ASSAM Tribal Land Alienation: Government’s Role The large-scale influx of infiltrators from the south and the north-west has compounded fears of insecurity and large-scale land alienation. Infiltration has been a fall-out of not merely recent government policies, but once formed a part of the colonial government’s moves to resettle and develop the region. CHANDAN KUMAR SHARMA W ith the burgeoning volume of tribal ethnic movements in India in recent years, a queer belief seems to be gaining strong currency among the common people. This belief holds that the government is taking all initiatives to ameliorate the socio-economic plight of our tribal populace. But due to the detrimental effects of the above-mentioned movements these initiatives have Economic and Political Weekly not yielded the expected results. We intend to argue that this view is largely a product of government propaganda aimed at discrediting the very raison d’etre of the tribal movements and also at finding an alibi for its own failure and nonperformance in the sphere of tribal development. What is most disturbing is the fact that even a large section of the intelligentsia also seems to be susceptible to this obnoxious view. However, no serious observer of tribal affairs can afford to be December 29, 2001 indulgent to this kind of campaign. This in turn requires us to find out the actual character of the much-vouched government initiatives toward tribal development. Verrier Elwin in his A Philosophy for NEFA (1949) observed “…the first cause of their (tribals) depression was the loss of their land and forests. This had the effect so enervating the tribal organism that it had no interior resistance against infection by a score of other serious evils” (p 62). “To the tribal mind, government’s attitude about land and forests is as important as any scheme for development or education” (ibid). Leading experts on tribal development also have echoed Elwin’s concern. This sets apart land as the most crucial issue in any scheme for tribal development. Ergo, the attitude of any government toward tribal development can best be assessed through its attitude toward tribal land. In this paper, an attempt has been made to examine the role of the Assam government in preserving tribal interest on land from a historical perspective. Assam, plagued by a series of tribal ethnic movements in recent times, represents an ideal case to examine the nature of government attitude toward its tribal populace. The various tribal groups are the most backward fragments of the Indian society insofar as their economy, education, health status, etc, are concerned. It is a well known fact that prior to the advent of the British there was not much social interaction between the tribal and the mainstream nontribal populations (the degree of this interaction indeed varied from place to place. Assam represents a case where tribalnontribal interaction was quite conspicuous.) In fact, social interactions between them was strongly discouraged. Still, there were relations of trade and commerce, though limited to a small scale, between them. Nevertheless, a reasonable section of the elites of the various tribal groups (the tribal chiefs, etc) were gradually entering the Hindu fold with an aspiration to attain kshatriya status. The Hindu priestly class played a very significant role not only in igniting this ambition but also in fulfilling the same. The former in turn enjoyed various privileges under the converted chieftains. Many of these chieftains turned into kings with the gradual process of state formation. Following the elite, and also due to the initiatives of the Hindu priestly class, a large section of the common tribal populace gradually entered the Hindu fold through a process of renunciation and enunciation of tribal and Hindu rites, customs and practices respectively. 4791 Through this process, many tribal neophytes in course of time even entered the Hindu caste fold. Notwithstanding such processes many tribal neophytes, however, could not attain caste or near-caste status for various reasons, a discussion of which is out of place in this context. Besides, a sizeable section of the tribal populace was left out of this process of Hinduisation. The above-mentioned process was present most conspicuously in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam. However, the non-Hinduised tribals, and even a good fragment of the Hinduised tribal neophytes to some extent, still largely retained their traditional economy, social customs and practices. Although a significant section of the tribal neophytes took to settled agriculture, many among them continued with their traditional practices of hunting, fishing, food gathering, terrace cultivation, shifting cultivation, animal husbandry, etc. Extensive dependence on and use of forest product and community ownership of land continued to be