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Bringing tribal issues to the fore

Staff Reporter

Anthropologist analyses draft national tribal policy

‘Reality of tribal life is missing in the draft’
‘Analysis of violence in tribal areas conservative’

KANNUR: The national policy on tribals should bring tribal values and lifestyles and their contemporary problems to the centre of today’s public discourse by encouraging tribal studies, Vinay Kumar Srivastava, Professor of Anthropology at Delhi University, has said.

Mr. Srivastava, who was on a visit to the Department of Anthropology of Kannur University as part of a University Grants Commission programme, said financial support should be offered for promoting tribal studies. Talking to The Hindu on the Kannur University campus, he said the Central government should constitute a committee comprising anthropologists and social scientists associated with tribal studies to examine the response to the draft of the national tribal policy circulated by the United Progressive Alliance government in July 2006 in place of an earlier draft released in February 2004 by the previous National Democratic Alliance government.

Calling for a nation-wide debate on the draft of the policy, Mr. Srivastava said that the draft began with a dilemma as it sought to strike a right balance between protecting tribal culture, values and identity on the one hand and ensuring their integration into mainstream society on the other. He said that nowhere in the draft was it stated as to what was the concept of mainstream its authors had in mind. He called for institutional measures to help tribal communities.

Observing that tribes themselves had done a lot for their own improvement, Mr. Srivastava said this reality of tribal living was missing in the draft as it lacked the “tribal voice.” The draft might not give confidence to the tribal people, notwithstanding its good intentions and suggestions, he said adding that their reactions and responses to the draft be sought and incorporated into the policy.

Referring to the drafts proposal for a periodic review of the policy by the Tribal Advisory Councils, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and the Cabinet Committee on Tribal Affairs, he said the anthropologists could play a significant role by providing empirical studies of land alienation from different parts of the country.

Anthropologists should give more importance to study of issues that were pauperising tribal communities, he said. Although the draft dwelled on violence in tribal areas, its analysis of the situation was conservative, he said adding that the tribals might be initially attracted to outside groups such as Maoists, though fear of violence created by these groups was a possible reason why the tribals succumbed to the extremist outfits.

Mr. Srivastava also called for documenting indigenous knowledge of people before it was lost for ever. Tribal issues were no longer confined to anthropology as was the case a quarter of a century ago, he observed. Indian sociologists, being comparative in nature, had included tribal studies in their curriculum since the beginning of their discipline, he said. He also said that tribal studies had been de-centred as they were distributed among different social sciences and humanities. Each discipline approached the study of tribes with its own specific viewpoints, he said, adding that none of these viewpoints could be a substitute to an anthropological account of tribal societies.

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