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| Reservations: A View from an Adivasi Village |
Throughout the tense weeks of the recent anti-reservation agitation, I have been participating in meetings of young adivasi and nomadic groups engaged in the work of village development. I have attended these meetings in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The young adivasis and nomads participating in each of these meetings have numbered between twenty and three thousand. Prior to the meetings and following them, I have had long discussions with the key-persons related to these meetings. I have exchanged views with them on a variety of current issues. Besides, I have traveled to scores of adivasi villages and bastis of nomadic communities for other work during the hot days of the anti-reservation agitation. You may imagine that during all these meetings and during my visits to adivasi villages and the nomadic bastis, reservation would have occupied all our discussion time. In fact, that was my expectation too. Every morning as I set out on a journey to a tribal meeting or visit to a village, I used to see front page headlines in newspapers about the agitation; every late night, back in Baroda, as I ran through the television news channels, I noticed the pictographs of anger among young doctors, students and their supporters. Therefore, I too kept expecting that the issue would come to engage the adivasi and nomadic minds with an equal intensity of passion. However, leaving aside some stray instances, it did not figure in our discussions. It did not show up as a presence in the emotional transactions of adivasis and nomads, even among those who have an easy access to newspapers. If I did try to bring up the issue, they responded without any real involvement in it.
One has, of course, seen reports of huge rallies organized in support of continued and extended reservation held in the capital city of India. One need not doubt the sincerity and authenticity of the composition of such gatherings. However, I hope I can draw upon my own experience of the mood in the adivasi villages and point your attention to how minimal the interest in the 'debate' about their emancipation has been among the adivasis. In contrast, when Medha Patkar was on fast as part of the continuing battle against tribal eviction and displacement, the opinion in the adivasi villages was quite active. References to the NBA struggle were an essential part of the sub-text of what was being discussed in the meetings.
Last year, the UPA government was discussing the Draft of a Bill that aimed at recognition of adivasi land ownership in forest areas. Though there were occasional references to the Draft and its progressive formulation, one cannot say that the Draft-Bill occupied any significant space in newspapers. Yet, the adivasis showed a remarkably high level of awareness about the shifts in the Draft and nuances of the formulations. Similarly, over the last two years, stray reports of the latest territorial count of the Naxalite influence have been appearing. These are usually printed on a newspaper page to which only the most adroit reader reaches. Yet, I have been repeatedly surprised by the accuracy with which some of the young adivasi activists have reproduced the exact latest figures on these matters. In order to give you some idea of the interest in this theme, I will add that the amount of engagement is of the same order as that an young IT professional will have in keeping up with the latest count of IT parks in the country and the sub-continent. Going by these observations, my conclusion is that constitutional guarantees not related directly to safe-guarding or enhancing access to natural resources, no longer interest the adivasis.
In 2001, Justice M. N. Venkatachalaih came to visit the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh. A large crowd of educated and semi-educated adivasis had gathered to listen and discuss with him. They knew that he was at that time heading the Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution. I have kept a good record of the questions that they asked him, not one of which was about drafting of a 'new' constitution. Rather, the questions were as to why the Constitution of the Republic had failed to change their situation.
Earlier last year, I had an occasion to watch an extremely powerful play produced by a collective of activists at Indore under the banner of IPTA. It was about the contemporary situation of adivasis depicted on the backdrop of Birsa Munda's ulgulan movement. It had taken into account the killings of the adivasis at Kalinga Nagar in Orissa, the death of mine workers by silicosis, the Shabri Kumbh Mela at Dangs, the encounter deaths of tribals in Madhya Pradesh, but –in the hot days of the anti-reservation agitation—no reservation issue! I would like to conclude that the adivasis of this country are now politically sufficiently mature to understand what empowerment really is. The bench-space promised to them, or being opposed to, in the name of education does not look attractive to them any more, not in any case, as a space of dignity.
