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Subir
Bhaumik is BBC’s Eastern India Correspondent and author of
“Insurgent Crossfire : Northeast India” . He was
Queen Elizabeth Fellow at Oxford University in
1989-90. He has presented more than thirty papers at
regional , national and international seminars, has written
for compendiums and journals on a regular basis and has
recently completed a book on Northeast India to be published
by the Penguins. He made a presentation before the World
Commission on Dams seeking the decommissioning of the Dumbur
Hydel Project in 2002 because he believes that may be the
starting point of a process of ethnic reconciliation
desperately needed for Tripura, a state he hails from and
intensely identifies with.
At
10,039sq.kms, Tripura is northeast India’s smallest
state. But this was not always so.
Maharaj Bijoy Manikya is said to have taken bath in seven
large rivers of East Bengal , which means he controlled a
large swathe of land between hill Tipperah and
Bangladesh’s present capital Dhaka.
The Manikyas controlled much of East Bengal’s
Comilla region during mediavel times – a region my
ancestors hailed from. Their governance was marked by
fairness and balance in handling of ethnic aspirations .
With royal patronage, tolerance and multiculturalism
flourished in an area divided by ethnicity and religion and
torn by conflicts born out of it. Not surprisingly
therefore, readers of “Tripura Observer” (an Agartala-based
English Daily) in 2000 voted Maharaja Bir Bikram as
“Tripura’s Man of the Millenium” in preference to
those who have led the state
since the end of the royal order.
Even after the advent of the British , when the
Tripura kingdom was restricted to its present hill confines,
Bengalis and indigenous tribespeople lived in peace. No
riot, not even sporadic ethnic clashes were ever reported
between Bengali settlers and from
princely Tripura . If the Manikyas welcomed Bengali
professionals or peasants to modernize their administration
or increase their land revenue through spread of settled
wet-rice agriculture, they also created the tribal reserve ,
that, in many ways, is the precursor of the Tripura Tribal
Areas Autonomous District Council.
The Partition unleashed a wave of migration from East
Pakistan to Tripura and other states on its borders. Though
the indigenous tribespeople in the state never enjoyed a
decisive majority like in neighbouring Chittagong hill
tracts or the Mizo hills,
they accounted for anything between 50 to 60 percent
of the total population. In the three decades after
Partition, the indigenous tribespeople were reduced to below
thirty percent of the state’s population , a situation
which left them completely marginalized in both
self-perception and reality.
1. (Table 1 – Tripura’s changing demography )
The influx intensified the land alienation of the
tribespeople and added to their collective sense of loss and
marginalisation. Almost all writers on Tripura insurgency
have identified land alienation amongst the tribespeople as
the major cause that has fuelled the violent insurgency that
has eaten into the vitals of an once vibrtant state.
2. As
long as the tribals had enough land and the Bengali
population was limited to
certain urban or semi-urban pockets or rural areas
around the capital, land alienation of tribals did not
emerge as a major problem. That began to change with the
Independence and
the merger of princely Tripura in the Indian Union. Between
1947 and 1971 , 6,09,998 Bengalis displaced from East
Pakistan came to Tripura for rehabilitation and
resettlement. Since the total population of the state in
1951 was 6,45,707,
it is not difficult to gauge the enormous population
pressure created on tiny Tripura by the Partition. During
this period, the state government primarily resettled the
refugees on land under different schemes , some enabling the
refugees to settle down with financial assistance and some
just helping them buy land.
The
operation of these schemes accelerated the process of large
scale loss of tribal lands. The pauperization of the tribals
can also be discerned from the growing number of tribal
agricultural labourers in three decades since the Partition.
In 1951, cultivators
constituted 62.94 percent of the total tribal workforce in
the state while only 8.93 percent were in the category of
agricultural labourers . But in 1981, only 43.57 percent of
the tribal workforce were cultivators and the number of
agricultural labourers had risen to 23.91 percent. But it
would be wrong to assume that tribals alone became landless
paupers and their lands were taken over by Bengali settlers
who grew at their expense – a stereotype that tribal
extremist groups seek to create.
