Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

while M. V. Kive’s research in central Indian had led him to conclude that Lanka was
located in the Amarkantak plateau of present day Indian state of Chattishgarh.
Many Indian scholars believe that the Aryans who came to India around 1800-1500 B.C.
had subjugated sections of the indigenous people of the subcontinent. Later, depending of
the skills of these people and the services they provided, they were integrated into the
society’s lower echelons as ‘polluted’ people or ‘untouchable castes’. Other people who
probably did not possess suitable skills or could not be enslaved, were pushed into
uplands and forests where they enjoyed relative autonomy. These accounts of history
may or may not be true. However these provide plausible explanations of the survival of
the Adivasi in the forest tracts, all across India, from the west to the east coast, through
central India and connecting up to the northeast.
Victims of internal colonialism
The so-called conceptual debate on the definition of ‘Indigenous’ and whether it is
applicable to post colonial Asian states will remain inconclusive. No concept can fully
define a reality. But what is important to note is that the real reason for excluding the
tribal peoples of Asia is not lack of conceptual clarity, but a political one. And therefore,
it is a political debate, which needs to focus on the reality of powerlessness of the tribal
peoples and their struggle for justice and the removal of the imbalance inherent in the
present national and international power structures. It is time to look at the mechanisms
perpetuating their subjugation and subordination within the countries in which they live,
as well as today's global economic system. Almost all tribal peoples and indigenous
peoples of Asia live in relatively remote areas with meagre resources.
During the colonial days, particularly as the British brought the railways to India and
started laying the rail tracks linking far away places cutting across forests, bridging rivers
and digging tunnels through hills, most of the forests in accessible areas on tribal lands
were taken away. The post-colonial governments of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have
followed the same policies. In Bangladesh, the Chakma and the Hajong tribes have been
uprooted from their homelands and majority Bengali people were settled in those areas.I
Sri Lanka, the state’s land acquisition policy has reduced the Vedda indigenous people to
a few hundred. In Thailand, the Royal Forest Department is in the process of removing
the tribal peoples from the traditional forest habitat in the name of preserving the
environment.
In Nepal, where the Indigenous/tribal people constitute a significant proportion of the
state’s population, they have been denied any say in the governance of the country. In
Myanmar (Burma), at the time of independence in the late forties, the federal government
agreed to provide full 'internal sovereignty' to all the ethnic communities. Yet within 15
years of independence, the government had decided to impose Buddhism as the national
religion and the Burmese language on all people. It initiated a programme of forced
integration of all ethnic people into the so-called mainstream Burmese culture by denying
them even the right to print books in their own languages. This policy has continued to
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