Sometime ago, I was asked to work as a member of an NCERT task-group set up to think of ways of enhancing educational participation of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the Indian schooling system. The other members were eminent educationists known for their social sympathy. As a starting point we were provided with a bibliography of available researches on this subject. Many of you know that primary education has been an area of research in India marked by an unusually high degree of productivity. The bibliography supplied to us mentioned a large number of dissertations proving that the IQ of the SCs and STs is relatively lower than the IQ of the non-SC and non-ST children. These were dissertations for which numerous Indian universities had awarded degrees to those scholars, obviously, leading to gainful employment in the knowledge industry. Since I have taught students belonging to the non-adivasi communities as well as students from adivasi communities, I know from direct personal experience that it is impossible to show one individual inherently intellectually superior to the other. They are just the same in terms of their intellectual abilities. I am aware that many of you may find it difficult to accept my claim; and to some extent, the very basis of the anti-reservation agitation is the argument of the inherent intellectual inequality. But, if that is the case, from where does the stereotype of a 'brainless' SC or ST emerge?
Whether we like to be reminded or not, our educational bureaucracy and the contents of the system recognized by us as 'knowledge' are of colonial origin. The 'knowledge' brought to India by that system had to conform to the needs of the colonial rule. Though several original thinkers including Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo and J. Krishnamurti tried to present alternate ideas of education, the system continued to cultivate the colonially inherited knowledge fields, which made generations of Indian students mentally paralytic. The colonial production systems and economic transactions looked down upon Indian villages as low-priority economic entities. The immeasurable distance between the people living in Indian villages and the English language, including the 'knowledge' contained in it and the law drafted in it, has created a rift, impossible to bridge, between the rural population of this country and the formal structures of intellectual production. The situation continues to worsen every passing year. It would be instructive to see how few of the three hundred odd Indian universities are located in rural sites. Even the seat of the largest distance education university in the country is in New Delhi and operates mainly through the medium of the English language. It would not be wrong therefore, if one argued that higher education in India has remained anti-poor, anti-labour and anti-village. This is not surprising, however, considering that it had been so traditionally during the pre-colonial times as well. It is true that the University system stabilized during the colonial times and removed the strict caste restriction prevailing in the earlier times; but, if one were to look closely at the issue, a similar filter was brought in by the new 'forms of knowledge'. For instance, the entire apprenticeship based materials-production practice was rubbished by the new education. Similarly, the whole of the traditional health-care system was made illegal by it. Knowledge developed through experience in these areas, and passed on through apprenticeship, came to be seen as no-knowledge. In its place, universities that were licensed to collect fees and certify one's learning abilities were given legal sanctity and a monopolistic control of knowledge production. Obviously, in such an arrangement, only those who can or will pay fees have a chance to be certified and validated as knowledge-practitioners.
When the colonial system of education was introduced as an aid to furthering the ambitions of the empire, many caste-based fraternity groups came forward to support poor young scholars belonging to those respective castes by arranging for 'scholarships' for them. In independent India, this function was taken over by the state. Besides, 'reservations' of seats in 'professional' courses was seen as an instrument of positive discrimination. Yet, the knowledge content of these courses and their economic impact on various social segments that had run out of favour during the colonial rule, have not been scrutinized seriously.
For the last twenty years, I have been making attempts at creating healthcare for villagers and adivasis in Gujarat. There is, of course, in descriptive terms and in official records, a kind of a healthcare service structure created by the State, in place. But, in reality, the delivery of the official system has been inadequate to say the least. I am told that it is necessary for every medical graduate to spend a short time after graduation serving in rural areas. But one rarely sees these medical graduates abiding by the formal stipulation. As a result, it has become not just difficult but literally impossible to find doctors willing to take up rural health as an area of occupational work. Thus, even when one is ready to pay adequate wages to them, doctors in India do not want to accept working in villages. Similarly, at the higher end of medical knowledge, most of the research is focused on diseases that are not exclusively confined to villagers and the poorer sections of the society. An instance of this tendency is the extremely primitive status of research on the haemetological disorder called the Sickle Cell Anaemia which is spotted in India only among the adivasis.
