated for land usurped by the Assam Rifles to be given back to the civic administration of Nagaland. A sympathetic and well-liked Indian Civil Service officer, Abhishek Singh, who was the District Commissioner at that time, was apparently very supportive of the cause and even went lengths to prevent further land acquisition.

He was transferred out of the region soon after.

The sights in Mokokchung gave me a strong feeling of déjà vu with my trip to Palestine in 2005. Replace the Indian military with the Israeli one, and Nagas with Palestinians; add in some desert land with olive trees, and I could well have been in Bethlehem or Hebron. The historical similarities between the Naga struggle and the occupation of Palestine are also eerily analogous, with British colonisers playing an instrumental role in the subjugation of both populations, laying the groundwork for the oppression to continue under the newly formed nation-states of India and Israel, who now play the role of regional imperialists.

Mokokchung is however, but a small manifestation of the larger Naga struggle and their quest for realising a national identity.

The Naga Struggle: The Naga Nation has been in a perennial state of war ever since the early part of the 19th century when the Nagas valorously fought and lost against the infinitely better-armed British who then soon created the North East Frontier to protect their Indian dominion. This effectively cleaved the Naga Nation in two with the creation of an artificial boundary between Burma and then colonial India. This state of war continued into the 20th century, and was particularly acute during World War II, where the region became a critical battle theatre for Allied success in the Indo-China region, with the Nagas placed at the center of the Japanese invasion.

Following the Nagas’ uprising against the British and their soldiering in someone else’s war, they continued to engage in the national struggle with the formation of the Naga National Council by the legendary AZ Phizo, and declared independence on August 14th 1947, a day before India did, with the declaration sent to Delhi, London and the UNO.

Niketu Iralu, convener of the Naga Hoho (Assembly) Coordination Committee, the apex body of the Naga peoples' struggle, in a finely written article states that:

India was about to celebrate her historic achievement of freedom the next day, in addition to being preoccupied with the trauma of the partition and the massive bloodshed that followed. It was not surprising that Delhi was not aware of what the Nagas had declared. But to the Nagas, the legal, historical and political validity of their case stands on the fact that they had clearly made known their position before India became independent. They have fought with heroism to defend their position with a free conscience, not hampered by any sense of being treasonous towards India, because theirs is not a secessionist, separatist or anti-India movement. Nagas maintain that they are not trying to secede or separate themselves from a union they had given their consent to earlier. They are clear that they are not anti-India. This is at the heart of the Naga problem. Nagas cannot be expected to just give up all that they have sacrificed and achieved, small as it may seem in real terms, for a settlement that will not recognize the facts of their history and the honour and dignity of their struggle. Yet we too know that India is not in a position to recognize Naga independence and leave Nagaland.

In an indication of the then Indian nationalists’ willingness to validate the Naga national cause, Iralu further goes on to state:

Here the story of the memorable meeting between Mahatma Gandhi and some Naga leaders should be added. A delegation of the NNC called on Gandhi at his Bhangi colony ashram a few weeks before India’s independence day. When the Nagas said that they had come to get India to recognize their freedom and independence, Gandhi said, "You must become free. I became free long ago." To their point that the British were still ruling in Delhi, he said, "My freedom has nothing to do with whether the British are in Delhi or London." He said he envisioned the new India to be like the garden outside his ashram with flowers, where diversity gave attractiveness and strength, instead of producing division and harm. He said that he considered the Nagas to be a part of the Indian household. But if they thought they were not, India would be the good neighbour the Nagas could depend on. When he was told that the Governor of Assam had threatened to use military force to control the Nagas if they refused to fall in line, Gandhi, according to the report the Nagas brought back, replied with passion that he would come all the way and be the first to be killed before any Indian bullet killed the Nagas. Our leaders returned and told our people that under Gandhi’s leadership our problems could be solved satisfactorily. Soon after their meeting with him, Gandhi was assassinated. Gandhi knew how to talk to the Nagas. He made a bid to stretch their thinking beyond political freedom with sensitivity.

Further validating this, Adinho Phizo, president of a much weakened present-day NNC, in an interview with the Sangai Express, said:

The Naga leader AZ Phizo led numerous Naga delegations to meet with emerging independent Indian leaders for bilateral talks with the aim of establishing mutual understanding and respect between the two peoples. In none of the many talks with the Indian leaders, Mahatma Gandhi, C Rajagopalachari, Ali Jinah, Gopinath Bordoloi etc. was there any suggestion of Indian political ambition to deny Nagaland independence.

It thus becomes of paramount importance to view the Naga struggle from a historic lens going beyond the post-colonial construct of the Indian nation-state. The Naga people continue to be subjected to Indian state hegemony with its obdurate constructs of nationhood and boundaries. With an even more repressive military regime in Burma, the historic oppression of the Nagas has spanned the colonial era and continues to exist in the post-colonial environment of the South Asian region. India continues to insist on nationalising space, sometimes brutally, without even considering slightly more progressive forms of federalism.

