In the early 1990s, recalls Santal schoolteacher Baburji Kisku of Garia village, an abandoned quarry near Siuri had most of its accumulated water pumped out. As the water level receded, it revealed some 10 to 15 sacks near the bottom – each holding the remnants of a human being. No one knew who these victims were but everyone presumed them to be Santals: women who'd been raped and killed by their overseers, men who'd protested the violation of a wife or sister and had also been slain, or labourers from afar who'd perished in mining accidents and simply been dumped. Because the mine owners – all men from mainstream diku society – openly carried guns and boasted of friends among the police and politicians, no one had dared to demand an investigation into these murders. "Many men told me their own sisters had been raped in front of their eyes, and if they protested they were warned off with a pistol," says Kisku.
Such outrages are not restricted to West Bengal or even India. In tribal areas across the world, mining and other forms of industrialization appear to be inextricably entwined with sexual violence. United Nations Special Rapporteur James Anaya stated in January: “Indigenous women have reported that the influx of workers into indigenous communities as a result of extractive projects [has] led to increased incidents of sexual harassment and violence, including rape and assault.” Such violations were contributing to the spread of HIV, he added.
Dias states that when he first arrived in Singbhum (in what is now Jharkhand) in 1974, "the only rapes I heard of were by forest guards. That's how the rape culture started here. And never, never until say about 1985, did I hear of an Adivasi raping someone." As mechanization vastly increased the scale of mining and hitherto untouched areas were opened up, matters deteriorated. "From 2005 onward, some 2,000 trucks started plying daily in the Saranda forest," continues Dias. "Each truck coming in with a driver, a cleaner, and others." As a result, he says, thousands of Munda, Santal, and Ho women in these tribal areas were raped or forced into prostitution. Such abuse has a storied history, he adds, accounting for the existence of an "Azaad Basti", or Freedom Slum, in each of the state’s major steel cities of Jamshedpur and Noamundi. Officials visit their Adivasi mistresses there for virtually free sex – which explains the name, says Dias.
Surya Shankar Dash, a filmmaker based in Odisha, similarly recalls that in the Lanjigarh area, where many Kondh families lived, "sexual violence was almost unheard of” before the arrival of the UK-based mining company Vedanta Resources in 2002. The only earlier rapes he knows of were committed in the 1990s – one by a government anthropologist in charge of the Dongria Kondh Development Agency, and the other by an employee of an NGO operating in Lanjigarh. After Vedanta started building an aluminium refinery, however, "I heard many stories from villagers about the abduction and rape of local girls and women by truckers, migrant workers and Vedanta's contractors and employees," he says. One of those allegedly abducted and abused by Vedanta's "goons," adds Dash, was the 9-year-old daughter of an activist – who fortunately survived. Today, says the filmmaker, Lanjigarh has hundreds of sex workers: women who were dispossessed when their villages were forcibly relocated for the refinery, or those who were raped or seduced and then abandoned by the migrants.
Dash goes on to recite a relentless list. "More than a thousand Adivasi prostitutes in Damanjodi, the township for the NALCO refinery in Koraput. A captive Birhor community in Sukinda's chromite mines where all the women and even teenagers have been forced to prostitute themselves to truck drivers and contractors. Displaced girls in Kalinga Nagar's transit camps being sexually abused by Tata's goons. A prostitute slum is emerging in front of Jindal's factory in Kalinga Nagar."
Also according to Dash, in an isolated Paroja community in Koraput district – whose land was submerged upon construction of the Kolab reservoir in the 1980s, rendering it unable to provide for itself – officials from the district administration threatened to withhold legally mandated rations from the villagers unless they were given free access to the traditional girls' dormitory. Their objective was to obtain sex. These dormitories, where the older girls of a village sleep in the same community hall (boys have their own separate dormitory), are common among tribes that live by hunting, gathering, and shifting cultivation, and impart to the tribe's future adults "a very subtle form of socialization," explains an anthropologist who asked not to be named. There these adolescents learn from their slightly elder peers how to compose songs, dance, raise crops, use herbs for medicinal purposes (including, eventually, contraception), craft combs and other gifts to give to romantic partners, as well as, says the anthropologist, "the whole care with which you go beyond that – when you sleep with someone and when you don't." Each dormitory also hosts unmarried visitors of the opposite sex when they arrive from another village for festivities. These occasions, which are important for reinforcing solidarity within the tribe, usually lead to romantic and sexual encounters that the tribesmen and women regard as a healthy prelude to marriage.
