No party can take Adivasis for granted

GUWAHATI: As the sun sets on Batashipur, a hamlet created by clearing forests in 1990s in Assam’s Sonitpur district, the village market winds up. In one corner, Sukra Orang and his friends relish their handia (rice beer), tipple time for these tea workers. Setting aside a tiny sum for groceries, they drown the rest of their meagre earnings in liquor.Sukra and his colleagues are paid Rs 126 a day.
The Batashipur weekly market is a good place for a peek into the lives of Assam’s Adivasis — descendants of motley tribes from the Chotanagpur Plateau settled here by British tea planters in the 19th and early 20th century.
Known as the tea tribe, Assam’s nearly 60 lakh Adivasis are a dominant chunk of voters in 800-odd tea gardens spread across 126 Assembly seats. Many among them are petty farmers now. The Adivasis live in grinding poverty, their lives hardly different from their ancestors’, social worker Ananta Bagh says. Last year, an NGO conducted a survey among 10,000 Adivasi children from 10 Sonitpur tea gardens. It threw up alarming fi ndings: About 50% of them don’t go to school regularly, some 40% school management committees aren’t even functional.
Similarly, a National Family Health Survey found over 90% of adolescent girls anaemic. And, most worryingly many Adivasi teenagers end up getting trafficked.
In election season, political parties routinely do the rounds of the Adivasis areas. In successive elections, they were mostly Congress supporters. Things are different now. The commun i t y is more politically assertive. And, it’s looking for options, especially after the anti-foreigner movement from 1979 to 1985. Buoyed by victories of two Adivasi MPs in the 2014 LS polls, BJP hopes to make inroads in areas dominated by the Adivasis.
“The literacy rate among Adivasis is low. But the community is far more politically aware now. They are looking at multiple options,” says Assam Tea Tribe Students’ Association general secretary Poban Bedia. One of their key demands is they be given ST status — in Assam they are OBCs, everywhere else they are STs.
Congress minister Atuwa Munda, an Adivasi, says: A lot more needs to be done for the community, but asserts that the Adivasi’s life has changed, all because of the Congress. The BJP can’t claim the support of the community only because it has MPs from the community, he argues.