the important hallmarks of their societies. In medieval Assam, various such tribal groups also maintained their own territories which were left to itself by the contemporary mainstream ruling classes in return for fulfilment of certain periodic feudal obligations. This situation also applies to medieval India in general. Change under Colonial Rule The British rule brought about tremendous changes to all this colonial policies. It unleashed a systematic onslaught on the Indian social structure. All agricultural and forestlands of the country were brought under the control of the colonial administration. Relatively isolated tribal habitats were encroached upon in the process. The non-tribals started penetrating the forest and hill areas to exploit economic resources, thereby undermining the traditional economy and society of the tribals [Arnold 1982]. This penetration of the non-tribals into the tribal areas was, in fact, engineered by the British to serve their own colonial interest. Otherwise, there was no reason as to why a mass of nontribal people all of a sudden should start encroaching tribal land, something they had not done in the past. The newly imposed British land system was radically different from that prevailing among many tribals [Shah 1990:91]. The British laid the basis of private property and created feudal interest on land including land and forests belonging to the tribals through the grant of ‘zamindari’ to landlords. The latter, known as zamindars, were to collect land revenue from the peasantry on behalf of 4792 the colonial administration. Many zamindars also indulged in importing a large number of non-tribal peasants to the tribal areas to work on their land with the intention of generating more revenue. Thus, the British paved the way for commer-cialisation of the resources that the tribal societies had treated and known to be their community holdings. Each and every item of their daily use like bamboo, thatch, reed and wood in the forest, fish in the rivers and ‘beels’ – everything was brought under taxation. The non-tribal peasantry also suffered quite heavily due to such an anti-people land and forest policy of the colonial administration. This was quite an all-India phenomenon. The anger and exasperation of the people in general and tribals in particular was beyond description. Commenting on the Birsa Munda uprising, K S Singh writes, “the transformation of the Mundari agrarian system into non-communal, feudal, zamindari or individual tenures was the key to agrarian disorders that climaxed in religious- political movements of Birsa” (1966:1). “In many villages in different tribal areas in Bihar, Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, tribals slowly lost their land to the non-tribal moneylenders and landlords, reducing their status to that of tenants or labourers. In some places, tribal chiefs were converted to Hinduism and invited the non-tribal peasants to settle in tribal areas. The latter being experienced farmers seized the land from the tribals and employed the natives as labourers” [Shah ibid:91]. Commenting on the usurpation of forestry inhabited by tribals, Verrier Elwin (1945:257) writes that the tribals firmly “believe that the forest belongs to them and that they have a right to do what they will with it. They have been there, they say, for centuries; it is their life and they consider themselves justified in resisting any attempt to deprive them of it.” The exasperation of the tribals found its expression in several revolts like the Mal Pahariya uprising of 1772, the mutiny of the Hos of Singbhum in 1831, the Kol insurrection of 1831-32, the Khond uprising in 1846, the Santhal rebellion in 1855-57, the Birsa Munda uprising during 1874-1901, to name a few. There were altogether 70 major tribal revolts during the 200 years of British rule in India [Raghavaiah 1971]. Assam also underwent the onslaught of the new land policy of the British. Assam’s problem was even more acute than the mainland India due to the fact that unlike the latter the state was still adequately introduced to a cash economy. So, both the tribal and non-tribal populations of the state experienced the pangs of the new land revenue policy of the colonial administration. The backward socio-economic structure of the state was torn asunder especially by the introduction of a plantation economy in the state in the very third decade of 19th century. The best plots of fallow land of the state were handed over to the British planters in a brazen display of neglect of the socio-economic interest of the people of the state. Lands belonging to the peasantry also often were encroached upon by the planters. Inter-village communication also suffered disjunction in the face of the aggrandising policy of the planters. All these had the direct blessing of the colonial administration. Besides, forestland and forest