Madhya Pradesh: Ahead of polls, Sehariya tribe’s only wish, ‘just let us live’

A member of the Sehariya tribe, Bharat is a resident of Bisonia village that falls in the Bamori assembly constituency of MP’s Guna district. His brusque but poignant reply to a banal question that journalists on their fleeting election coverage tours ask mechanically before laying out highbrow analyses of electoral contests speaks volumes of the Sehariya tribe’s disillusionment with successive governments and their hollow claims of improving the tribe’s lot.

Unlike the numerically formidable Bhil and Gond tribes of MP, the Sehariya adivasis are rarely mentioned in popular discourse that typically saturates electoral rhetoric by political outfits of all hues during elections — or after it. Officially classified as a ‘Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group’ (PVTG), with their estimated population at just over six lakhs, the Sehariyas are found in clusters across the districts that comprise the Gwalior-Chambal region of MP. Smaller concentrations of the tribe are also found in the adjoining districts of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.

In varying numerical strengths, the Sehariyas are spread across Guna, Shivpuri, Gwalior, Sheopur, Morena and Datia. In Bisonia and adjoining villages, there are nearly 100 Sehariya households. An estimated 37,000 members of the tribe populate the Bamori constituency, a number that is substantially greater than the combined strength of the Bhil and Bhilala tribes that collectively number around 35,000.

Living on the edge

Victims of extreme starvation, crippling penury and social oppression by dominant caste groups, the Sehariyas fare miserably on all indices of socio-economic welfare and human resource. Yet, while they may have been classified as vulnerable, successive governments — be it at the Centre or in the state, and irrespective of the party they are led by — seem to have simply forgotten that an obvious corollary to such classification must be the introduction of measures that ameliorate the miserable state of the Sehariyas.

And so, it is not surprising that as the cacophony of elections drowns Madhya Pradesh, there isn’t so much as a whisper of concern by the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress — the two dominant parties in the state — for the Sehariyas.

Suraj Sehariya, a resident of Bamori’s Nonera village and member of the tribal rights’ group, Ekta Parishad, highlights “lack of political leadership within the Sehariya tribe” as a key reason for the voice of the community going unheard in the din of political brinkmanship by other dominant caste and community blocs.

“Unlike other castes and communities such as the Bhils, Jatavs, Yadavs, Khatiks and Kirars who have identified leadership within their ranks and emerged as a political force that no party can ignore, the Sehariyas are not organised. There is no Sehariya leader with political or financial muscle who can compel political parties to take the community’s issues seriously,” Suraj told The Federal.

The result of a lack of leadership and formidable pressure groups that can fight for their cause has meant that the over a dozen odd Sehariya-dominated villages across Bamori wear a similar look: barren huts with no water or electricity supply, empty kitchens, starving babies, ailing elders, non-existent sanitation, decrepit government-run primary schools with empty classrooms where a teacher or two come merely to spend a lazy day, and agricultural lands that produce less and less with each passing year.

“Over three months ago, a government contractor came and started digging around the village to lay pipelines. He said the government has started a scheme to provide taps in every house for supplying water. They gave us tap connections but in the last three months, not a drop of water has come through those taps. We still have to send our children and women to the common hand pump to get water. We used to have three hand pumps around our village. Two of them have dried up and the last one that functions takes over 30 minutes to fill one bucket of water. At times, there are clashes among the village folk over water,” said Sitabai, another Bisonia resident. 

The situation with electricity is “marginally better” but “comes at a price that makes death look cheaper,” said Bharat. “We have been given ek batti (single light) connections but even for that the electricity supply is erratic... what we get regularly though is our electricity bill even though there is no meter installed in the entire village,” Bharat explained. When asked how much a household pays for electricity on an average, he showed receipts of at least four households, each of Rs 550 each per month.

“The average income of most households in our village is between Rs 2,000 and 2,500 per month. Out of this, if we have to pay Rs 550 for our ek batti connection, what will we be left with? We have filed complaints and appeals at all levels of the administration but no one has bothered to come and check. Some months back, we went with the Ekta Parishad volunteers to meet officers in the electricity department. They accused us of lying and said you people use TV and fridge on an ek batti connection but complain about the electricity bill being too high... we told him he could come and inspect every house in our village and if he finds a single TV or fridge, we will never complain again... we don’t have money to even afford two meals, how will we keep a TV or fridge,” says another Bisonia resident, who did not identify himself.

