Jarawas Living On Borrowed Time

Exactly six years after the Supreme Court of India ordered its closure, the government of Andaman and Nicobar islands, in direct defiance of the order of the highest court of the land, continues to keep the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) open.

The controversial 340-km-long road goes right through the habitat of the Jarawas, one of the oldest hunter-gatherer communities in the world. Only two hundred and fifty odd Jarawas survive today. And the closure of the road is considered to be critical to the survival of the Jarawas.

London-based Survival International, an international organisation which fights for tribal rights, has declared the Jarawas among the “three most endangered tribes” in the world. Over the past several years, Survival International, along with several other organisations based in Andamans, have repeatedly called upon the authorities in Andaman and Nicobar islands to close the ATR, as per the Supreme Court orders of 2002.

The Jarawas live on Middle Andaman Island, in territory they have inhabited for thousands of years. In 1957, the government of India created a reserve of 700 square kilometres, surrounded by police posts and manned by a 400-strong force. Ostensibly the idea was to protect the Jarawas from outside incursions, but in reality the reserve was built to contain the Jarawas within that area.

And, almost overnight, the erstwhile lord and masters of the Andaman Sea found themselves confined to a limited piece of real estate. A piece of real estate, through which in 1969, the government of Andaman and Nicobar islands, in its infinite wisdom, decided to construct a major inter-island road.

From 1970 to 1989, when the Andaman Trunk Road was being constructed, the Jarawas on several occasions attacked the construction workers, thereby expressing their objection to the construction of the road in no uncertain manner. Anthropologists and environmental groups working in the Andaman islands had for long warned against the wisdom of constructing a road that goes right through the middle of the Jarawa reserve.

The authorities persisted with the construction of the road that links Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar islands, in south Andamans, with Diglipur in north Andamans. In the 1970s, when I was a schoolboy, it used to take more than a day and a half on a steam ship to travel from Port Blair to Diglipur. Now the same journey can be made by road in less than twelve hours, thanks to the ATR..

But the construction of the ATR brought in its wake not just settlers, but poachers who eyed the rich tree cover of the Jarawa reserve. As incidents of poaching increased, and tension among the Jarawas and the settlers who lived around the ATR mounted, environmentalists and anthropologists were convinced that Jarawas would in the not-so-distant future become extinct if the ATR was not closed down.

Acting on a petition filed by local environmental groups, prominently among them SANE (Save Andaman and Nicobar Ecology) and backed by Survival International, the Supreme Court in May 2002 had ordered the closure of the Andaman Trunk Road. An order that lies unimplemented even after six years of its passing.

As we drive down the gleaming tarmaced road starting from Port Blair, a top environmentalist who has battled the Andaman administration for several years, tells me : “Each day this road remains open, it brings the Jarawas closer to extinction.”

About 15 kilometres down the road, bang on the middle, sits a huge, abandoned road roller – perhaps the most poignant symbol of the insensitivity with which the authorities in Andamans have tried to steamroll the opposition to the construction of this road.

As we move into Baratang in Middle Andamans, the heart of the Jarawa reserve, one can see makeshift straw shelters on roadsides which act as police pickets. Policemen can be seen lounging idly, their backs against the straw shelters, puffing away at cigarettes. Cigarettes that, my environmentalist friend tells me, find their way to the Jarawas.

In order to ensure the road remains closed, the Andaman government had set up police pickets at different intervals along the Andaman Trunk Road. Apart from the human and vehicular traffic on the road, today the single biggest threat to the survival of the Jarawas is posed by the policemen manning these pickets.

Though authorities in Port Blair claim otherwise, the policemen appear hardly sensitized to handle the delicate issue that they have been asked to oversee. Not only there have been reports of growing addiction to tobacco among the Jarawas, as a direct result of easy access to cigarettes through the police personnel on duty, there has been the odd case of policemen trying to sexually exploit the Jarawa women.

The contact of outsiders travelling on this road exposes the Jarawas to all kind of medical diseases that these people may be carrying with them. There have been several earlier instances of large numbers of tribals dying following contact with members of the outside world.

Worse, outside contact is exposing the Jarawas to a lifestyle that they can ill afford to adopt. My friend showed me a photo of a Jarawa woman being given a packet of biscuits by a passenger in a bus.

On my second morning in Baratang, at about ten in the morning, I spot a bus carrying settlers entering Baratang. You can see on the roof of the bus, a group of Jarawas who have decided to hitch a ride into town. They purposefully make their way into shops, often buying stuff in exchange of honey they have collected from the forest.

Among them is a boy no more than 15 or 16, wearing a worn out Calvin Kline tee shirt. My environmentalist friend points out to the sight and comments ruefully : “Calvin Kline meets Stone Age, huh?”

I speak to some of the shopkeepers who deal with Jarawas on a daily basis. They are the settlers who have built houses along the ATR, set up shops there. They are unanimous in their contempt for the Jarawas. "These people are uncivilized. For them this road is not important. For us it is a lifeline," says one.

A number of them have been settled there by the Andaman administration, others have moved on their own. Now they add up to a sizeable vote bank that no political party in Andamans is willing to antagonize.

Manoranjan Bhakta, solitary representative of the Andaman islands in the Indian Parliament, calls for a holistic approach to the whole issue. He says the Andaman government remains committed to protect the interests of the Jarawas. But Bhakta says the Andaman administration cannot overlook the interests of people it has brought from different parts of mainland India and settled them around Andaman Trunk Road.

Politicians have their own compulsions. They need votes. And in electoral terms, the two hundred and fifty odd Jarawas don’t matter at all, in comparison to the 12,000-strong settler votes. Any politician worth his salt would tell you, that is a bit of a no-contest.

Problem is, if only the Jarawa could articulate an important piece of anthropological arithmetic, he would tell you that three decades of settlers’ existence in Andamans weighed against a civilization as old as perhaps mankind itself, is also a bit of a no-contest.