The Govt. of India delegate, Prabhu Dayal, made a statement on July 31, 1991 before the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Geneva, saying that India’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are not indigenous population and to defend his claim he produced the evidence of Prof. Andre Beteille, an “eminent sociologist” of Delhi University. (DV Dec. 16 1991, p.11: “India’s corrupt intellectuals get awards and rewards”.)
In DV, you have been repeatedly publishing documents after documents including those from India’s tallest authority, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, to prove that SC/STs are indigenous population. But Prabhu Dayal’s argument was against all historical facts and sociological claims to this effect.
Prof. Kisku argument: Dayal points out the difference between the “indigenous peoples” and “minorities of various other types”, and hence the question of “minorities” should not be confounded with that of “indigenous populations”, he says. The term ‘indigenous peoples’ cannot be equated with the scheduled tribes and scheduled castes. “The specific categories of SC/ST have been created in our Constitution to promote the development and upliftment of certain sections of our populations in favour of whom a system of positive discrimination is followed by the Government in order to secure for them special privileges and ensure their accelerated progress”, he said.
Replying to Prof. Kisku’s argument, that the STs constitute the indigenous peoples of India, he quoted Prof. Andre Beteille “in an important study on the definitional aspect of this question published in 1960” in which the “eminent sociologist” says:
“In the beginning, nobody bothered to give a precise meaning to the term tribe. This did not create very much confusion so long as the groups which were dealt with could be easily located and differentiated from groups of other types. By and large, this was the case in Australia, Melanasia and in North America.
“In India, and also to a certain extent in Africa the situation is conspicuously different. In this country, groups which correspond closely to the anthropologists’ conception of tribes have lived in long association with communities of an entirely different type. Except in a few areas, it is very difficult to come across communities which retain all their pristine tribal character. In fact, most such tribal groups show in varying degrees elements of continuity with the larger society of India”.
Tribals Hinduised ? : Prof. Andre Beteille continued stating that “in India hardly any of the tribes exists as a separate society and that they have all been absorbed, in varying degrees, into the wider society of India. The on-going process of absorption is not recent but dates back to the most ancient times”.
The learned professor has taken the ruling class line of argument “that ethnically speaking, most of the tribes in present-day India share their origins with the neighbouring non-tribal population. India has been a melting pot of races and ethnic groups, and historians and anthropologists find it difficult to arrange the various distinct cultural, ethnic and linguistic groups in the chronological sequence of their appearance to the sub-continent.”
Linguistic Confusion: It is said the basic substratum of India’s racial structure is Negrito, supplanted later by proto-Australoids. The analysis of India’s tribal population shows that Negritos are negligible and proto-Australoids pre-dominate, exactly as reflected in the rest of the population. If the linguistic criteria is applied, there is even greater confusion; the Bhils, a tribe numbering over 5 million, which lives in Central India, speak a language which has 80% of its words in Sanskrit, an Indo-Aryan language.
So, the term “indigenous people” cannot be equated with the SC/STs, Dayal said. Distinctiveness on grounds of religious, cultural, ethnic, linguistic or other predominant characteristics could apply to several other categories of people in India, not only to tribals.
Human rights not violated: “In case the various criteria of indigenous populations were to -be selectively applied to the Indian context, at least 300 – 400 million people could come within its ambit. I would therefore reiterate my Government’s view that tribals in India do not constitute what is understood here by the term indigenous populations.”
Dayal even criticised some Indians for “making baseless allegations that the Govt. of India is violating the human rights of the SC/STs. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Govt. of India is, in fact, extremely aware that the SC/ST and other weaker sections of society are vulnerable to human rights violations and it devotes special attention to their problems and their welfare. The administrative machinery as well as the judicial system takes remedial action in all cases of human rights violations”.
SC/ST Com. verdict: Poor Dayal, a govt. servant, has not read the numerous SC/ST Commission’s own report submitted to the Govt. The Commission is a constitutional authority.
Therefore, we must appoint an anthropologist- historian to reply to these charges and publish it in Dalit Voice by June 1992.