3. It is true that tribals account
for 41 percent of the agricultural landless labourers in
Tripura – but the
rest are non-tribals, almost wholly Bengalis. It is true
that the percentage of landless agricultural labourers in
Tripura’s rural workforce has sharply risen from 4 percent
to 20 percent in 1971 to 29 percent in 1981 – but it is
also true the rest are Bengalis and that’s almost in
keeping the population ratio of the two communities in the
state. Of the nearly half
a million agrarian population in 1951, 2.5 percent were rent
receivers, 97.5 owner cultivators , 11.6 percent tenant
cultivators and 6.4 percent were labourers. In 1981,
agricultural labourers had become 29 percent of the total
rural workforce . In
1961, 16.9
percent of the tribals and 29.9 percent of the Bengali
settlers controlled much of Tripura’s land . The World
Agriculture Census (1970-71) shows that in Tripura 11
percent of the total population controlled 46 percent of the
total land while 70 percent of the population controlled 28
percent of the operational holdings.
4. But
while the Bengalis who came were used to sharp class
differences in the erstwhile homeland – East Bengal –
the tribespeople were not. At an individual level, they lost
lands mostly to Bengalis, rich or poor.Studies
made by the Law Research Institute in Guwahati in certain
areas of Tripura shows the huge land loss suffered by the
tribespeople at the hand of the Bengali settlers. The study
analysed the land transfer pattern in seven scheduled and
seven non-scheduled villages in South and West Tripura. In
the seven non-scheduled villages , out of the total 240
plots transferred , 145 plots were transferred by tribals to
non-tribals (read Bengalis) , 76 by tribals to tribals and
19 by non-tribals to non-tribals. So sixty percent of the
land transfers were from tribals to non-tribals.
In the 7 scheduled villages , the position was worse.
Out of 282 plots transferred, 191 were transferred from
tribals to non-tribals ( 68 percent of the total land
transfers) . Of the villages under study , the heaviest
tribal to non-tribal transfer took place at Hawaibari on the
Assam-Agartala road.
5. One
has to go to Teliamura , once
a small village but now a vital road junction
connecting West , North and South Tripura. Gunomoni Sardar ,
the grandfather of the
INPT leader Debabrata Koloi and former TNV military wing
chief Chuni Koloi, owned almost seventy percent of the lands
in Teliamura. He was a great friend of my grandfather,
Kashinath Bhowmik, who established the police in Khowai town
, from where Teliamura was covered those days. In 30 years,
Gunomoni Sardar’s descendants have hardly got a few
hectares left for themselves by the side of the TRTC bus
stand on the Assam-Agartala Road .
Under
the Congress administration, some Bengali refugee leaders
even set up “land cooperatives” like the Swasti Samity
in North Tripura. These cooperatives violated the Tribal
Reserves regulations and
began to take over large swathes of tribal land , a process
that was legitimized by conniving bureaucrats. The Communist
Party mobilized the tribesmen and even took the matter to
the court to secure a favourable verdict that was not
honoured by the bureaucracy. Angry at such rampant loss of
their traditional lands, large number of tribal youths took
to the jungles and the first significant underground group
in post-Merger Tripura, the Sengkrak or the “Clenched
Fist” was born.
6. The
Sengkrak movement, Tripura’s first manifestation of overt
ethnic militancy, started
in1967 as a direct fallout of the large scale of
alienation of tribal lands , accentuated through state
patronage .The ruling Congress government backed the
forcible occupation of tribal lands in the Deo valley by
Bengali settlers grouped into an organization called the
Swasti Samity and the Reang tribesmen organized themselves
into a militant group to hit back at the new Bengali
settlers.This
writer conducted a correlation analysis between land
alienation and tribal insurgency in August 1984 by choosing
to interview the family members of 84 extremists of the
Tribal National Volunteers. These family members had been
gathered at a government hostel as part of Chief Minister
Nripen Chakrabarti’s “Motivation Drive” to facilitate
the return of the guerrillas to normal life. It was found
that sixty-four percent of the families had suffered loss of
land to Bengalis while thirty-two percent of them were from
families of jhumias or shifting cultivators who were under
increasing pressure to find fresh lands for cultivation due
to the growing occupation of hill stretches by Bengali
refugees. Only four percent were from families with enough
land that had not been lost to the settlers.
