Why the Adivasis of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are running out of patience

Angry Adivasis are asserting themselves with the age-old practice of pathalgadi - declaring their right to self-governance

Early on April 26, the indigenous people, or Adivasis, of Hindehassa village in Jharkhand’s Khunti district gathered around a dark green 12-feet-tall and 4-feet-wide stone cemented at their village boundary. The village priest bathed the stone, garlanded it and lit incense sticks at its base. The stone had India’s official emblem, the Ashok Stambh, painted in white at the top. Below that, Constitutional articles that apply in what are known as Fifth Schedule areas — regions that are poor, under-developed and inhabited mostly by Adivasis — were listed, such as the village’s power to self-govern. Adivasis call this practice “pathalgadi”, erecting a stone to declare self-rule. 

Hundreds of Adivasis then headed to a special meeting organised by Hindehassa’s village council. Women, men and children sat in an open field surrounded by saal trees. Some men, carrying wooden bows and arrows, stood guard. The people faced a stage from which Joseph Purti, member of the Adivasi Mahasabha, a local activist body, told them that they needed to assert their special rights, given under the Fifth Schedule, to govern their village and its resources, including land, because the government had failed to do so.

Ten Indian states, including Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, have Fifth Schedule areas. “The government is selling off our land,” Purti said. “Pathalgadi is a way to save it.” He urged the participants to boycott government schools and schemes such as Aadhaar and vaccination drives. The participants cheered. In the background, a poster read: Village Republic.

Village after village in Jharkhand and nearby Chhattisgarh is declaring self-rule through pathalgadi virtually every week. This has shaken the governments of these states, which are ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Some states, including Madhya Pradesh, will have assembly elections in a few months. Jharkhand’s chief minister, Raghubar Das, appeared on hoardings in Jharkhand’s capital Ranchi to call pathalgadi unconstitutional. The police have arrested over two dozen people associated with pathalgadi. Adivasis, in turn, held a few police officers hostage for some time in Jharkhand. “The pathalgadi movement is getting intense,” Gladson Dungdung, an Adivasi activist in Ranchi says. “It could blow up if the government doesn’t pay attention to what the Adivasis are saying.”

Villagers gather for a meeting organised by the village council. | Photo: Ankur Paliwal

Pathalgadi has been part of Adivasi culture for centuries, especially among the Munda tribe. It is done to mark the death of elders, announce an important event, write land details and demarcate village boundaries. Adivasi leaders remember that pathalgadi became pronounced in late 1996 when the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, or PESA, was passed, which empowered village councils to self-govern in Scheduled Areas. To celebrate this, people increased the size of the stone to write the articles of the Act. Thousands of such stones were placed across Schedule Five areas. “Nobody called it unconstitutional then,” remarks Dayamani Barla, an Adivasi leader in Ranchi. PESA empowered village councils to decide how their land, water and forest produce will be used, what kind of development will take place and in which part of the village, Barla says, raising her voice and thumping the table in her tea-stall. “But the government never respected this.”

Land grab

The BJP has largely been the party in power in Jharkhand since it split from Bihar in 2000. But its development plan has marginalised Adivasis, who constitute 26 per cent of Jharkhand’s population. Activists and scholars who study Schedule Five areas say that pathalgadi is an angry response to the systematic attempts to grab Adivasi land.

In late 2016, Raghubar Das proposed to amend two laws — the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act (1908) and the Santhal Pargana Tenancy Act (1949) — which prohibit the transfer of Adivasi land to non-Adivasis. The amendments would allow the government to acquire Adivasi land for “development”. Although massive protests by Adivasis forced Das to withdraw these amendments, he came up with a new plan.

His government proposed an amendment — and pushed through in the state assembly as a Bill — in the central law of the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (2013). The amendment reduces the quorum of the village council, required to be present at a public hearing of a project to consent, from 50 per cent to just 33 per cent. The notice period given to the village council to participate in the hearing was reduced from three weeks to two. The central government returned the Bill in December last year after the agriculture ministry objected to another provision that makes acquisition of agricultural land easier.

Meanwhile, in February 2017, Raghubar Das launched the Momentum Jharkhand Global Investors’ Summit to attract investment in the state. The summit’s website extols Jharkhand’s unparalleled reserves of mineral resources, its pro-business environment and its investment-readiness. So far, more than Rs 88 billion has been invested in the state. Momentum Jharkhand meetings continue.

A woman passes the stone erected at the village crossing. | Photo: Ankur Paliwal

To make land readily available to investors, the Jharkhand government has created a land bank that has so far accumulated 2.1 million acres. Land records show that the government has banked the common land of some villages. “That has been done without the consent of village councils, which makes it illegal,” says Dungdung. PESA, the Forest Rights Act (2006) and the Supreme Court’s Niyamgiri judgement (2013) authorise village councils to decide about village resources. In Khunti’s Arki block, which has been a hub of pathalgadi, about 90 acres of village common land has been banked without the consent of village councils. Adivasis use this land to earn a living by collecting and selling forest produce, and for cultural rituals. “Land here is not property,” says Barla. “It is a heritage which we got from nature.” Repeated phone calls made to Khunti’s land acquisition officer, Pradip Prashad, went unanswered.