products on which both the tribal and the non-tribal peasantry depended heavily for their sustenance were also brought under the total control of the government. All these left, within a very short span of time, the traditional economic life of the people in total disarray. The consequence was a surge of anger which found its expression in the longdrawn peasant upsurge in the areas of central and lower Assam in the latter half of the 19th century. Although unlike other parts of India, the role of the non-tribal peasantry was conspicuous in these revolts, it is the tribal peasantry whose role in these revolts was the decisive one. Their whole-hearted participation in these revolts speaks volume about the extent and intensity of their suffering due to the explanation colonial land and forest policy. Concessions Extracted The prolonged peasant struggle succeeded in compelling the British to allow certain concessions. Nevertheless, the kind of disjunction and displacement that the colonial land policy resulted in the life of Assamese peasantry, especially its tribal constituents, was beyond repair. The tribal peasantry belonging to the Tiwa and BodoKachari communities of the erstwhile Nagaon, Darrang, and Kamrup districts were the worst casualties of the British land revenue policy. Their problems were much more acute than their tribal counterparts in the rest of India and the nontribal peasantry of Assam. Why? We have already mentioned that Assam entered the ambit of a cash economy much later than the rest of India. During Ahom rule in the pre-British Assam the predominant form of revenue was the corvee labour service rendered to various state activities. Barter was still the chief medium of exchange. Although towards the later part of the 18th century cash economy started Economic and Political Weekly December 29, 2001 to make some headway in Assam, yet it was in too low degree to be treated as a general mode of exchange. So, leave alone the tribal peasantry, even the non-tribal peasantry did not have enough cash at their disposal to meet the demand of an exacting colonial revenue policy. This compelled them to take loans from the marwari usurers who were encouraged to enter the state of Assam by the colonial administration with this same very objective along with carrying on with trade and commerce. Both the tribal and non-tribal peasantries of Assam were, however, not in a position to earn enough cash to repay the debt and thus entered into a devastating debt trap. The necessity of repaying debt compelled them to selling off their land and agricultural product at throwaway rates. The tribal peasantry suffered more acutely in this process due to their ignorance and innocence. Besides, a good fragment of the tribal peasantry of Assam of that period was a practitioner of shifting cultivation. Land was abundant and they used to shift their habitat from place to place. Moreover, many tribal peasants practised this in order to avoid paying revenue to the government [Barman 1995:75]. This practice, however, deprived them of procuring permanent ‘patta’ land for themselves. To put in brief, the tribal peasantry of Assam could not withstand the burden of the colonial revenue policy and the latter resulted in widespread poverty, land alienation and displacement of the tribal population of the state and this went on unabated despite protests from them. Land Alienation The plight of the tribal peasantry worsened with the growing number of peasants migrating into Assam from the neighbouring erstwhile East Bengal from the early second decade of the 20th century. The British administration encouraged this immigration of peasant, mostly Muslims, hoping to garner more land revenue by settling them in the fallow and wasteland areas of the Brahmaputra valley. Their presence was most conspicuous in the Goalpara district, the Barpeta subdivision of the erstwhile Kamrup district, foothill areas of the Karbi hills in the Nagaon district and the Mongoldoi subdivision of the erstwhile Darrang district. The magnitude of the immigration can be gauged from the fact that within 30 years (1911-1941) the percentage of Muslim population in the Barpeta subdivision increased from 0.1 per cent to 49 per cent. Similarly, during 1921-31, the Dhing, Lahorighat, Juria, Laokhowa, and Bakori mauzas in the Nagaon district Economic and Political Weekly experienced population growth from 100 per cent to 294 per cent [Barman ibid: 30-31]. The migration from the erstwhile East Bengal was accompanied by an almost equally worrisome surge of immigration of Nepali citizens who settled mainly in the remote forest areas of Assam. Most of them traded in milk and some in smuggled timber. The large-scale settlement of the immigrants resulted in the displacement of the tribal peasantry from their land in two ways. Firstly and directly, the migrants usurped agricultural land