7. In
settled agricultural areas like Khowai and Sadar , all
within one hundred kilometers of the state’s capital
Agartala, between twenty to forty percent of the tribal
lands have been alienated by the end of the seventies , when
tribal insurgency gathered momentum. In some parts of south
Tripura district, as much as sixty percent of the tribal
lands were alienated , sold in distress conditions as a
sequel to an unequal economic competition with the Bengali
settlers.
8. The land
loss at the level of the individual
was further compounded by large scale loss of tribal
lands to huge government projects like the Dumbur
Hydro-electric project, where an estimated 5000 to 8000
tribal families lost their lands and only a small percentage
of them possessing title deeds to prove ownership managed to
secure rehabilitation. The pauperization of Dumbur’s once
prosperous tribal peasantry and the huge benefits that
Bengali urban dwellers gained by electricity and
Bengali fishermen gained by being able to fish in the
large reservoir was not lost on a generation of angry tribal
youths who took up arms and left for the jungles to fight an
administration they felt was only working in the interests
of the Bengali refugees. Insurgent leader Bijoy Kumar
Hrangkhawl , now back to mainstream politics after his
Tribal National Volunteers (TNV) returned to normal life
following an accord in 1988, used to refer to Nripen
Chakrabarty as the “refugee chief minister” of Tripura.
9. The heartburn
over steady land loss on an one-to-one basis was further
exacerbated by the submergence of
a huge swathe of arable lands owned by the tribals in
the Raima valley as a result of the commissioning of the
Gumti hydel project in south Tripura.
This project not only disturbed the fragile ecology
of the Raima valley in
the south district of Tripura
, but also left a permanent sense of loss in the tribal
psyche. All tribal organizations including the Communist
backed Gana Mukti Parishad fiercely protested the
commissioning of
the Gumti hydro-electric project in 1976. But the Congress
government crushed the protests. It was determined to
augment Tripura’s deficit power supply – but it ended up
augmenting the catchment area of tribal unrest
by dispossessing thousands of them of their only
economic resource and collective symbol , their land.A
thirty-metre high gravity
dam was constructed across the river Gumti about 3.5 kms
upstream of Tirthamukh in south Tripura district for
generating 8.60 megawatt of power from an installed capacity
of 10 megawatt. The dam submerged a valley area of
46.34 sq.km. This was one of the most fertile valley
region in an otherwise hilly state , where arable flatlands
suitable for wet rice agriculture is a mere 28 percent of
its total land area. Official
records suggest 2558 tribal families were ousted from the
Gumti project area – but these were families who could
produce land deeds and were officially owners of the land
they possessed. Unofficial estimates varied between
8000 to 10000 families or about sixty to seventy
thousand tribespeople displaced
by the project. In
the tribal societies of northeast, ownership of land is
rarely personal and the system of recording land deeds
against individual names is a recent phenomenon.So,
most of those ousted by the Dumbur failed to get any
rehabilitation grant and were forced to settle in the hills
around the project , returning to slash and burn agriculture
called jhum. The Left government has recently announced that
all Dumbur
Oustees, wherever they are, will be covered under Kutir
Jyoti programme. A list of 500 Dumbur Oustee families
supplied to the Power Department. The Department has given
connection to 114 families who do not have power connection
under Kutirjyuti Programme. But what these families need
more than free
electricity is arable land and resources to earn their
livelihood from it.
10. The dam
destroyed the once surplus tribal peasent economy of the
state. Tripura’s leading economist Malabika
Dasgupta has shown in her study
on the Gumti hydel project that “attempts either to
protect the environment to the exclusion of considerations
for the well being of the people
or to improve their level of well being without
consideration for the environmental impact of such policies
can neither protect the environment nor improve the standard
of living of the people.”