Diku men who are posted to these remote regions, however, tend to see the dormitories as locations of unbridled licentiousness, so that they frequently invade these spaces in search of sex. As a result, many tribes have been forced to shut their dormitories down, depriving their youngsters of an education in the culture of the tribe, including the arts of romance. In this particular case, the Paroja village also closed its dormitory rather than give access to it to the district officials, but it is nonetheless still required to provide sex to the officials in lieu of provisions.
Just as troubling, in 2008 Mahammad Ashlam of KBK Samachar, a video collective in Odisha, reported that young Adivasi men and women were singing and dancing at a traditional gathering in Kalahandi district when traffickers in jeeps invaded and dragged the women away. This is not an isolated instance. Last year, Lily Kujur of Adivasi Mahila Suraksha Mandal in Rourkela, Odisha, informed CGNet Swara, a mobile reporting service, that more than 40,000 Adivasi women have been trafficked out of just one Odisha district, Sundergarh, of whom 15,000 have vanished without trace.
According to activist Gladson Dungdung of Jharkhand, Delhi alone has almost half a million Adivasi girls and women, mainly working as domestic servants in homes but also as prostitutes. Brokers from placement agencies roam tribal villages, especially those where agricultural livelihoods have been damaged by mining, luring women with false promises of jobs in the city. Dungdung charges that these agencies also organize auctions during the Adivasi festivals of Sarhul and Karam, selling women to other brokers or directly to prospective employers. Many of the trafficked women are sexually abused, some are killed, and others return with a child in tow – only to be rejected by their home communities. Many vanish without a trace. "When I go back to my home village" in Simdega district, says Dungdung, "I hardly see any girls. They're all gone."
If anything, matters are even worse in Chhattisgarh, where the destructive impact of mining and displacement has been compounded by the violent conflict between government forces and Maoist guerrillas. Starting around 2005, the Central Reserve Police Force and the state-sponsored tribal militia Salwa Judum forced some 50,000 Adivasis into camps in order to cut off any contact with the Maoists. Another lakh fled into Andhra Pradesh, estimates anthropologist Nandini Sundar of Delhi University. These state's representatives "were killing people, raping women as and when they caught them, and using girls from the camps as sex slaves," says Sundar. Twenty-two CRPF outposts now ring the Raoghat mining area in north Bastar – in order to deter protests against mining, explains Sundar – and in parts of Dantewada such camps can be found every 5km. These security centres are usually located on school premises, and with men roaming unhindered many girls are too terrified to attend anymore. Few dare to venture into the forest either for fear of encountering police or soldiers there.
Tehelka magazine recently reported that although official figures say 9,000 Adivasi women have been trafficked from Chhattisgarh in the past decade, activists believe the figure to be 10 times that. Advocate Sudha Bharadwaj noted last year that the state had yet to register a single FIR for 99 rapes allegedly conducted by the Salwa Judum – despite a 2011 Supreme Court order directing the Chhattisgarh government to act on detailed affidavits regarding them. Such studied tolerance of atrocities committed by the ‘keepers of the law’ indicates to many observers that the Indian state is now indifferent to the human rights violations arising from its subjugation of Adivasis on behalf of the mining industry.
Half a century ago, anthropologist Verrier Elwin had observed that the ghotul, or the Muria Adivasi dormitory for adolescents celebrated the idea that "youth must be served, that freedom and happiness are more to be treasured than any material gain, that friendliness and sympathy, hospitality and unity are of the first importance, and above all that human love – and its physical expression – is beautiful, clean, and precious." Almost all of India's ghotuls have been eradicated by now. Instead, says Dias, as a result of relentless exposure to sexual and other aggression committed by the diku world, Adivasi youth – "a few, maybe, but a dangerous few, are regarding violence as an integral part of sexual relations."