of the tribals. It has been already mentioned that the tribal peasantry of Assam were still the practitioners of shifting cultivation. Their area of movement included a very large tract. When migrant peasants were settled in these areas the traditional agricultural practice of the tribal peasants received serious setback because migrants now occupied the land, which they thought to be their own to continue their agricultural work. Secondly and indirectly, due to the tendency of the tribals to abandon their land and shift to a different place at the drop of a hat also contributed to their displacement. Many tribal people moved to remoter areas and even to forests to avoid living side by side with the strangers [Raychoudhury 1991:23]. In fact, this indirect process seems to be playing a crucial role in the process of land alienation among the tribal people of Assam. It may be mentioned in this connection that a considerable portion of land of the present-day city of Guwahati originally belonged to the people of Bodo-Kachari and plain Karbi tribes. Doley (1986:55) has noted that most of the land of the present-day township of Chlilapathar in the Lakhimpur district originally belonged to the Mishing tribe. Such examples can be multiplied. The tribal inhabitants of these areas sold off their land at minimum prices to others and moved away to live in remoter areas relatively free from the hustle and bustle and social complexities of the modern city life. It may be mentioned here that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants of the 524 forest villages of Assam are tribals [Barman ibid:76]. This demonstrates their propensity to live amidst or nearer to nature. This propensity is not to be construed as something sentimental, it is rather an offshoot of the dependence of the tribals on the forest resources for the sustenance of their economic life. This is ostensibly in order to wrest this process of displacement and land alienation among the tribals that the provisions for reserved tribal areas were adopted by the then colonial administration. The first such effort could be found in the ‘Line December 29, 2001 System’ introduced first in the erstwhile Nagaon district and the Barpeta subdivision of the erstwhile Kamrup district in 1920 [Das 1986:30]. The line system aimed again ostensibly at protecting the tribal lands from the land hungry migrant peasantry. It made provisions for settlement of the latter in specified manners in the village areas of Assam. Those villages where the immigrants could settle freely were specified as ‘open’ villages. Those villages where immigrants could settle only on one side of a line drawn on the village map were specified as ‘mixed’ villages. And the third category of the villages which were closed to immigrants was known as ‘closed’ villages. But this system collapsed under the aggressive land grabbing initiative of the immigrants. The Line System Committee instituted to look into the working of the line system found that the tribal villagers were the worst victims of the land encroachment ventures of the immigrants. Many tribal villages disappeared in the process and their inhabitants moved into submontane zone [Das ibid:31]. The committee in its report submitted in 1939 favoured creation of ‘prohibited areas’ for backward and tribal communities. However, the resignation of then Congress-led coalition government under Gopinath Bardoloi’s premiership, and outbreak of the second world war halted the process of its implementation. The Muslim League-led coalition ministry under Sir Syed Muhammad Sadullah rejected the suggestions of the Line System Committee by a resolution in June 1940 and instead devised a Development Scheme aiming at facilitating the settlement of migrants in all wasteland areas of Assam [Das ibid:33]. The enthusiasm of the Muslim League ministry in settling the Muslim migrants had an obvious political objective which was to turn Assam into a Muslim dominated province. But this scheme generated a storm of protest and the Sadullah ministry fell. But Sadullah returned to power again in 1943 and went ahead with the much-hated development scheme. Land for Immigrants Under the garb of ‘grow more food campaign’, it proposed to de-reserve portions of Professional Grazing Reserves and even two Forest Reserves, namely, Laokhowa and Orang. The main objective of this scheme was to “open more lands for the immigrant population”. Again under sustained protest this policy was modified in January 1945. In this way, after going through a process of modification and changes over a prolonged period of time, the ideas of today’s tribal belts and tribal 4793 blocks were implemented eventually by the Gopinath Bardoloi-led Congress ministry in 1946. Villages with 50 per cent or more population of the tribal and backward communities were brought under the jurisdiction of tribal belts