Tribal Christians demand clarity on Indian state’s domicile policy

India

Existing policy in Jharkhand is a betrayal of local people including tribal Christians, say protesters

Indigenous people including tribal Christians in eastern India’s Jharkhand state have demanded the immediate declaration of the state’s domicile policy.

Domiciles of a state are entitled to certain privileges that are denied to outsiders, such as reservations in education and government jobs.

This is a sensitive issue, especially in a state like Jharkhand where distrust between tribal people and outsiders due to historic socioeconomic disparities continues to exist.

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To highlight their long-pending demand, some 5,000 tribal people in traditional attire staged a protest outside the Jharkhand Assembly in Ranchi on March 14.

They want the government to adopt a domicile policy on the basis of the state’s 1932 khatian (land records) at the ongoing session of the state assembly.

“The whole idea of creating the new state of Jharkhand in the year 2000 was to ensure the socioeconomic progress of tribal people. But the government is yet to decide who are the original inhabitants of this state,” said Ratan Tirkey, a former member of the Jharkhand government’s tribes’ advisory committee.

“The 1932 cut-off will ensure greater benefits for tribal people but political parties fear it would impact their vote banks among the outsiders in the state” 

Tirkey told UCA News that various Christian and Sarna (a tribal religion) organizations have been demanding that the 1932 land records be treated as a cut-off for granting domicile but all governments including the present one run by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) have failed to meet their expectation.

“The 1932 cut-off will ensure greater benefits for tribal people but political parties fear it would impact their vote banks among the outsiders in the state,” Tirkey said, blaming this “political confusion” for the continued suffering of local people.

The previous government of the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had announced in 2016 that people living in Jharkhand since or before 1985 would be considered local inhabitants. But this was seen as an attempt to snatch away the rights and benefits of the state’s indigenous people.

The JMM government headed by Chief Minister Hemant Soren has set up a cabinet subcommittee to redefine the domicile policy. “The deliberations are still on but the land records of the year 1932 cannot be the ‘only basis’ as many districts were left out of it,” said Rural Development Minister Alamgir Alam.

He said the government will be studying all details and nuances before arriving at a final policy.

But Lobin Hembram, a JMM leader who is also an elected member of the legislative assembly, said they will not go home until a fresh policy is announced in the ongoing session.

It was a similar discontent against outsiders in the region that had led to the formation of the state, say experts

Mukti Prakash Tirkey, editor of a weekly newspaper on tribal affairs published from New Delhi, said several leading industrial houses have set up automobile and iron processing factories in mineral-rich Jharkhand state, hiring mostly people from outside since the 2016 policy announced by the BJP government.

It was a similar discontent against outsiders in the region that had led to the formation of the state, say experts.

“Jharkhand holds a significant part of India’s mineral wealth and has always had tribal and non-tribal indigenous people in the majority. Though the number of Adivasis [tribal people] has fallen — from two-thirds of the population in the 1950s to one-fourth, as per Census 2011 — the combined population of tribal and non-tribal natives is still around 70 percent of Jharkhand’s 31.9 million residents,” according to Down to Earth, a magazine published from New Delhi.

Christians, mostly local tribal people, are estimated to number around 1.4 million in the state.

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