The National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaak-Muivah), the most comprehensive Naga Nationalist movement at present, gave a proposal to the Indian state that included genuinely progressive alternatives to the present standoff. This included suggestions of shared sovereignty, and the sharing of defense with India, while still maintaining India’s political boundaries and national space in international forums like the United Nations. Such initiatives, were they to be met with less pig-headedness by the Indian state, would be historic leaps in the idea of nation building along egalitarian lines. More than any other party, it is the Indian state that stands to gain, both politically as well as in socioeconomic terms. India and the Naga people would be path breakers in developing potential solutions to other conflicts of occupation and hegemony such as that of the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the Basque people in Spain. It is difficult for an oppressed people to take further strides in attempting to meet a hegemonic state mid-way, and it is important that the Indian state makes efforts along the same lines, else the current conflict stands to only serve the deleterious purpose of naked hegemony. Hegemony has never won and foaming discontent with alarming brutality without stepping back and understanding historical oppressions has never resulted in anything other than mass upheaval, and if that’s the path that the Indian establishment chooses to trod on, then the ruling elite best be prepared at some time or the other for another conflagration, one that might go greater lengths in taking them down.

Adivasi Struggles in Assam

Adivasis in Assam: from the tea gardens to the struggle for ST status

(To be published in India Together - www.indiatogether.org - in April 2008)

Across India, Adivasis (also known as indigenous peoples or "first peoples") were and continue to be primarily agriculturists and that too subsistence cultivators who live off the land in tightly knit villages and communities, with a history, fraught with oppression, that can be traced back many centuries. In Assam the history of the Adivasis really starts from the 1850s onwards and is directly connected to the highly exploitive tea industry. It's a tragic history with longstanding implications of acute relevance till date. This article briefly examines that history, the longstanding disenfranchisement of the Adivasis in Assam and their struggle to gain Scheduled Tribe (ST) status in the state while highlighting its limitations.

The bloody brew: The British "discovered" tea in the early 1820s when the native tea leaf in Assam, long brewed by the Singpho tribe, was presented to a certain military man by the name of Bruce. The British East India Company (maybe realising the possibility of regaining monopoly from China in tea production) took over Assam in 1826 from the Ahom kings through the Yandaboo Treaty. Soon in 1837, the first tea garden was established at Chabua in Dibrugarh District of Upper Assam, and in 1840 the Assam Tea Company started the production of tea on a commercial basis. The tea industry started expanding rapidly from the 1850s onwards. Vast tracts of land needed were cleared for the establishing of new tea plantations, and soon by the turn of the century, Assam became the leading tea producing region in the world.

Of course, the rapid expansion of the industry and its highly labour-intensive nature meant that a large source of labourers were required. The locals generally preferred cultivation and, if at all, would work in the tea gardens out of temporary necessity. Furthermore the locals had a rather self-sufficient pre-capitalist economy and even considered tea garden work as derogatory.

Thus, there was no landless labour class in the region to exploit. The British tried abolishing certain local agricultural means of production and imposed heavy taxes on the subsistence farming of local peasants, but it was ultimately felt that uprooted labour would be far easier to control and exploit. This is where the import of labour began in the 1840s primarily from the Adivasi regions of Central and Eastern India. The process was of course extremely violent and hazardous, obvious from the fact that the first batch of labourers in 1841, from the Chotanagpur area, all died en-route due to malnutrition and illness. Recruitment was carried on through highly abusive contractual networks. Numerous episodes of fraud, forcible recruitment, kidnapping, and torture have been recorded as frequently occurring during the recruitment process. There is even the rumour that the British orchestrated a famine in the Chotanagpur Santhal Paragana areas by stopping food supplies from reaching there so that the Adivasis would presumably jump at the opportunity to work in the tea gardens of Assam.

All the Adivasis in Assam trace their immediate history through this torturous route of indentured, immigrant labour brought in to work in the tea gardens. The socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement that they faced then continues in large part today.

Continued disenfranchisement: In Assam, the Adivasis today can broadly be divided into two communities, the tea garden workers and those who came out of the tea gardens at the end of their contracts and settled in and around the area after procuring a little land mostly through government schemes.