The colonial economy, and the economy of ideas as well, have profoundly stigmatized the Indian villagers as intellectually inadequate. If that stigma then reflects in the researches churned out by the Departments of Education in India's city based Universities, there is no need to feel surprised. Whether we like to recognize this or not, the adivasis and the village population in India seem to have seen through this game with remarkable clarity. It is time for the nation to ask why the dream of universal literacy has eluded fulfillment in our country. I have noticed that there is much less excitement in the villages about the idea of schooling for their children. Schooling no longer appears to them in any way connected to their livelihood options. As I write this piece, I do not have the official figures ready at hand showing the education-related migration from villages to the cities; but my personal experience tells me that it has been on the decline during the last ten or fifteen years. In the over all national context of an unprecedented boom in education industry, this new demographic trend calls for a thorough analysis.
If the villagers no longer look forward to being 'educated', the rich in India no longer trust the Indian education factories as well. There has been a phenomenal increase over the last two decades in the number of children from affluent families leaving India for the purpose of educating themselves. This is so even when education in Europe, America and Australia where Indian students are bee-lining, is exorbitantly expensive, almost unaffordable even for affluent Indians. Back home, the news is that not even one of the three hundred odd universities in the country get listed in the first hundred institutions of learning in a global reckoning. The only ones that find a mention are the Bombay IIT and the Ahmedabad IIM. This is a crisis in India's knowledge production that calls for a good national debate.
The anti-reservation agitation sparked off by the central government's desire to be seen as pro-poor has been not so much in the manner of a debate about merit in education. Such a debate should have taken into account issues such as the relevance of knowledge produced in the institutions of knowledge cultivation, the economic and social impact of that knowledge, the future of India as a repository and laboratory of knowledge forms, etc. The agitation was more in the manner of a cumulative function of over-population. The level at which it was carried out was essentially no different from disputes arising in bus-station queues or the train-reservation queues. There was no intellectual quality to it. Considering that the educational bureaucracy and the content of the knowledge system that occupies the central space in Indian schooling and higher learning spaces has been evenly condemned by the extreme rich and the extreme poor sections of the society, one feels sad that a lot of otherwise creative energy was wasted on it.
Adivasis are at this juncture unwilling to participate in the debate. They are more immediately concerned with the situation of growing violence in their locations, and also the consequent militarization of their areas. They are interested in creative viable livelihood options for themselves so that they do not get totally devastated by the tornado of economic globalization. By bringing these concerns to the centre of their life-practices, and by refusing to engage in a non-productive debate about empty constitutional guarantees, they are in a way challenging our knowledge of how we are constituted as a society, our ideas of justice and equality, and our notions of fair-play.
This has happened in India at least twice before our times. The first time, Gautam Buddha and his followers had posed is kind of larger challenge to the established notions of truth and knowledge. Then the thinkers and poets of the medieval Bhakti movement had raised questions about the validity of the Brahminical forms of knowledge. One feels that there is a massive ground swell today in India of a new perception that the state-sponsored and caste-and-class-bound knowledge institutions need to be corrected. It is another thing that the wide-spread disillusionment about what the nation-state provides the people goes largely unnoticed in the capital of India. In that perception, the quarrel over the bench-space in institutions that lack social relevance is not of much interest. Reservations in higher education by a self-serving state, or the wrath of a social segment that engages in stereotyping other sections and has lost its social sympathy altogether, are equally distasteful to those who have been hoping for a society based on a genuine sense of equality and justice. There should be no surprise if adivasis or the nomads decide to ignore both and start charting out a path of their own.
Dr. Ganesh Devy
Jharkhand Forum
A Global Network of Jharkhand
E-mail: forum@jharkhand.org.in
http://www.jharkhand.org.in/forum |
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