How the BJP is trying to exploit Adivasis’ anxieties in Jharkhand for electoral gain

Chunki Marandi is the mukhiya, or elected village chief, of Madhuapada village in Jharkhand’s Sahibganj district. But on a visit to the village in early August, when Scroll asked a group of local residents for directions to the mukhiya’s house, they pointed us to a large bungalow owned by a Muslim man.

Marandi was indeed the mukhiya, one of the residents said. But it was the resident of the bungalow, an influential person in Madhuapada, who led the village and managed its official work.

We were in the village to investigate the Bharatiya Janata Party’s claims that Muslim “infiltrators” were marrying Adivasi women mukhiyas to grab Adivasi land and change the demography of the Santal Parganas, the eastern region of Jharkhand, which is traditionally home to the Santal Adivasi community. A party leader had identified nine panchayats in Sahibganj where this had happened. Madhuapada was one of them.

The claim turned out to be false. When we did meet Marandi, we learnt that she was married to an Adivasi man, Babu Soren. The couple lived in a half-constructed house with missing doors and red bricks for walls, and worked as labourers at construction sites. “So what if I’m a mukhiya? I am still poor and struggle to earn a living,” Marandi said.

The reason Marandi had been elected as the mukhiya was because the post was reserved for an Adivasi woman, and hers was the only Adivasi family in the village.

As we left Madhuapada, Adivasi social activist Emiliya Hansda, who had accompanied me to the village, could not help but wonder: “Where did Adivasis from this area go?”

Land alienation

Hansda’s question struck at the core of a problem that has deep historical roots, and has surfaced now in the BJP’s attempts to stoke divisions between communities in the region.

The Adivasis of the Santal Pargana are known for their rich history of resistance. In 1855, tens of thousands of them gathered in Bhognadih village, in present day Sahibganj district, to start a revolt against the diku, or outsiders, who included landlords, moneylenders, traders and imperialists of the British East India Company. All these groups were exploiting Adivasis on the land they had cleared and become stewards of.

This revolution came to be called the Santal Hul. The British responded to it by carving out an administrative territory known as the Santal Pargana, in which, ostensibly, the community’s rights would be better protected. The administration also passed the Santhal Pargana Act, 1876 – a law that remains in force today. It was enacted to protect Adivasi sovereignty over their land and forbids the transfer of Adivasi land to non-Adivasis in the region. This sovereignty is also protected by similar provisions in the fifth schedule of the Indian constitution, on the non-transferability of land owned by Scheduled Tribes.

But these protections have failed to prevent large-scale dispossession in the region. This has been caused by both the state, which built large development projects in the area, like the Sahibganj riverine multi-modal port, and private corporations, which are setting up mining and energy projects. In neighbouring Godda district, for instance, the Adani Group has displaced at least 841 families for a thermal power plant.

Adivasi activist Emiliya Hansda said that she had observed that land-grabbing had indeed occurred in the Santal Pargana. “But it is wrong to say that it is mainly happening through Adivasi women marrying non-Adivasi men,” she said.

The BJP has ignored land alienation caused by large infrastructure and development work. Instead, its members, like the member of parliament from Godda, Nishikant Dubey, focus blame on the Muslim community. In a speech in parliament on July 26, Dubey claimed that around 100 Adivasi women in the Santal Pargana were married to Muslim men. He also claimed that the share of Adivasis in the population of Santal Pargana had shrunk from 36% in 2000 to 26% at present. The activist group Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha was quick to point out that the actual decrease in the region according to census figures was from 29.91% in 2001 to 28.11% in 2011.

Political observers say neither the timing nor the thrust of Dubey’s speech is surprising. Assembly elections are coming up in Jharkhand later this year. To defeat the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, the BJP needs to make a significant dent in the Santal Pargana, the region which sends the second largest number of legislators to the assembly. Of the 18 seats in the region, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and its ally, Congress, hold 13 seats. Chief Minister Hemant Soren, himself a Santal Adivasi, is the representative from Barhait, his family’s pocket borough.

“The JMM and Congress alliance brings Adivasi and Muslim voters together, and the BJP wants to break this unity,” said social worker Mohammed Azad.

Following up on Dubey’s diatribe, on July 28, BJP politician and member of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes Asha Lakra listed nine panchayats in Sahibganj district where she alleged Muslim men had married ten Adivasi women representatives to grab their ancestral land. Scroll visited all ten representatives. As we reported previously, we found that the claims were false: three women, including Chunki Marandi, had married Adivasi men, and one had married a Hindu man. The remaining six, although married to Muslims, said they had no family land to pass on to their husbands.

But while it was evident that the BJP had distorted the facts, on the ground, we also found that the campaign had struck a chord among many members of the Adivasi community, and that it tapped into real anxieties about the loss of Adivasi land and identity.

Many believe that even though Adivasi women do not inherit land, they are still able to buy Adivasi land in their names for the use of their marital families, and thus inevitably take land away from the community.

These anxieties have long existed in Jharkhand and were at the heart of the demand for the formation of the state. In 1987, a memorandum that the Jharkhand Party, which was fighting for statehood, submitted to the Indian government stated, “After independence large-scale industrialisation of the region created an unfavourable situation for the Jharkhand identity. Nearly 50 lakhs of outsiders were brought into the region, while the people of the region were evicted in large numbers. Today the whole of big business, industry and employment are in the hands of outsiders. The people of Jharkhand are treated like foreigners in their own homeland.”