Rights denied, land encroached

Their tribal status and, more importantly, their classification as PVTGs entitles the Sehariyas to a safety net and several rights under the Constitution and laws such as the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) Act. Key among these is their right to the ownership of their ancestral lands and the produce they get from them. However, just like the tall promises of development through multiple government schemes, their rights mandated under these laws also remain a pipedream. 

“Under laws like FRA and PESA, the Sehariyas enjoy various protections and rights. Key among these is their right to their ancestral lands; their pattas but despite repeated applications before the officers concerned, the struggle of Sehariyas in Bamori and even in adjoining areas of Guna, Shivpuri, Datia and Morena remains an unending one. Even when the tribals succeed in getting the required paperwork done, which is extremely rare, they don’t get the land because musclemen with political influence — colloquially, the dabang — encroach these lands,” says Dr. Pushparag, a Guna-based lawyer, writer and tribal rights’ activist.

Bharat told The Federal that in Bisonia alone there are “over 10 pattas belonging to our ancestors but we don’t have the official document to prove our ownership of any of them... all have been encroached by dabang people who are close to local politicians from Guna”.

The hardship of the villagers aside, what strikes an outsider like this reporter is the absence of any youth. Most villagers are either children aged below 16 or adults aged 45 years or more; a majority of them women who look far older than the 50 or 60 years of age that they proclaim to be, and others men of the same age bracket.

“What will the young men do here?” asks Vikas Sehariya, Suraj’s colleague at the Ekta Parishad, and a resident of Bamori’s Myana block. “There are very few Sehariya men in the 16 to 45 age group who stay back, either because they have somehow managed to find work locally or because they don’t want to leave their parents, wife or child and go to some other place in search of work... some like Suraj and I have found work with the Ekta Parishad but 95 percent of our young men migrate to other states, most of them to Bikaner, to work as daily wage workers... many of them never return to the village,” Vikas adds.

Bamori may not be a VVIP assembly segment at par with the Lok Sabha constituency of which it is a part — Guna, represented for decades by one or the other member of the Scindia royal family until Jyotiraditya Scindia’s defeat in the 2019 polls. However, for the last five years, its sitting MLA has been an important minister — first during the 15 months of Kamal Nath’s Congress government and, subsequently, in Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s BJP government.

Long road to upliftment

The incumbent Bamori MLA, Mahendra Singh Sisodia, holds the panchayat portfolio in Chouhan govt. One of the 22 Congress MLAs who had defected to the BJP in March 2020, thereby toppling the 15-month old Kamal Nath government, Sisodia, a close aide of Jyotiraditya Scindia, was also a minister in the previous Congress government, with charge of the labour portfolio. Sisodia’s predecessor, Kanhaiyalal Agarwal, who was the MLA from Bamori between 2008 and 2013, had also served as a powerful minister in the then Chouhan administration, holding, among others, the key portfolio of Narmada Valley Development. 

However, Suraj says neither Sisodia nor Agarwal before him paid any heed to the concerns of the Sehariya community. “They rarely visited Sehariya villages after getting elected and whenever members of the community met them to place their demands, the delegations were humiliated and turned away,” says Suraj.

Sisodia, who is seeking a re-election from Bamori, this time on a BJP ticket, denies the charge. “I am not disputing that much more needs to be done for the Sehariya tribe but allegations that I have not done anything for them are wholly untrue. Organisations like the Ekta Parishad are coaching innocent members of the Sehariya tribe to spread such lies. Fact is that I am the only MLA from Bamori who has worked for the upliftment of the Sehariyas. I have laid foundation stones for projects worth thousands of crores and several of these, including irrigation projects, are in areas where the Sehariyas are settled. Once these projects are completed, the tribe will be a direct beneficiary,” says Sisodia.

It is hard to miss the operative words in Sisodia’s long-winded response: “laid foundation stones” and “once these projects are completed”. What until then?

Sisodia’s challenger in the current election from the Congress party is Rishi Agarwal, son of Kanhaiyalal Agarwal, the former BJP MLA from Bamori mentioned earlier. Like Sisodia, Rishi too claims his father “did a lot” for the Sehariyas but fails to highlight any project that stood completed or any benefit that was actually accrued to the vulnerable tribe.

Is it so difficult to imagine why Bharat, and others in Bisonia, have little interest in finding out who the contenders are in Bamori’s electoral contest or why the only expectation of the Sehariyas from the next MP government is to simply have the right to live?