Jarawa community
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Andaman Jarawas say they are sexually exploited by poachers
Arun Janardhanan,TNN | Feb 4, 2014
Contents |
The Jarawas: basic facts
There are 420 of them at the last count
Ancestors of Jarawas arrived at Andaman 60,000 years ago
They live along the western coast of the south and middle Andaman islands
Mostly hunters and gatherers, they are dependent on terrestrial and aquatic resources
Jarawas live in 1,025sq km in Southern Andaman. It's been hardly two decades since Jarawas, one of the four tribal groups on the islands, started coming out of the forest. Sentinelese, the Onge and the Great Andamanese are the other three tribes in the Andaman forests.
Trivialisation
Earlier, tourists made them dance and pose for food; now poachers sexually assault them. Jarawas, whose population adds up to 420 in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, are being exploited by poachers who have introduced alcohol and ganja into the reserve forests, the Andaman Chronicle has reported.
A Jarawa man told the paper-which it shared with The Guardian, London-that their women and girls are being forced to have sex with poachers and fishermen. An unidentified Jarawa man said poachers have established a barter system with a section of the community. They offer them alcohol and marijuana to poach resources in the tribal territories and sexually abuse the women and girls.
In one of the audio clips, the Jarawa man, speaking in Hindi, says the poachers regularly visit the reserve forest and under the influence of alcohol and ganja, they "chase and hurt the girls and sleep with them in the Jarawa Chadda (hut)." Andaman Chronicle said most of the Jarawas being sexually exploited by outsiders are either orphans or widows.
"They press them using hands and nails, when the girls get angry. They chase them under the influence of alcohol. They also sleep in Jarawa's house," said the Jarawa man naming a few poachers who come often.
"This has been going on for a long time," said Zubair Ahmed of Andaman Chronicle, who did the interview along with his colleague Dennis Giles. "The administration here has failed to take action against poachers claiming lack of evidence." The Supreme Court had banned tourists on the Andaman Nicobar Trunk Road after media showed Jarawas being lured with food to dance for tourists in early 2013.
Authorities had [in 2013-14] arrested seven poachers for entering the Jarawa territory. The administration has a system in place using local volunteers to prevent exploitation of Jarawas.
India's policy of integration
[ From the archives of the Times of India]
Parakram Rautela | TNN
There was anger and outrage when reports came in of Jarawa girls being made to dance half-naked for biscuits. The government announced an inquiry and promised to punish those found guilty of encouraging human-exhibit tourism. Whatever the outcome of the probe, it will not resolve the battle India’s indigenous people are fighting to both live the lives they have been accustomed to or to merge with the rest of the country. As of now, neither seems easy.
In the absence of policy and a willingness to understand an ancient, untouched way of life, the persisting alienation between some of our most isolated tribes and the government will most likely carry on for an eternity. Not that assimilation anywhere in the world has been uncomplicated. One just has to look at America and Canada’s discomfort with their respective native (Red) Indian populations to grasp the enormity of the endeavour. There is rampant drug abuse, unemployment and a general state of drift in the “camps” erected to protect them. As Chief Seattle, head of the Suquamish Indians, wrote to the American president in 1855, it is hard for the outsider to understand an existence not theirs. “If we sell you our land”, Seattle wrote, “you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers... If we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred. Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother?” That’s a tough lesson for anyone. In India, leaving the indigenous people and their habitat alone — think of Vedanta and the Niyamgiri Hills people — will be more difficult as governments race towards achieving firstworld development, often bulldozing everything in its path. Take what the Jharkhand government is trying to do with the Birhors, who have always been nomadic and who, despite the best wishes of their government, do not wish to saddle themselves with the responsibilities of a job or a permanent home. Soma Munda, assistant director at the Jharkhand Tribal Welfare and Research Institute says, “The Birhors are poor. If the government gives them fodder for the pigs and chicken, then maybe they will stop feasting on them.” The government has also tried to give them permanent homes and farmland, hoping they will take to them but the Birhors have