Nayan Soren, a researcher from Pakur said that he had observed several instances of Adivasi land being captured. A key reason for this, he explained, was that large sections of the Adivasi community in the Santal Pargana continue to be severely impoverished. “Their land is the only capital they have,” he said. “Often they are coerced, forced or threatened to part with it, or fall into a debt trap and end up losing their land.”

Anxiety over intercommunity marriages

That the BJP’s claims have been proven false does not preclude the fact that the Adivasi community is worried about intercommunity marriages.

“You can’t say that only Muslims are marrying Adivasi women,” said Shanti Murmu. Murmu is a former panchayat mukhiya from Barharwa and the mother of Vijay Hansdak, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s member of parliament from Rajmahal constituency. “Today, everyone is marrying people from different religions and communities. And everyone is grabbing Adivasi land, not just Muslims. Blaming only one group for it is wrong.”

She argued that the government needed to implement measures to safeguard the interests of Adivasis. “We live in a male dominated society,” she said. “When a woman marries outside the community, she becomes a member of the community she marries into. There should be a rule made that prevents such women in intercaste marriages from standing for elections.”

Others echoed this sentiment. A former Adivasi woman mukhiya from Barhait block, who asked to remain anonymous, said that intercommunity marriages were detrimental to the Adivasi community. “When an Adivasi woman marries into a different community, she adopts the customs and practices of that community, so she can’t call herself Adivasi anymore,” she said.

These views are rooted in the fact that historically, Adivasi communities in Jharkhand have been endogamous. Marrying outside the community, especially for women, is widely frowned upon even today.

In fact, over the last few decades, some Adivasi outfits have sought to socially boycott women who marry outside their community. Some have even tried to enact laws which take away the Scheduled Tribe status of these women, out of a fear that they and their children will take undue advantage of reservations and benefit non-Adivasi communities.

Adivasi feminists have argued that these particularly virulent measures against women who marry outside the community have taken shape as a result of the influence of right-wing organisations such as the Bajrang Dal. Specifically, activist Neetisha Xalxo argued, they have emerged as a result of Sanskritisation – a process by which, sociologists say, lower caste groups and tribes emulate the practices of upper caste groups to gain upward social mobility. “This Sanskritisation has destroyed the gender equal practices that existed in Adivasi society before,” Xalxo said. “People are adopting a sense of masculine pride over women and want to control them.”

Among the women mukhiyas we met, those married to Muslims recounted facing familial or communitarian disapproval at first. For instance, Elijence Hansda, the mukhiya of Kadma, had a case filed against her and her husband by her parents. In the other instances, as is customary for those marrying outside the community, the married couple had to pay a fine or organise a meal for the community.

But all these women pointed out that they had no inheritance rights over their ancestral land or family’s property. They also denied buying Adivasi land in their name for the benefit of their marital families.

Fears of demographic change

Inter-community marriages between Adivasi women and non-Adivasi men do not just spark anxieties about ancestral land being transferred to non-Adivasis. Members of the community also fear demographic change, and worry that the region itself will lose its Adivasi identity.

This fear is rooted in the fact that these Adivasi communities in Jharkhand, like most communities in the country, are patriarchal in nature, and that children born out of inter-community marriages are most commonly seen as inheriting the father’s ethnic and religious identity. Some argue that by marrying Muslims and having children with them, Adivasi women are enabling a rise in the Muslim population at the cost of their community. In her press conference, BJP leader Lakra laid out an even more detailed picture of what she claimed was a broader conspiracy – she said that Muslims would grant small loans to Adivasi families, and then trick them by faking documents to show that the amounts were larger. “When the family is unable to pay back the loan amount, they marry their daughters and grab their land. This is bringing about a change in demographic,” she said.

But Adivasi women activists argued that such arguments deny Adivasi women their agency, and that the phenomenon of intercommunity marriage was not a result of a conspiracy, but of natural societal shifts. “As people leave their villages to study and seek employment, inter-community marriages are bound to occur,” Xalxo said. “This is happening everywhere, not just in Jharkhand.”

She argued that the changes resulting from these shifts were less significant than the broader decline in Adivasi population in the region as a result of land dispossession and a lack of employment opportunities, both of which were leading to migration. “I call this forced migration because people are forced out of their land for a living,” said Xalxo.

This view of the situation was underlined by the mukhiyas we met, who asserted their autonomy. “Migration and malnutrition are some of the reasons for population decline amongst Adivasis,” said Elijence Hansda.

A statement by the Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha laid out a more detailed explanation of the reasons behind the decline of the region’s Adivasi population, and the change in its demographic. The first, it noted, was the influx of migrants from north Bihar and other neighbouring states. Jharkhand saw 10.73 lakh migrants in 1961, 14.29 lakh migrants in 1971 and 16.28 lakh migrants in 1981.

Additional factors, the statement argued, include the high levels of displacement that locals face, and their high unemployment rates, as well as the fact that the state lacks a domicile policy, which would prioritise employment for locals. All these force Adivasis to migrate to other states for work. The 2017 Economic Survey report of the Central Government noted that around 50 lakh people had migrated from the state between 2001 and 2011.

Lastly, the statement observed, the population growth rate of Adivasis has been lower than that of other communities due to “inadequate nutrition, inadequate health system and economic constraints”.

A true attempt to assuage the anxieties of Adivasis over displacement and demographic changes would address all these factors, activists argued. “It is true that demographic change has occurred, the population of Adivasis has decreased and that of other communities who’ve migrated to the state has increased,” said activist Tom Kavala. “But it is not just Muslims, the population of other communities has also grown . Taking this matter up to the Lok Sabha is an election stunt.”