Adivasi

The tragic events at Muthanga in Kerala earlier this year were a culmination of adivasi frustrations over the failure of successive governments in the state to restore adivasi land despite several judicial directives and the existence of laws enacted for the purpose, such as the KSA Act of 1975. Instead attempts were made to amend the act which was later wholly repealed. The protest of the adivasis at Muthanga met with brutal repression by the government. But chastened by the public anger at the police action, the government now remains immobilised in the face of a series of fresh land occupations by adivasis in the Kerala part of the Western Ghats. If the government were to handover the land in Muthanga to the adivasis and make other lands available to landless adivasi families and bring all adivasi regions under Schedule V of Article 244 which provides for participatory self-rule and autonomy, it would herald a new era in adivasi history.

The BJP's electoral victory in Gujarat last year has further cemented the grasp of the Hindu right in all aspects of the state's social and political domain. The rise of reactionary politics was itself an outgrowth of different socio-political movements that Gujarat was witness to since the 1970s. It is the absence of any progressive class/caste movement or a new social movement, this paper argues, that has made Gujarat susceptible to experiments with and sustenance of right wing ideologies, especially the politics of the Hindu right.