11.
The Gumti, Tripura’s principal river, is formed by the
confluence of two small rivers , Raima and Sarma, the former
flowing out of the Longtharai range , the latter originating
from the Atharamura range.
Before the dam, the river Gumti flowed southwards
through a gorge in the Atharamura range beyond the
confluence point of Raima and Sarma . It spilled over a
series of rapids which
were locally known as the Dumbur falls at the point of
Tirthamukh (literally “Pilgrim’s Point) , a
place considered holy by the tribals and also the
Bengali settlers who would bath in the river
during the Pous Sankranti every winter.
Beyond Tirthamukh, the Gumti flows westwards up to
Malbassa village and then changes direction again , cutting
through the Deotamura range . After crossing the Deotamura,
it flows for another 60 kilometres before it enters
Bangladesh. After about flowing 80 kilometres through
eastern Bangladesh, it joins the Meghna river which flows
into the Bay of Bengal.The upper catchment of the Gumti
comprises of eleven
Gaon Sabhas- nearly
sixty villages in all – in the Gandacherra block of
Tripura’s newly formed Dhalai district.
The
upper reaches of the catchment area is steep and hilly ,
located on the east of the river, but as it flows towards
Tirthamukh, it is flanked by small flat-topped hills locally
called tillas with many lungas or lowlands between them. And
as it comes down to Tirthamukh, the Gumti valley waters huge
flatlands all the way along its course into Bangladesh.
Before the commissioning of the hydel project , the upper
catchment supported a small population of tribals . The
small Bengali population practised wet-rice cultivation
around Boloungbassa and Raima and some were into trading
while the tribals , originally
almost all slash-and-burn agriculturists called jhumias, had
began to settle down to wet rice cultivation, having learnt
it from the Bengali farmers. The Kings of Tripura had
settled some Bengali farmers even in such remote areas to
encourage tribals to pick up wet rice cultivation and
abandon jhum which is ecologically damaging.Before the Dam,
the hills around the present project area were sparsely
population and the area was almost wholly under dense forest
cover supporting wildlife. The Tripura Gazetter of 1975
talked of sighting
“large herds of Indian elephants in the Raima-Sarma region
alongwith some tigers and bears in the dense forests.”
Dasgupta says the area “was an abode of deers,bears,
wild boars,tigers,elephants and a wide variety jungle
cats.”
The vegetation was rich , so was the flora and fauna.But
after the hydel project was commissioned , not only did
almost half of the tribal families displaced by the Dam move
into the hills in the river’s upper catchment area , but
the roads built to first transport construction material and
then to support the Hydel project opened up the rich forests
of the area to the illegal loggers. The surplus-producing
tribal peasentry were not only angry for having lost their
rich flatlands and lungas – they were forced to revert
back to slash-and-burn jhum cultivation
that has , in Dasgupta’s opinion, “caused
irrepairable damage to the ecology of the upper catchment of
the Gumti.”
12. Illegal
logging by businessmen backed by politicians has further
damaged the ecology. During two extensive trips into the
Gumti valley in 1985 and 1998, this writer found extensive
felling of trees and no presence of forest guards to check
it.The tribal insurgents of the National Liberation Front of
Tripura or the NLFT have not banned tree felling , as some
northeast Indian rebel groups like the National Democratic
Front of Bodoland or the NDFB has done . They have
encouraged it. In large parts of the Gumti valley upstream
of Tirthamukh , tribal villagers told this writer that the
NLFT had allowed loggers to operate freely so long as they
paid them off. Relatives of some insurgent leaders were in
the business , entering partnership deals with the
Bengali-owned saw mills of Amarpur, Udaipur and Sonamura. So
the tribal insurgents who had capitalized on the
community’s anger at the large scale displacement at Gumti
were now collaborating with the most exploitative segments
of settler society to raise funds .It is my contention that
(a) the present ethnic conflict that pits the Bengali
settlers against the indigenous tribespeople in Tripura has
much to do with the large scale land alienation of tribals
because land is seen not only as the prime economic resource
in a rather backward pre-capitalist agrarian society like
Tripura but also as the symbol of the ethnic preponderance
(b) the psychological alienation of the tribespeople was
further aggravated by the Dumbur hydel project which , in
one stroke, contributed the most to the ongoing process of
land alienation (c) the Dumbur hydel project has caused huge
damage not only to the ecology of the Raima-Sarma valley but
also to ethnic relations in the state (d) that the project
is now a white elephant and can be decommissioned to make
way for large scale land reclamation that can be used to
resettle landless tribespeople in a major gesture of undoing
injustice.