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Every native yearns to take the place of his colonial master – to sleep in his bed, and if possible with his wife, wrote the French-Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Playing the flute and composing poetry are no longer the aspirations of a young Santal man. He seeks, instead, the attributes that diku society attaches to a ‘successful’ male: an air-conditioned Scorpio or, failing that, a motorcycle, jeans, sunglasses, branded cigarettes, foreign alcohol, a fancy mobile phone, and a contemptuous attitude to women. These are all components of the lifestyle affected by owners and managers in the mining industry around him. But a quarry owner may make a million rupees in a day while his labourer earns between one and three hundred per day, and so many Adivasi men satisfy their newfound desire to consume with cheap alcohol.
According to Deb and others, male labourers in Birbhum typically spend a third of their daily wages in the hooch shops that are located by every quarry and in every village. In the past, Santals used to painstakingly brew liquor out of flowers of the mahua tree to drink only on religious occasions. Now, cheap commercial alcohol is available all the time. Many men also claim that work on the quarries is physically so punishing that they need to get drunk at the end of the day. Needless to say, alcoholism lies behind considerable domestic abuse, of which women and children are the primary victims. Moreover, it has reduced the pool of eligible Santal males and thereby increased the attractiveness, to Santal women, of diku suitors.
The resulting loss of access to the tribe's women is compounding the despair and fury of Santal males. Apart from increasing numbers of genuine "love" marriages between diku men and Adivasi women, many Santal women in Birbhum and Jharkhand are being controlled by outsiders, not so much for sex as for access to land. Practically the entire quarry belt in Birbhum lies on land once owned by Santals – but almost all the quarries are owned by outsiders. Selling tribal land to non-tribals is illegal, so the dikus have assumed ownership either by using a false Santal name or by seducing a Santal woman. The lover either marries the woman or keeps her permanently as a mistress, "after which he can make a quarry on her land or buy land in her name," says Deb. As Virginius Xaxa of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences notes, such alliances are also common in Jharkhand, where the women involved "are not only seen as aligning with the dikus but also as conduits of land transfer from tribes to non-tribes."
As a result, young Santal men find that as the quarries advance across the landscape, they are losing their traditional occupations, autonomy, and self-respect – along with their women. And it is the women on whom they are taking out their fury. In recent years, gangs of Santal youth from Birbhum have staged nude parades of three Santal women: one who was found with her Bengali diku lover, and the other two merely on suspicion of having interacted with diku men.
One of the latter victims, Phulmoni (name changed) of Neempahari village, tells her story. In the summer of 2010, she'd gone with two girlfriends to eat jamun fruit in a nearby forest when Santal youths from her own village seized them and charged that they'd been secretly meeting with lovers. The men, who were among the more educated in the community, says Phulmoni, held the three overnight – warning off the women's family members and even the majhi when they tried to intervene. According to several villagers in the locale, Robeen Soren, a Santal youth leader who was allegedly in the pay of quarry owners, had earlier issued a diktat to take mobile phones away from young unmarried Santal women, and to punish them if caught with dikus. The captors told Phulmoni's relatives that Soren had been summoned and would "try" the women.
The next morning Soren had arrived, with a large and threatening retinue of young Santal men on motorcycles. According to Phulmoni and others, Soren tried half-heartedly to restrain his followers, who nonetheless stripped her and a friend (the villagers were able to rescue the third) and dragged them naked all the way to the next village and back. Phulmoni, who remains profoundly traumatized, says that she eventually fainted but remembers the men, who "have no shame," fondling her private parts. She has since fled the village because of threats by those she'd named to the police; and with pictures of the parade having been circulated via mobile phones, she is too ashamed to seek work anywhere in the area. Instead, Phulmoni survives now by collecting sal leaves from the forest, sewing them into plates, drying them and then selling each for ten paisa. "If there is sun, I eat. If not, I don't eat," she says matter-of-factly.
Nude parades have occurred elsewhere, as in 2007 in Guwahati, Assam, when a young Adivasi woman participating in a march for constitutional rights was stripped naked and chased through the city. Never before, however, have they been perpetrated by Santals. The parades in Birbhum appear to be a copycat expression of the young men's fury toward the women, whom Soren had allegedly branded as traitors to the tribe. Notably, Santal men have no access to Bengali women either – and men with little hope of acquiring a woman of their own are particularly prone to sexual violence. We see this throughout history, as evinced by a startling statistic from the 19th century coolie trade. In 1871, an official study found that among indentured labourers from India in Guiana, where only two female coolies were available for every five males, murders motivated by sexual jealousy were 90 times more frequent than in India – and 142 times more frequent than in the two districts from which most of the coolies had hailed. Almost all of those murdered were women.
