A lot is happening this week. Opposition parties are united in their demand to ask the government to reduce the 18% GST on life and health insurance – an issue that affects 450 million middle-class people. Headlines from Bangladesh. Vinesh Phogat. The silver lining of Neeraj Chopra and Indian hockey.

Some topics are not given the space they deserve in the newspaper and are not suitable as content for clickbait.

On June 29 this year, a young Bharat Adivasi Party MP representing Banswara led a unique march. His supporters carried blood samples in protest against a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister’s statement that he had suggested a DNA test to prove that he was a Hindu. The young MP stood firm – they were Adivasis who did not need a DNA test to determine their identity.

Today, on International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, your columnist writes about an issue that is often ignored: the rights of indigenous peoples in the last decade of the ruling regimes.

First, here is the balance sheet of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in India’s 2024 budget:

• The term “Scheduled Tribe” appears only once in the budget speech.
• The funds for the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, a constitutional body, were cut from Rs 22 crore to Rs 20 crore.
• Prime Minister Jan Jatiya Vikas Mission budget cut by 62%.
• Funding for the National Tribal Welfare Program fell by 10%.
• The development of particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTGs) received only Rs 20 crore.
• Expulsion and expropriation

According to the Xaxa Committee on Tribal Communities, over 40% of those displaced by development projects are tribals. The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023 was rushed through the Lok Sabha in just 38 minutes, with only four MPs participating.

This bill relaxes the approval requirements and provides blanket exemptions that affect forests, wildlife and indigenous communities. For procedural reasons, the bill should have been referred to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change for scrutiny. Instead, it was referred to a joint parliamentary committee comprised of BJP MPs. The committee approved all the changes, despite six MPs filing dissenting submissions.

Between June 2022 and July 2024, over 1,000 projects were approved for forest clearance, while only six projects were denied approval between 2018 and 2022. Interestingly, at least four companies that top the electoral bond issuers’ list are notorious for violating forest and tribal rights.

Questions in Parliament have revealed that the Rs 72,000 crore Great Nicobar Project will involve felling 10 lakh trees and change the face of the ecologically sensitive area.

Consider the following:

• The Nicobar Tribal Council withdrew its clearance certificate for the project.
• The government has not consulted the original inhabitants, the Shompen (a PVTG tribe) and the Nicobarese.
• The Anthropological Survey of India was also not consulted.

mismanagement

In a speech to the House of Commons, the Finance Minister claimed that the BJP government had protected the rights of Scheduled Tribes (ST) in India. But the situation on the ground tells a different story. There are over 10,000 vacant seats in the Eklavya Model Residential Schools across the country. The Venture Capital Fund for Scheduled Tribes (VCF-ST), announced two years ago, is still not operational.

Socioeconomic indicators for the ST population in India are also worrying. Six out of 10 ST women and seven out of 10 ST children suffer from anaemia. Four out of 10 children above the age of six have not received any schooling. Five out of 10 ST populations belong to the lowest wealth quintile. Crimes against STs increased by 14%, with Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra recording the highest number of cases of assaults on ST women and children.

Homogenization

In 2022, the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes published a book titled “Contributions of Tribal Leaders in the Freedom Struggle”. The book, which was sharply criticised for downplaying Adivasi resistance to caste structures, is a copy of an e-book published by the Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (ABVKA, an RSS offshoot focused on organising religious events in tribal areas). At the time, the NCST was headed by a former member of the ABVKA. In fact, both BJP and RSS often refer to the ST population as ‘Vanvasi’ (forest dwellers) rather than ‘Adivasi’ (indigenous people), reflecting their long-standing stance. The ABVKA runs 21,000 projects in more than 16,000 tribal areas, most of which are religious in nature.

These numbers were achieved in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. In 47 ST reserve constituencies, the BJP’s number of seats fell from 32 in 2019 to 24, while that of the opposition rose from six in 2019 to 19 in 2024.

As the world celebrates International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, Adivasi communities in Hasdeo, Singrauli, Talabira, Gare Pelma, Chhindwara and elsewhere are resisting the takeover of their jal, jangalAnd Subscribe.

We stand by them as they fight the good fight.

(Research credit: Anagha)

(Derek O’Brien, MP, leads the Trinamool Congress in the Rajya Sabha)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author