Why the Dam must go ?
The Gumti hydel project
must be decommissioned for four reasons :
(a)
The Gumti hydel project is now not
producing more than seven megawatts of power even in
the peak season when the reservoir is full during monsoon.
The state government says that by investing Rs 1.18 crores ,
it has been able to restore the output to the original
installed capacity of 10 MW. It also says that while the
running cost of the project is around Rs 3 crores per annum,
it rakes in nearly Rs 21 crores through sale of electricity.
Officials in Tripura Power department describe the project
as “very profitable .” But experts say the siltation
levels will continue to increase and unless the reservoir
can be dredged , there would be no rise in output. The power
output from this project will progressively diminish.
(b)
With huge natural gas reserves now discovered in
Tripura and major gas thermal power projects in the pipeline
(including one with the capacity to generate 500 MW against
the state’s current peak demand of 125 MW ) , it is a
wastage of funds to invest in the Gumti Hydel project . If
the state can produce three times more electricity than it
now uses , there is a strong case for decommissing the dam
that will free a huge area for other pressing causes. An
ideal power strategy for Tripura would be to produce around
500-600 MW of electricity , feed half of that into the
Northeastern Grid, use 150 to 200 MW within the state
keeping in mind the rising demand, and sell the balance of
100MW to Bangladesh as the NEEPCO’s former chairman P.K
Chatterji had suggested .
13 . In the long run as Bangladesh augments its
own power capacity , the surplus Tripura power could be used
locally in the event of major industrialization or
fed into the regional grid for neighbouring
perpetually power deficit states like Mizoram
which lacks the gas reserves of Tripura.Since
more than 45 sq.kms can be reclaimed from under water
if the Gumti hydel project is decommissioned , a huge
fertile tracts of flatland would be opened up for farming
and resettlement of the landless tribal peasentry of the
state. The fertility of this land is likely to increase
after so many years under water. Atleast 30000 tribal
families, perhaps the whole of its landless population,
can be gainfully resettled in this fertile tract.
Before the dam, this area’s fertility
was a talking point
in the state. After so many years under water , this
is likely to be very fertile.
Tripura is a food deficit state and turning this area into a
modern agrarian zone
will solve the state’s food problem for ever.Needless to
say, the entire tribal landless population of the state ,
estimated at between 25000 to 27000 families, can be
gainfully resettled in the Gumti area, once the entire land
in and around the reservoir area is reclaimed. Each family
can be given atleast one hectare
of prime agricultural land – thrice the average land
holding size in Tripuira
. The problem of tribal land alienation
can be tackled in one go. Solution of conflicts need
both symbols and substance – this gesture could provide
both. Never before has a development project been dismantled
to preserve the interests of the indigenous peoples
Since this project is proving to be a bit of
white elephant , it is not very difficult to justify
its decommissioning in view of its potential to solve the
problem of tribal landlessness in one stroke.
If
the entire or almost the entire tribal landless population
can be gainfully resettled in the Gumti project area , it
will free the hilly forest regions from human pressure.
