Road to the edge of the world

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 ’