In the lexicon of Hindutva, the word adivasi has disappeared. The Sangh Parivar prefers to call them vanvasis (dwellers of forests or jungles). It is just a step away from calling them junglis (illiterate, uncouth and uncivilised). Thus the fall in the status of a people who take pride in calling themselves the adi (original) people of the land is at once apparent. This metamorphosis is the fallout of a deliberate policy of the Sangh to deny the tribals the status they deserve ... Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad, the largest Sangh-affiliated body working among the tribals, started in 1952 ... is part of a grand project of rewriting history which the parivar and its affiliates have ventured into ...

The tribals' response has been quite unlike that of the untouchables, who find the name Harijans (children of God), coined by Mahatma Gandhi, highly patronising and condescending and have, therefore, been resisting it with all their might. Instead, they prefer to call themselves Dalits, a term which can be applied to the socially underprivileged of all communities. The reason why the Sangh denies adivasis the status of the original dwellers is that it runs counter to its own claim that the Aryans, who brought Vedic civilization to the country, are the original inhabitants of the land.

Historians cast in the Hindutva mould have been turning all historical evidence upside down in their bid to prove that the Aryans are not immigrants. Akbar's chronicler exclaimed, "What a series of years, of centuries must necessarily have elapsed before the boundless tract of country, inhabited by wild and vigorous tribes, could have been brought over to Brahminism." The renaming of the adivasis is a continuation of this very process under which they become yet another low caste of Hinduism.

... The adivasis, whom the anthropologist calls the Fourth World or the indigenous people, suffered the first lexical assault when they were brought under the official term Scheduled Tribes by the British, who drew up separate legal provisions to look after their interests. The framers of the Constitution found it convenient to follow the British practice and there are separate schedules in the statute to cover the untouchables and the adivasis. It is a different matter that the schedules have not yielded any positive results to the tribals except for the reservations they enjoy in government service. As early as in 1960 the UN Dhebar Commission which inquired into the status of the adivasis "discovered that the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, which set up special areas all over tribal India in which governors were expected to take special interests, had been an almost complete failure."

Today, 39 years later, the situation has only worsened. A clear case is Bihar where the statutory Tribal Council, which should be consulted on all tribal-related issues, has not met even once since 1972. That is even when a plethora of new tribal districts were created and a Jharkhand Autonomous Council was constituted and later dissolved ... Each mega-project has been at the cost of the adivasis ... Apart from some menial jobs and petty. cash, which ultimately reached the moneylenders, the adivasis have got precious little in return for their ancestral land.

It is not that the tribals have not protested. From the Mahal Paharia revolt in 1772 to the Naxalbari and Srikakulam uprisings in the sixties which threw up leaders as varied as Birsa Munda and Jaipal Singh, they have been protesting against inequities and injustices. But each time the brute force of the state was used to suppress them.

Every measure of homogenisation - so that they are exactly like everybody else - has been a direct assault on what the adivasis consider precious. The Chhotanagpur Tenancy Act and the Wilkison rules that sought to respect their identity have given way to laws that do little justice to their own time-tested social and legal institutions, customs and practices. The Panchayat Raj Act is the latest of its kind which will undermine their traditional systems ... It is this apathy, this disinterestedness that encourages the Sangh to alter their nomenclature. It is not confined to calling. adivasis vanvasis. Anything that distinguishes them and anything that marks their distinct identity becomes anathema to the parivar. It is for this reason that Jharkhand, which fired the imagination of the adivasis of Chhotanagpur and Santhal Pargana of Bihar for over a century becomes just Vananchal in the Sangh jargon. (Source: The Indian Express, 8 March, 1999)