Since most of these landless tribals practise jhum or
slash-and-burn which is dangerous for ecology of the hills
and the forests , it is essential to settle this entire
population in wet plains like the Gumti area. The hills
cannot take the high pressure of human settlements – the
plains can. So from an ecological viewpoint, the
resettlement of the landless tribals of Tripura in Gumti
project area will be welcome . The state’s forest cover ,
now receding, will improve , degraded forests may be turned
into gainful plantations by large scale private investments
. The area
likely to be reclaimed in Gumti project area should be used
only for resettling tribal landless – a compact
area in keeping with Maharaja Bir Bikram’s tribal
reserve concept .
This decommissioning
proposals should be implemented before ethnic polarization
between Bengali settlers and indigenous tribespeople
snowballs beyond control.
The state is still ruled by the CPI(M) led Left
Front, a left-of-centre coalition which has support both
amongst Bengalis and tribespeople. Tribal parties and
militant groups will support the dam’s decommissioning
and Bengali extremist groups are not yet around to
resist it. A political dialogue can be initiated to create
the proper climate for decommissioning and the creation of
an alternative economy.
Even the security agencies have a benefit from this
settlement – a happily settled tribal population , easily
monitored, is less of a headache for police than if it is
spread out over a huge hill region with a poor economy that
creates empty stomachs and angry minds. Otherwise the graph
of insurgent violence in Tripura , very considerable for a
small state, cannot be controlled. According to police
statistics, more than 3,000 people including 158
schoolteachers were kidnapped and 1697 people (including
security personnel) were killed between April 1, 1993 and
February 15, 2003. The figure has risen further after
February 2003.
I would argue that the Bengalis
can buy peace through the process of ethnic reconcialition
that decommissing of Dumbur hydel project and redistribution
of the lands reclaimed from the project can start off. That
is because the root
cause of the tribal insurgency can
be addressed. The tribal peasentry can be
substantially empowered
through this relocation of priorities . If the Dam
goes , some Bengali fishermen in the area may feel upset at
the loss of the Dumbur lake (as the Gumti reservoir is
popularly known). But in the larger interest of ethnic
reconciliation , the dam must go. Tribal insurgency in
Tripura , now largely criminalized , must be fought
relentlessly . The tribals
must be reminded that these insurgents never
addressed grassroot development issues like land.
They have focused
only on power-sharing concerns or resorted to
mafia-style extortions rather than look at strategies for
the empowerment of the tribal peasentry.
Only such empowerment can lead to percolation of the
fruits of development and
make it an equitable process.
Endnotes
In
Tripura, the tribals were never a decisive majority
but they were always in majority prior to the
Partition, constituting just over fifty percent of the
population. But by 1981, they were barely accounting for
thirty percent of the population. See Tripura Census Reports
, 1951 to 1981.
J.B.Ganguly, “Problem of Tribal Landlessness in Tripura”
, in B.B.Dutta and M.N.Karna (eds) , Land Relations in
Northeast India, Peoples Publishing House,Delhi,1987.
Website of the Tripura Peoples Democratic Front (TPDF) in
www.geocities.com.
Harihar Bhattacharya, Communism in Tripura, Ajanta
Publishers, Delhi, 1999.
A STUDY OF THE LAND SYSTEM OF TRIPURA , Law Research
Institute,1990
For a detailed account of the Sengkrak movement, see Subir
Bhaumik, Insurgent Crossfire : Northeast India, Lancers,
Delhi, 1996.
Findings of the study was used for a PTI special report , 18th
August 1984.
The writer has collated the statistics available with the
Tripura Land Revenue Department and the Agriculture Census
Reports. The Land Revenue department
had entertained applications from tribals for
restoration of their alienated land holdings. The percentage
figures given are a result of this collated exercise.
B.K.Hrangkhawl’s letters to Chief Minister Nripen
Chakrabarty , 1983-87, available with the writer.
PROGRESS REPORT ON 25 POINT TRIBAL DEVELOPMENT PACKAGE (1999
TO 2002)
Malabika Dasgupta , “The Gumti Hydel Project of Tripura”,
Economic & Political Weekly , 7 October, 1989.
Dasgupta, Ibid.
www.petrowatch.com
, 27 July 2001
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