Land Conflict Watch, an online portal of ongoing land conflicts in India, reports that Schedule Five districts, which constitute only 12 per cent of all districts in India, are sites of 26 per cent of the total conflicts reported so far. About 87 per cent of the total conflicts in Schedule Five districts involve common land.

Photo: Ankur Paliwal

In Jharkhand, about 4,000 cases of land disputes between Adivasis and non-Adivasis are pending in Scheduled Area Regulation (SAR) courts, which were created to settle such land disputes. “Most of these cases involve politicians, and retired bureaucrats and judges who have illegally acquired tribal land,” says Ratan Tirkey, a member of the Tribal Advisory Council in Jharkhand. He remarks that the pathalgadi movement is not sudden, that the anger has been simmering. “It has just taken an organised form.”

Self-determination  

A few weeks before Purti urged Adivasis in Hindehassa to boycott government schools, some Adivasis in nearby Kurunga panchayat had painted over the name of a government school. “What’s the use of sending our kids there when there are no teachers?” Kurunga’s village head, Sagar Munda, demands. The school has two teachers to attend to all children between classes 1 and 8. Kurunga resident, Kenu Munda, has stopped sending his son to school. He says, “Although he has passed Class V, he can barely say his ABCD.” Heads of other villages describe a similar situation. Purti declared in the meeting that the village councils would now build their own schools, draw up their own syllabus, and even build their own banks and hospitals. “We will have to take governance in our hands,” he says.

Sagar Munda agrees. He cites the example of poor-quality toilets built in his village. They are too small, built at arbitrary locations and do not have water connections, he says. Residents walk a kilometre to fetch drinking water. In nearby Kochang village there are 250 families but no electricity. Health facilities, too, are in a shambles. Purti and Sagar Munda demand that the village councils should receive Tribal Sub-Plan funds to develop their villages. Every year central and state governments put money in the Tribal Sub-Plan for the welfare of tribal areas. “Much of that is diverted to non-tribal works in Jharkhand,” says Tirkey. An analysis by Delhi think-tank Centre for Policy Research Land Rights Initiative shows a shortfall of Rs 522.16 billion in the expenditure of state Tribal Sub-Plans in the country between financial years 2011-12 and 2015-16. Schedule 5 areas accounted for 66 per cent of that shortfall.    

Kariya Munda, a senior BJP politician from Khunti, denies there has been no development. “There are some roads and some schools,” he says. “If teachers are not there, from where do we bring them?” Jharkhand’s additional director general of police R K Mallick says it is “ridiculous” to boycott government schemes. They have a “funny interpretation of the Constitution” on the stones, says Mallick. He suspects that part of the pathalgadi movement is driven by Naxals to farm opium freely.

While Neelkanth Munda, a BJP member of the Legislative Assembly from Khunti, calls pathalgadi a political vendetta against his party, Kariya Munda gives it a communal twist. “This is a Christian agenda,” he says, referring to the names of the pathalgadi movement leaders. Sanjay Kumar Azad, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, echoes him by calling pathalgadi movement leaders “Cryptochristians — those who call themselves Adivasi but are actually Christians.” “They are misleading Adivasis,” says Azad. Tirkey, who is Christian, condemns their statements: “This is an old strategy to divide and rule.” Tirkey and other Adivasi leaders say that Christians have been fighting alongside other communities even before Independence to protect the rights of Adivasis. It was a German missionary, John Baptist Hoffman, who drafted the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act which Adivasis hold dear.

In both Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, the Congress Party supports pathalgadi. “We stand with Adivasis because they are demanding their rights which have not been respected here,” says Arun Oraon, secretary of the All India Congress Committee in Chhattisgarh.

Dignified space

When I asked Adivasis in some villages how pathalgadi has changed their lives, most said that they feel more secure. Kurunga resident Kenu Munda recalls that a year before pathalgadi in his village, he was celebrating moving into his new mud-house. Food was being cooked for guests. The police came in and threw plates and food. “They accused me of feeding Naxals,” he recalls. He says the policemen slapped him, took him to a field, snatched Rs 2,000 from his pocket and made him stand in the sun. “Nothing of this sort happened after pathalgadi,” Kenu says. Khunti’s superintendent of police, Ashwini Kumar Sinha, refused to comment.

Some tribal leaders and academicians describe Purti’s exhortations to villagers to reject government schemes as an “extreme form” of pathalgadi. But, argues Geetanjoy Sahu, assistant professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, this rejection of state has to be seen sympathetically and in a historical context where rights have been trampled, identity threatened, village councils sidelined, protective laws like PESA not implemented and basic facilities denied. “They are angry because they feel cheated,” says Barla. Sanjay Basu Mallick and Gopinath Ghosh, human rights activists in Ranchi, say that Adivasis are essentially exerting their right to live with dignity and govern their villages, which the government should respect. “The government will have to deal with the movement sensitively through dialogue,” says Ghosh. “Else it could get dangerous.”