and blocks. For geographical compactness, even the neighbouring villages with less than 50 per cent tribal population were clubbed with the reserved tribal areas. However, the non-tribal population already inhabiting these reserved areas was allowed to keep their holdings as before. In these reserved areas transfer of tribal land to non-tribals was prohibited. These provisions were given final shape by the Assam Land and Revenue Regulation Amendment Act, 1947. This was the genesis of tribal belts and blocks of today. At this juncture, it is necessary to make a comment on the phenomenon of migration from the erstwhile East Bengal. Traditionally, entire blame for this phenomenon has been put on the ‘nefarious design’ of the then Muslim League ministry to turn Assam into a Muslim dominated province and eventually to merge the province with Pakistan, demand for which was rife from the mid-1930s. But it is conveniently forgotten that the Muslim League ministry first came to power in Assam only in the late 1930s, but migration to the province began from the very second decade of this century. Obviously, the British administration had a definite role in encouraging the influx. In fact, the former did that with a view to, as is already mentioned, procuring more land revenue by settling the migrants in the fallow and wasteland areas of Assam. This again raises question about the real nature of the much-professed concern of the British administration about protecting the tribal interest. In fact, there are reasons to hold that the sympathy of the British administration visa-vis the tribals was nothing but lip-sympathy and aimed at geographically, socially and sentimentally isolating the tribal communities from the non-tribal population of the society. The colonial administration, on the one hand, imposed sanction on the movements of even the indigenous nontribal population of the state into the tribal areas with the excuse that the separate identity of the tribals would be endangered otherwise, while on the other hand, it virtually opened up the tribal land to facilitate the settlement of the immigrant peasantry with the motive of maximising revenue resources. This duality of the colonial administration regarding the tribal habitats can be understood only in the context of its attempt to keep the tribal population away from the influence of the freedom struggle. 4794 Notwithstanding the seemingly good intents of the Gopinath Bardoloi-led ministry in creating tribal belts and blocks, eventually they failed miserably in safeguarding tribal interest. Usurpation of tribal land by non-tribals continued by exploiting lacunae in the existing laws. Although transfer of land to nontribals in the reserved areas was illegal, yet under the burden of indebtedness and also under other compulsions, the tribal inhabitants kept disposing of their land to their non-tribal counterparts. There are instances when land is transferred even on verbal assurances [Goswami 1986:47]. Even the very custodians of tribal interest, viz, the government officials, ministers and political leaders have been recognised as principal perpetrators of the problem of tribal landlessness. All these categories of people are engaged in the usurpation of tribal land by various dubious means. It must be mentioned in this connection that even the emerging tribal landlords are engaged in seizing land from their poor brethren whenever the latter fail to repay their debts. Although, in this process the land appears to be intact in tribal hands, it actually results in the alienation of land among a large section of the tribal peasantry and concentration of the same among a handful of tribal elites. Many tribal political leaders also come under this class. Government’s Role However, what is of most concern is the fact that the government itself as an institution has been deeply engaged in violating the spirit of its own tribal land policy. Each and every government in postindependence Assam has been following the practice of acquisition of tribal land in the name of development. The government acquires tribal lands for construction of railway and road transport, setting up of industrial and irrigation complexes, construction of dams, and so on. Studies by the Tribal Research Institute (TRI) of Assam, a government agency, contends that one of the very significant factors leading to tribal displacement in Assam is the installation of the industrial and irrigational complexes in the reserved tribal areas. The Dhansiri Irrigation Project in the Darrang district, the Jagiroad Paper Mills of the Hindustan Paper Corporation at Morigaon district, the Bokajan Cement Factory of the Cement Corporation of India in the Karbi Anglong district, the Namrup Fertiliser Industry of the Fertiliser Corporation of India in the Dibrugarh district, the Bongaigaon Refinery and Petrochemicals in the