no light I would like to start talking from the end of the royal pomp of the national pride day, Meghani to Jayant Kothari. After almost three or four decades, he got a call from Jayantbhai asking who is this Birsa Munda. The reason for his question was of course my poetry. Considering the way in which Meghani Jayanti was penned by Me Marti, and the way Meghani captured the pulse of the mass movement, if she was among us, many people's heroes, including Birsa Munda and Suu Kyi, would not have been sung. If you ask me, what did I write while writing, but where was I ready to talk about Birsa comfortably and in detail at any time? Sadhiaro was of course one, Mahaswetadevi : happened to read her novel 'Aranyer Adhikar' ('The Right of the Wilderness', trans. Sukanya Zaveri, 1985) and got some glimpse of Birsa Munda's life work. In the tribal area of Jharkhand, what he knew in his short life, people called him God. Birsa was born on the fifteenth of November 1875 and died in prison on the ninth of June 1900: five months less than the full twenty-five years. Beginning with the East India Company and beginning with Queen Victoria's charter, the period of British rule has been a period of gradual usurpation of water, land and forest rights from the natives. The child Birsa, because his father wants to teach him and wants to study himself, accepts Christianity and enrolls in a mission school. The stretch is certainly not one of piety. A Christ-seeker changes school at the behest of a teacher, and before he is even past his twenties, he steps into the outside world, where he feels exploited. The crowd of young people is making noise. A battle of arrows against guns, the outcome is fixed. But what happens is a new, reversed mood. A popular experiment from Birsa, Ulgulan. In 1857, the nation heard a rallying cry of 'Maro Firangi Ko' with a hint of roti ne kamal. In the later 50s, the slogan of 'Vande Mataram' took over the public mind. In the third decade of the 20th century, this Swadeshvatsal Jai Ghosh was reaching new heights with the slogan of 'Inkilab Zindabad'. But along with 'Vande Mataram' and 'Inkilab Zindabad', in the tribal areas of interior India, there was a sound of revolution called Ulgulan. When the centenary of 1857 was celebrated, the editor-in-chief of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan's prestigious India History series R. C. Mazumdar refused to call the struggle of Sattavan the first freedom struggle. Not that they did not appreciate the importance of Sattavan. But he said that before and after 1857 freedom struggle has been going on in different places in the country. In the tribal areas of the country, the trend continued from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century. Well, Birsa is a name of one hundred and fifty years, but barely five decades later, we had Rani Gaidinliu, titled Lakshmibai of Nagaland-Manipur. In 1931, this 16-year-old girl faced the Assam Rifles with an armed force of four thousand and went to jail. After meeting her in 1937, Jawaharlal gave her the title of 'Rani' which became part of her name. Azad Hind gave him the honor of freedom army and Padma Bhushan. By the way, taking a small detail out of the whole fight, BJP plays its anti-Christian politics in this case. For example, in Birsa Charit, the memory of Jacob Vakil and other Christian workers is seen as an attempt to smear communal colors with the Koran. Subject: Except for the fringeline churches, the main line churches are the workshops of the workers fighting for water-land-forest rights like Sthanswamy Peth, who was martyred in jail during the Bhima-Koregaon case. With the British implementation of the Forest Act and its ancillary measures, forests and wastelands became government owned like coal and gold mines as national assets… Yes, after a well-marked area for the royals and Latsahebs! After Swaraj, of late there has been movement on the issue of water-land-forest rights. From 1988 onwards some change began under the shared arrangement of Gram Sabha and Forest Officers. In 2006, Manmohan Singh's government began to make some progress under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act-FRA. But the last decade has been a contraction of tribal rights, barring remedies such as installing a tribal woman as president. The issue of forest protection and tribal rights seems to be a bottleneck in the development journey for the ministries of Railways, Power, Coal, Petroleum and NITI Aayog. According to the April 2024 survey, government officials seem to dominate community rights in the One-Gram Sabha matter. The details will be heard in the tamzam of the half century? don't know
Image Credit: (Divya-Bhaskar): Images/graphics belong to (Divya-Bhaskar).
Shadows of history: Tribal rights issue hampers development