been more content to hunt rabbit and partridge and carry on as they were. The story is no different for the Bondas of Orissa. Some years ago, members of the tribe — around 6,600 in the Malkangiri area who only come into contact with the outside world on Thursdays and Sundays at the haats (bazaars) in the Onukudelli and Mundiguda markets — ran helter-skelter when a tourist who’d been waiting in hiding took a flashlight photograph of them. It was symbolic of a forced intrusion they were afraid of. In Arunachal, the IduMishmis say they do not want the 3,000 megawatt hydropower project the government plans for the lower Dibang district. Human rights activist and tribe member Sunil Mow says, “What the government calls development in the Idu Mishmi areas is really “forced” development. “The mega projects will do no good for us. Instead, our culture, our identity and our livelihoods will be jeopardised by the influx of people who come into our traditional lands.”Of course, the tribes have changed, too. Jugal Kishore Ransingh, a welfare extension officer with the Bonda Development Agency, says, “Today, young Bondas use mobile phones, and houses in four of the tribe’s 32 villages have electricity and TVs.” It is inevitable that the forces of modernisation will leave the tribes unaffected. As Suresh Babu of Delhi’s Ambedkar University, who has studied the ecology and wildlife of the Andamans, says, “If the settlers around the Jarawa reserves are growing bananas, then the Jarawas will come for them when they ripen. They’re like us that way, fairly intelligent.” Is it possible, then, to think we can build a fortress around them and leave them in splendid isolation? The noble savage in his glorious world? And even if we did, says Pramod Kumar, JNU research scholar who has studied the Jarawas’ language, the poaching that goes on around the Jarawa reserves would leave them with no wild boar, a food staple, to hunt in about 10 years from now. Clearly, it’s a Catch-22 situation with disturbing ramifications. In 1857, there were 10 tribes of the Great Andamanese, the indigenous people who lived on the Andaman islands. Today, seven are extinct. Only 40 to 50 tribes people remain. They were wiped out because they came in contact with outsiders and to the diseases they had no immunity from. So what is the solution? Minister for tribal affairs, V Kishore Chandra Deo, says that “the tribals’ sentiments have to be respected and their complaints taken up on a case-by-case basis.” Babu says it might be simpler to educate “us” than to educate them. “Talk to the settlers who live around the Jarawa reserves. Explain to them that the Jarawa way of life — even if different — is just as good as ours.”
With reporting by NareshMitra in Guwahati;SanjayOjha in Ranchi, and RajaramSatapathy in Bhubaneswar
Although the Supreme Court in 2002 ordered that the highway through the Jarawas’ reserve should be closed, it is still open and tourists use it for ‘human safaris’. Poachers also enter the reserve. The tribe, in 1999 and 2006, also suffered outbreaks of measles – a disease that has wiped out many tribes worldwide
The Dongria Kondh of Orissa are fighting against mining in the Niyamgiri Hills
2001-16
The Times of India, Jun 19, 2016
Somdatta Basu
Jarawa numbers up 62% in 15 yrs In a tribe where every birth and death makes headlines, here is news of the century . Jarawas, one of the most endangered tribes of the world, have seen a 62% rise in population in last 15 years -from 266 in 2001 to 429 in 2016. As many as 263 of them are below 20 years of age. The Jarawas are so vulnerable that the Supreme Court has had to issue orders to protect them. The 2012 killing of a Jarawa woman by a crocodile and the death of a Jarawa child in March this year had triggered shockwaves among anthropologists. But it seems the health outreach started in 1997 has paid off.
In 2001, Andaman and Nicobar Centre of Anthropological Survey of India put the Jarawa population at 266. In 2012, the Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti, the apex welfare body for Jarawas, said the population had gone up to 406. “Their number is at 429,“ said AnSI director-in-charge M Sasikumar.
This data will figure in the book `Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups of India' to be released by AnSI to mark International Day of the World's Indigenous People on August 9. It includes a paper by AnSI deputy director Anstice Justin where he attributes the rise in population to modern healthcare.
Jarawas, also known as Angs, inhabit 1,028 sq km of forest area in the south and middle Andamans in pockets called Tanmad, Boiab and Thidong. Justin found that there are 164 children below 10 years. Men seem to outlive women as of the 11 tribals aged over 51, only three are women. The book warns of threats from poachers and the need to study why male infant mortality rate is relatively higher than that of females.
