Road to the edge of the world

Union Minister of State for Commerce, Jairam Ramesh, in his capacity as
co-chair of the National Advisory Council appointed expert group on the
Jarawa community was recently in the islands when he met members of the
small and remote community. In what was a pertinent articulation of the
situation, he spoke of the 'dharam sankat' faced in ensuring an "iterative
measured engagement, and on their (Jarawas) terms," as the only way forward.
The Jarawas are a small community of 300 odd individuals living
hunter-gatherer nomadic lives deep in the finest forests that still survive
in the Andaman Islands. What happens to this small and vulnerable community
that seems headed towards extinction, will in the final analysis be more a
statement on the world that pushed them over the edge than their own
capacity to survive. If one were to search for the elusive solutions, one
point of beginning, perhaps, is the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) that the
minister and his entourage must
have taken to reach into the Jarawa Tribal Reserve. He was taking a road
that has been unanimously acknowledged as being one of the most fundamental
vectors of bringing in highly problematic influences into the lives and
world of the Jarawas. It is one of the primary creators of the dharam sankat
that the minister said we are now facing. History is witness that the ATR
was one of the biggest blunders created in the forests of the Andaman
Islands; forests that this road now slices through, ripping in the process,
the lands of the Jarawa, their very cosmos. The Jarawas weren't asked when
work was first initiated in their forest home in the late 1960s. They had
opposed the road even then, violently attacking the work force using their
superior knowledge of the forests and perfectly crafted bows and arrows. The
work on the road, however, progressed. Their forests became settlements,
agriculture fields, and horticultural plantations. The road brought in
settlers; it also
took out tens of thousands of cubic meters of tropical hardwood. There was
nothing for the Jarawa to gain. Now it is bringing a whole set of other
inputs from a world the Jarawas know little about: alcohol, tobacco, guthka,
reportedly even sexual exploitation. The ATR has also facilitated the rise
of a pernicious endevour, perversely called Jarawa Tourism. Tourists
visiting the islands are being openly solicited with offers of rides of the
ATR and the promise of seeing Stone Age tribes; a spectacle has been made of
an entire community of people. This is the same road that the minister took
to meet the people who are so cut off from the world we live in that they
could only be marginally aware of the significance and importance of people
in power - the 'bada sahebs in white clothes'. Did the Jarawas want to meet
a bada saheb, any bada saheb? Do they have a choice? Does it matter? Were
the Jarawas asked? Should they have been asked? Could they have answered
with the
freedom and choice that we take completely for granted? Do the seeds of the
problem somewhere lie in answers to questions like these? The minister also
cannot be unaware of another significant reality of this road; the stark
irony that he was traveling on a road that the Supreme Court of India had
ordered shut four years ago precisely to protect the Jarawas. It was in May
2002 that the Court issued its path-breaking orders in the interests of the
fragile environment and indigenous peoples of the islands. One of them was
the closure of the Andaman Trunk Road in those parts that it runs along the
forests of the Jarawa Reserve. It was an acknowledgement that our legal
system still had the capacity to care for the most vulnerable and invisible
sections of the country; that there was the possibility of bringing
meaningful change. But the order of the closure of the ATR remains
unimplemented even today. The political and economic costs of closing the
road, it has been
argued, will be too high; tens of thousands of settlers using the road will
be inconvenienced; that the road is the sign of the development of the
islands. The sub-text of the arguments and reality of the situation is
clear. In the balance is the convenience of a few thousand settlers pitched
against the very survival of another extremely vulnerable community that
has, incidentally, been in the islands for at least 50,000 years. The
political system and the administration of the islands (three lieutenant
governors and four chief secretaries included) have pitched their weight
loud and clear - against the orders of the Supreme Court and against the
interests of the Jarawa community. Can there be any justification for this
attitude of the administration? Various people have tried over the years to
bring this to the notice of the administration; to prod it and cajole it to
do its duty in upholding the law of the land, of implementing the orders of
the apex court. There has
also been expert opinion which is both articulate and eloquent. "The ATR",
Dr R.K. Bhattacharya, former director of the Anthropological Survey of
India, observed in an official note to the Kolkata High Court in 2003, "is
like a public thoroughfare through one's private courtyard¿ In the whole of
human history we find that the dominant group for their own advantage has
always won over the minorities, not always paying attention to the issue of
ethics. Closure of the ATR would perhaps be the first gesture of goodwill on
the part of the dominant community towards an acutely marginalised group,
which is almost on the verge of extinction." Will the language of ethics cut
ice with an administration that thinks nothing of violating court orders? It
may merely be a dharam sankat for us; for the Jarawas it's disaster waiting
around the corner.

The writer is National Foundation for India (NFI) Media Fellow 2005-06
writing on the A&N Islands and author of 'Troubled Islands '

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