Tribal Insurgeants Threaten Communist Government
Tribals displaced by a dam being built. Bengalis flood in and take their place. Tribals revolt.
Kinda like Americans in Arizona?
Hundreds of indigenous tribes people in India’s north-eastern state of Tripura have been flocking to reclaim lands emerging from a dam’s reservoir after a sharp drop in the water level there. But they are being chased away by the police.
The state’s Communist-led coalition government says it will not to let anybody settle down on the lands emerging from the reservoir of the 10 MW Gumti hydroelectric (hydel) project.
But Tripura’s power minister Manik Dey admits production of electricity from the project has completely stopped since mid-March. “There is hardly any water in the dam’s reservoir to generate power but we are not saying goodbye to the project as yet,” Mr Dey said.
A rise in the reservoir’s bed due to heavy silting caused by soil loss from the hills around the Gumti hydel project is believed to be responsible for the crisis.
The Gumti hydel project was commissioned in 1974, despite fierce protests by nearly 40,000 indigenous tribes people whose fertile lands went under water. Not even one-fifth of the people who were forced to give up their land were compensated because most tribesmen had no land records to prove ownership.
“There’s heavy deforestation in the hills caused by the primitive agricultural practices in the hills around Gumti by the tribesmen who lost their lands to the hydel project,” says environmentalist Abhijit Bhattacharya.
“There’s also rampant illegal logging by timber smugglers. That’s badly affected rainfall levels and led to heavy silting in the Gumti reservoir.”
This has prompted demands for scrapping the Gumti dam, so that the dam lands can be redistributed amongst Tripura’s landless tribal population.
Rabindra Debbarma, general secretary of the opposition Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura (INPT), wants the Gumti dam to be scrapped to “undo a historical injustice” against the indigenous tribes people of Tripura, who have been marginalised in their own state by ceaseless influx of Bengali settlers from what is now Bangladesh.
Tribals now account for less than 30% of Tripura’s population, Bengali settlers account for the rest.
Most tribals have lost their lands to the settlers and that has fuelled a violent insurgency with young men and women from landless families joining the state’s two major rebel groups.
“The Left coalition government that rules Tripura has an historic opportunity to undo the injustice by restoring lands to tribals who don’t have them. That can kick-start a process of ethnic reconciliation in our violence-scarred state,” said Mr Debbarma.
But few tribes people have high expectations from the government.
“These pro-tribal leftists opposed the dam in 1970s, but now they want the dam to continue even though it has become a white elephant, ” said Dhirendra Tripura, a tribal leader in Raisyabari on the southern extreme of the dam reservoir.
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