Vacation Travel India

Electoral fightback

In the past India has shown a great capacity for reinvention. The 2004 election showed that politics are alive and kicking, particularly at a grass roots level. Believing their own propaganda, the NDA aimed their campaign squarely at the middle class, imagining that the dreams of the affluent minority would prove sufficiently alluring to the poor majority to carry the election. This was not to be the case. The BJP saw its vote plummet, losing 44 seats, while Congress (the largest party) went up from 114 to 145. Perhaps even more telling were the gains for the left-wing, with the two communist parties (CPI and CPI(M)) winning in 53 seats (up from 37 in 1999), and the overwhelming defeat of the arch-liberaliser Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP (Tclugu Desam Party) in Andhra Pradesh, which went down from 29 to five seats.

Social attitudes

As with so much else in contemporary India, people’s attitudes towards everything from religion, to clothes, to sex are multifarious and complex. To take one example, it is generally true that the position of women in society has improved over the past 50 years. After all, India had a female prime minister years before the UK, and it is not uncommon to see women in the workplace. On the streets of central New Delhi you can now see young women wearing miniskirts, unthinkable 10 years ago; though it is true that this is still an exception, the norm being either jeans and a T-shirt or salwar kamiz.

However, these advances are not universal. In many areas women are still restricted to the domestic sphere or, if they are poor, undertake gruelling physical work for little reward. Female infanticide (now gone illicitly hi-tech through foetal screening) is still a huge problem, and astonishing levels of rape and abuse are under-reported.

As with many things, middle-class women, with their access to education and health care, have seen their prospects and freedoms open up, while their poorer sisters concern themselves with the struggle for survival.

In moving away from traditional roles and becoming a target in the marketplace, women find themselves facing new challenges. Body image has become a major concern. Women are now bombarded with advertisements for creams, shampoos and beauty treatments, promoted by sylph-like creatures with fair skins. “Fair and Lovely”, a skin-lightening cream, is the best-selling beauty product in the country, highlighting the implicit racism in the widely promoted ideal image. Anorexia, unheard of in India a few years ago (going without food was not fashionable in a country where so many people are malnourished), has now reared its ugly head as movie stars and models parade their skinny bodies across the television and cinema screens.

Indians are caught between competing discourses: liberalization or the Nehru-Gandhi legacy; frugality and saving or consumption and spending; religious orthodoxy or newly acquired social freedoms. In the past they have proved themselves humane and inventive, giving us hope for the future.

Technorati Tags: Contemporary India

Also known as “tribals”, the Adivasi (indigenous/aboriginal) peoples of India are found from the Nilgiris to the Himalaya, and from asthan to Arunachal Pradesh. This blanket term refers to a hugely diverse selection of societies and cultures and is used as a catch-all for peoples who are not easily categorized in terms of India’s dominant groups or ideologies.

Many Adivasi peoples, particularly those living in a forest belt that stretches across Central India, from Orissa and Bihar, to Madhya Pradesh, may be the descendants of the first inhabitants of South Asia. Linguistically and culturally distinct from the peoples that make up the majority of India’s population, it is thought their presence in South Asia predates the two waves of immigration from the north and west that brought the now-dominant groups of the North and South.

As these new peoples moved in through the passes of the northwest they displaced the existing inhabitants, forcing them into the hills and forests where there was less pressure for land. Over time there was interaction between these different groups, but due to their relative isolation in sparsely populated regions many Adivasi peoples have retained highly individual identities.

The northeastern states have, after Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Orissa, the highest concentration of Adivasis. The groups who live here have more in common culturally and linguistically with peoples living in Burma (Myanmar) to the east, than they do with, say, the Todas or Kotas of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Even within the state of Arunachal Pradesh, one of the very few areas of India where Adivasis have any control over their affairs, there are over 60 distinct groups.

What does unite many of these peoples, however, is the degree of discrimination they have suffered and continue to face. Where Adivasis have had close contacts with the dominant Hindu population their place within the caste system has been considered extremely low, working as agricultural labourers or undertaking menial tasks (often those believed to be “polluting” by high-caste Hindus).

Traditionally, land-ownership patterns among ™ivasi groups tend to be collective and not governed by individual ownership laws, making it easy for unscrupulous politicians and landowners to appropriate Adivasi lands. This process of appropriation accelerates as the general pressure for land increases, and those areas where the Adivasis are relatively protected from exploitation become fewer and fewer.

Some of the worst offences of this kind have been committed by the state. Many large dams, such as the controversial Narmada projects, have flooded areas populated by Adivasis, and provide power and drinking water to urban areas while handing out pitiful, or no, compensation to the people they displace. Land reform programmes in states such as Kerala, while laudable in many respects, redistributed land that had traditionally supported Adivasi groups practising low-level rotational agriculture and hunter-gathering. Logging has decimated many of the forests previously inhabited by Adivasi groups, and areas such as Jhark-hand, which are rich in mineral wealth, have seen the displacement of many people, as well as widespread pollution of their lands.

Southern Bihar is now the new state of Jharkhand, and eastern Madhya Pradesh is now the state of Chattisgarh. Both have large Adivasi populations and, in theory, the Adivasis themselves should be able to lobby the state governments more efficiently than before. How far these new states will go towards protecting the interests of the Adivasis, however, remains to be seen.

Technorati Tags: Adivasi