The condition of the tea garden workers continues to be abysmal. While Adivasis form the vast majority of the workers, there are also small percentages of other tribal communities, as well as Nepalis, Bengalis, Oriyas and so on. During the initial decades from the 1850s till the 1920s under the British, the working conditions were akin to slave labour, with flogging, rape, torture and even the throwing of dead workers in rivers. While certainly not comparable to earlier times, the working conditions today are still far from being the well-regulated environment that functions according to the Plantation Labour Act brought out in 1951 to protect the interests of workers in plantations. Even a cursory observation of the plantations today brings to light numerous violations of the Act, including inadequate or completely non-existent provisions for drinking water, crèches, schools, proper health facilities, sanitation for women workers (who form the majority of tea industry labour) and shelter. In addition one notices the expanded usage of child labour. Upon further investigation and discussions with workers, one learns that wages paid are much lower than prescribed minimum wages, no over-time payment is made, and occasional physical abuse occurs.

The conditions of the Adivasis who came out of the tea plantations and settled as cultivators around the gardens, is certainly better but not by much. Those who have land tend to be better off and more self-sufficient, while the those possessing no or uncultivable land often end up as informal labour in nearby towns and cities. Education levels, health indicators and poverty levels for Adivasis are among the worst among all communities in Assam. Many Adivasi families find it difficult to get their children into educational institutions and later on in finding proper employment. Furthermore, while Adivasis, both tea garden and ex-tea garden communities form nearly 20% of the population, their representation in the legislative assembly is markedly lesser.

Some of the more prominent Adivasi organisations like the All Adivasi Students Association of Assam (AASAA) as well as groups active with tea garden workers like the Assam Tea Tribes Students Association (ATTSA) point to a particular policy feature that is historically missing here in Assam, which is the granting of Scheduled Tribe (ST) status to the Adivasis. The granting of this status is something these groups feel would go great lengths in ameliorating the historically oppressed condition of the Adivasis in Assam, and it is often the central, if not only, point of many of their campaigns.

ST Status and its limited scope: The struggle for ST status by the Adivasis in Assam warrants an examination as it is the only state in India to deny them this basic right by taking away their tribal status after Independence and instead classifying them as OBC (Other Backward Classes).

With Adivasis having borne enormous historical oppression and exploitation, the Government of India made special safeguards to protect them from exploitation and ensure social justice since the inception of Planning in 1951. This policy of "protective discrimination" for oppressed communities includes reservation of posts in public services, guaranteed political representation, and seats in educational institutions. And while far from perfect, this policy has certainly seen positive signs over the decades for a lot of communities like, for example, the Dalits (falling under Schedule Caste status) whose education levels, human development indices and levels of franchise have steadily risen across the country, and particularly in states like Tamil Nadu, which has historically been far ahead of most other states in India when it comes to safeguarding the interests of oppressed communities through a consistent policy of protective policy-making.

For Adivasis too, ST status in many other states of India has given them greater political representation and resulted in increasing presence in educational institutions and government jobs. This has resulted in some positives for the community with some sections slowly climbing up the socioeconomic ladder. However, despite this improvement, human development indicators still show Adivasis languishing at the bottom among all communities in India. It can be safely argued that, while hardly the only solution, protection through ST status for Adivasis needs to necessarily continue.

It is under this paradigm that the struggle for ST status by the Adivasis in Assam gains particular legitimacy. This struggle has faced a brick wall in the form of either the Assam government or opposition from other identity-based movements. Among the arguments against the granting of this status to Adivasis include pointing to the historic migration of the Adivasis into the state thereby arguing that they're not tribals of the region per say. However this is a rather flawed argument to make as every community in India has a migratory history behind them, whether it's the various Dravidian communities in South India, the numerous tribes in Northeast India, or any other community. Furthermore the migration was as indentured labour, of a very abusive and forced nature, and the Adivasis continue to carry the burden of their historical disenfranchisement even in Assam. Thus to deny the community what has been deemed as a fundamental right by the Indian Constitution is indeed a continuation of that historical injustice.

It must be strenuously added however that ST status alone, while important, will not be some kind of quick-fix panacea to cure all ills. This is evident in other parts of India, where political power via reservation often ends up in the hands of the political elite of that section of society, groups like AASAA, who themselves sometimes form an oppressive ruling class within the community. There are numerous other issues that the Adivasis face such as lack of economic franchise, serious labour exploitation and social problems such as alcoholism that will require strenuous social movements to tackle.

Without serious examination of the vast gamut of issues that form the oppressive existence that the Adivasis have to contend with, mere political representation will not wish them away. A worrying feature of a group like AASAA is the single-point nature of their campaigns, without vigorously examining deeper issues such as the conditions of Adivasi workers and women, as well as struggling against internal exploitation. A far clearer analysis of labour and gender by the numerous Adivasi organisations, looking beyond just identity, and the building of movements based on that analysis would serve the community tremendously. The Adivasis have a long history of valiant struggle behind them, with one of the first rebellions against the British Empire being the Santhal Rebellion of 1855 as well as a history of egalitarian living. This legacy of struggle and egalitarianism can certainly be a guiding force in taking on the oppression that the Adivasis face today in a truly fruitful manner.