The coolies had, of course, also undergone violent rupture from their families, communities and traditions. Across all cultures experiencing change, explains Venkateswar, "especially when those who are subject to those changes have no control over them, women become the target of violence and repression because they are the symbols of what needs to be preserved, what is being lost. Women as bearers of progeny are also the source of hope for a future, and their loss therefore also signals a lost future for the community."
Ironically, National Public Radio in the US also described this nude parade as having been ordered by "village elders." But in September 2012, more than a hundred majhis from the area assembled in a council to hear testimonies from several Santals who'd suffered this and other abuse at the hands of Soren's gang. Padel, who has observed smaller councils, says that "these are really the best examples I know of democracy at work…the way everyone is allowed to speak, men and women, and an amazing rhythm between everyone talking at once, and moments when everyone is silent with full attention on one speaker." The council excommunicated the offenders, including Soren, from the tribe. Now operating under the banner of the BJMM, the Santal majhis have also organized rallies attended by thousands to protest Chief Minister Banerjee's recent call to outlaw tribal systems of governance in reaction to Bimala’s case in Subalpur. As they see it, restoring the true self-governance that Santals once enjoyed is the only way to defend the culture and integrity of their tribes from the corrosive aspects of modernity, of which sexual violence is but a symptom.
Across the country, besieged Adivasis say that the only hope of slowing the disintegration of their communities is to fight the ingress of the outside world. For the Dongria Kondh of Odisha’s Niyamgiri, the disfigurement of the Adivasi culture in Lanjigarh, at the foot of the mountain, was reason enough for their collective decisions, taken last year, to stop Vedanta from mining the mountaintop. And as a Dongria man told journalist Amitabh Patra, the government and the company had sent forces who were "beating us up, dragging us by our long hair, trespassing in our houses, attacking our women and girls, insulting our gods by entering our sacred places wearing shoes, and looting our valuables. Is this what educated people do?"
So far as Adivasis across the country can tell, the answer is an emphatic “Yes.”
It pains dishom-majhi Hembrom that many newspapers described what happened in Subalpur as a ‘medieval’ barbarity. Santal culture, he points out, has always accepted certain women's rights that mainstream society does not yet fully grant. For example, the 19th century social reformer Iswarchandra Vidyasagar was born into the only Bengali family in a Santal village, where he observed the practice of widow remarriage that he eventually propagated in Hindu society. Vidyasagar never alluded to the source of the idea, says Hembrom, because then as now most dikus looked upon Adivasis as savages, and would therefore have found further ground to reject it. "Whatever happened in Subalpur," Hembrom concludes, "was not medieval barbarity at all, but a modern barbarity."
Time and time again, the ways in which an allegedly backward society treats its women has been used to argue for a civilizing mission. The canonical example is sati, which 19th century British publications described in lurid and illustrated detail. A century later, British intelligence financed the research that went into Mother India (1927), a runaway bestseller book that described Hindu males as paedophiles. Although both these campaigns were based on certain truths, their underlying purpose was not to defend women and girls but to argue for imperial rule. As historians have shown, sati in fact intensified in response to the land laws that the British introduced to facilitate the extraction of taxes: it suddenly became profitable to kill widows for the land they owned. The very cause that aggravated the disease – colonialism – was subsequently hailed as the cure.
Padel and others suspect that the prominent misreporting of the Subalpur affair across national and international media, showcasing the purported barbarity of India’s tribal councils, may have served a similar purpose. What remains of Adivasi resistance in India is blocking tens, possibly hundreds, of billions of dollars of investment in further mining operations. The decision by the Dongria Kondh councils last year jeopardized Vedanta's $10 billion investment in the Lanjigarh complex, constructed to refine the ore to be mined from Niyamgiri. Uncritically accepting a narrative of a gang-rape being ordered by such a council – while simultaneously ignoring how Adivasi society is being destroyed wholesale by development – may serve a classic neo-colonial purpose: making the case to ban these gram sabhas that are holding up development and completing the takeover of Adivasi land for diku profit.
This piece originally appeared on Grist Media