Bongaigaon district, etc, are glaring examples of government’s nefarious role in uprooting the tribals from their own land [Bordoloi 1990:63]. The proposed dam in the Pagladia rivulet in the Nalbari district of lower Assam, it is claimed, is going to displace around 2,500 tribal families. Despite protests from different quarters including environmentalists and social scientists, the government wants to go ahead with the project in the name of development. On the other hand, government has no comprehensive scheme for the rehabilitation of the displaced tribal families. Studies conducted by TRI corroborate the above fact. In fact, the picture of land alienation among the tribals within the tribal belts and blocks becomes evident from a study undertaken by TRI in the late 1980s which says that 16.44 per cent of the tribal families had already transferred their land within the reserved areas. Of this 16.44 per cent tribal families, 10.38 per cent had transferred their land to nontribals, 2.22 per cent to tribals and lands of 3.83 per cent of families had been acquired by government [Bordoloi ibid:62]. There are again many cases when leave alone measures of rehabilitation, even due compensation is not provided by the government to the displaced tribal families [Barman ibid:74]. Another ironical development that caused land alienation among tribals was the Assam Ceiling Act, 1956. First, the landlords owning excess land under the act often disposed of their extra land to someone else, real or fictitious, to escape from the clutches of the act. The peasants working on these lands were also thereby displaced. It has been [Raychoudhury 1990:24] pointed out that an overwhelming number of peasants thus evicted from surplus land belonging to individual landlords or institutions were tribal peasantry. The evictors (that is, their erstwhile landlords) being members of influential gentry class always had the support of the government machinery. Hundreds of tribal peasants of Beltola and Panbari Mauzas under the Guwahati tribal belt underwent severe police repression while they had launched a struggle in the 1950s to protect their rights on land. These lands although owned by non-tribal absentee landlords, tribal peasants had been carrying on cultivation for long periods in these lands. Among the absentee landlords there were several ministers, MLAs, politicians and bureaucrats. Second, the Ceiling Act resulted in many tribal peasants getting much less land than what they hereditarily deserved. Due to the ignorance of the tribal peasants, the land of their ancestors are often not duly transferred to them and they continue to enjoy land right Economic and Political Weekly December 29, 2001 in the name of their ancestors without any documentary evidence that the land had already been divided among the descendents. The reluctance of the revenue officials to help the tribal peasantry in this regard also compounds the problem. So, when Ceiling Act came into operation they lost even their rightful land. This act, thus, ironically accentuated the process of land alienation among the tribal peasantry. On the other hand, the government continued to settle immigrant peasants on tribal lands. Unlike the motives of the British administration and the Muslim League ministry, in the post-independence period the motive of the government (especially of the Congress Party which ruled Assam continuously for 30 years after independence) behind its initiatives to settle immigrants has been to create ‘vote banks’ for electoral gains. Forced Migration All these factors compelled the tribal population in many areas of Assam to migrate into remoter areas, especially forest reserves and submontane areas leaving behind their normal habitats. Over the last 40 years or so, a huge section of the Bodo peasantry, the worst victim of the government land policy, have migrated to newer areas like the eastern part of the river Suwansiri, Gohpur in the Sonitpur district, Lakhimpur district, Daiyang forest reserve of the Golaghat district, Karbi Anglong district, and so on [Bora 1993:41]. Today these are the people who bear the brunt of governmental eviction measures. The settlement of a large number of Bodo peasantry in the Batasipur forest reserve of the Sonitpur district which recently have generated quite a furore following successive police actions on the encroachers bears testimony to this contention. Thus, the tribal populace who has lost their land and livelihood due to faulty and sometimes deliberate government policies now face the grind of governmental action. Protection of our forest cover is undoubtedly important. Today, however, it has become customary to put the onus squarely on the tribals for the depletion of our forest cover. As if the most dangerous threat to our forestry comes from the indigenous tribal populace! No one cares to inquire critically as to what have actually caused the progressive shrinkage of forestry in Assam (till 20 years back Assam had the highest percentage of forest cover in the country). We seem to be unmindful of the devastating role played by the external migrants, contractors, forest officials, political leaders and big industrial houses in the spoilation of our forestry under the Economic and Political Weekly burden of government propaganda. In fact, the role of the Nepali immigrants who had settled in the forest areas of Assam and started the process of plundering the forest cover long before, is hardly taken cognisance of while discussing the factors leading to the depletion of forestry in the state. To put it briefly, we have not experienced the same kind of activism on the part of the government in evicting the encroachers belonging to the external migrant communities – be it Bangladeshi or Nepali – as is seen in case of the indigenous tribal communities. We have mentioned above about the tribal (Bodo) encroachment in the Batasipur forest reserve. The Assam government tries to describe this phenomenon as a deliberate attempt on the part of the leadership of the ongoing Bodo statehood movement to establish geographical contiguity between different Bodo dominated areas so that geographical buffer zones do not stand in the way of creating one Bodoland state. The government has adopted unprecedented stern measures to evict the encroachers from the occupied forestland. We do not have enough details on government motives behind these encroachment. But the question remains as to why a mass of tribal peasant should abandon their original habitat to settle in a forest reserve thereby also risking eviction and other troubles. Moreover, we have already mentioned that government has exercised an uglylooking indifference insofar as land grabbing by other agencies is concerned. This indifference cannot be better exemplified than the government attitude towards encroachment of tribal land by numerous tea plantations of Assam. In fact, successive governments have turned a deaf ear to all reminders and protests against this design of the plantations. On the contrary, the government is doing every bit to facilitate the success of the land-grabbing ventures of the plantations apart from having leased them out land at most friendly terms. In this backdrop, it becomes a matter of serious enquiry as to whether there is any correlation between the land grabbing ventures of the plantations and the fact that tea gardens in Assam have now become prime targets of various tribal extremist outfits. Though the discussion here deals with the tribal land alienation in Assam, its conclusions are in fact all Indian in character. Be it the central or the state governments, neither has demonstrated any empathy toward the problems plaguing the tribal communities of the country till today. On the other hand, the history of December 29, 2001 post-independence India is full with examples of exploitation, deprivation and marginalisation of the tribal population. Wherever displacement of population has taken place in the name of development projects, it is invariably the tribals who have been compelled to bear the brunt of it. The saga of the Sardar Sarovar Dam is only a recent phenomenon. Tribals are not well organised everywhere to rise against such exploitation. In most of the areas they form only a minuscule minority without any wherewithal to offer significant resistance to the nefarious designs of the combine of the government, industrialists and businessmen. But wherever possible, they are offering stiff resistance against the injustice done to them. The tribals of the Bastar region of Madhya Pradesh, of the Narmada valley are glaring examples of this. In the north-east India too, tribals are on warpath against the government for various reasons. But among the plains tribes, the prime reason of disgruntlement is the loss of their traditional land and forest resources. The Bodo movement is the most telling example of this. It is time that the government took serious note of the situation and alters its attitude towards tribal development. EPW References Arnold, David (1982): ‘Rebellious Hillmen: The Gudem Rampa Rising 1839-1924’ in Ranajit Guha (ed), Subaltern Studies I, OUP, Delhi. Barman, S N (1995): Asomar Janajati Samasya, Progressive Book House, Guwahati, Assam. Bora, D (1993): Samokaleen Tokabahi, Journal Emporium, Nalbari, Assam. Bordoloi, B N (ed) (1986): Alienation of Tribal Land and Indebtedness, Tribal Research Institute, Assam. – (ed) (1990): Constraints of Tribal Development in North-East India, TRI, Assam. Das, J N (1986): ‘Genesis of Tribal Belts and Blocks of Assam’ in B N Bordoloi (ed) (1986). Doley, D (1986): ‘Patterns and Causes of Land Alienation of the Mishing Tribe of Assam’ in B N Bordoloi (1986). 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