Appeal by an Adivasi Writer
I knew from news that on 16 September, the special NIA Court at Jagdalpur gave death penalty in the case of Jhiram Ghati attack of May 25 2013. In this incident, as per the report, 27 people including police personnel killed and 38 injured. The attacked was on Congress Parivartan Rally as part of Maoists carry out a campaign called “Tactical Counter Offensive Campaign” (TCOC) (Wikipedia). Ten people who awarded death sentence are tribal in general and Gond in particular.
And I come from that Gondi tradition, the tent people belong to, that has taught me to ask a different question: After so many years of violence in Bastar, must justice finally speak through another death?
I believe it should not.
The memory of another Bastar
The history of Adivasi as well as the Bastar has not written in Adivasi perspective. While writing History the myth, folklore, social memory, Community morality not taken into account. Before Bastar became a battlefield of competing armies, before the State entered the forest with its police stations and administrative boundaries, before insurgency and counter-insurgency became the language through which the region was understood, there was another Bastar.
There was a Bastar of forests, rivers, hills, clans, villages, songs, rituals and relationships.
There was a worldview in which the human being was not standing outside nature, looking at nature as a resource. Human beings were inside nature. This is an important part of the indigenous memory carried by the Gond people.
In the Gondi tradition, Pahandi Pari Kupar Lingo played a major role in their social memory and occupies a foundational place. Different Gond communities preserve and interpret his story in different ways, but he is widely remembered within Koya Punem (Gondi Dhram) as a first teacher associated with the organisation of social life and ethical conduct. Contemporary scholarship author Motiram Chhatiram Kangali in his book ‘Parikupar Lingo: Koya Punem’, describes Gondi Dharm or Koya Punem as an oral philosophical framework and code of conduct concerning relationships among humans and between humans and non-human beings. For us, this is not merely mythology. It is a way of remembering how society should live.When an animal becomes a relative
One of the most beautiful ideas in the Gond social imagination is the relationship between clan and Persapen (Supreme God or sometimes expressed as natural power) often translated into the language of totemism. Gond social traditions associate clans with particular animals, birds and trees. Research on Koya Punem describes clans as carrying responsibilities toward particular non-human species. Kangali in his book describes the Gond social system has 750 clans and each clan associated one animal, one bird and one tree species sum total three non-human species. The clan have the responsibility to preserve the assigned animal, bird and plant. In this way 750 clan become responsible of preserving 2250 natural elements. Because if our ancestors could imagine a moral prohibition against killing an animal because that animal was part of our kinship and responsibility, what does that teach us about the killing of human beings?
That distinction matters enormously when we speak about death today.
I do not claim that Gond society was historically free from hunting, conflict or warfare. That would be an inaccurate romanticisation of indigenous history. Even they were allowed to kill animal, bird or plant not belong to their clan totem. So attacked killing was not been done unless it is necessary. Gond has attacked the outsider Aryan to preserve their nature and community.
Bastar or the whole Dandakaranya is the land of different Gondi people like Muria, Halbi, Koya, to whom, in Brahminical Writing, describes as Asuras. In Ramayana, Mahabharata, Vedas etc there mentioned about the fighting between Danava and Deva. Asuras of Dandakaranya have resisted Basistha and Rama to inter into their land and perform Jagaraksha (doing Brahminical ritual: Jajna). Gondi people were more serious about the tradition of preserve nature and go any extend to save the same. The resistance, which shown by the Bastar Gondi people against the corporate to save the Jal Jangal Jamin, has come from inside of the community’s indigenous practices.
This is why colonial attempts to reorganise forest life produced resistance across Adivasi India.
Indigenous societies experienced the forest differently. The forest was inhabited. It was remembered. It was sung. It was worshipped. It was cultivated. It was a source of food, medicine, shelter and knowledge. And it was governed through social relationships.
Bastar was no exception.
The same resistance we can see during Bhumkal of 1910, is one of the most important memories of resistance in Bastar. Historical accounts connect the rebellion to colonial intervention, forest reservation, restrictions on traditional practices, forced labour, revenue demands and the wider erosion of indigenous control over land and forest. The Government of India’s digital repository describes the 1910 uprising as a response to British forest policies and the disruption of the people’s relationship with land.
Gundadhur remains one of the most important names in this history. But we must understand Bhumkal carefully. It was not simply a story about people who loved violence. It was a story of people resisting the transformation of their world. The language of the rebellion was therefore inseparable from land, forest, dignity and self-rule.
An oppressed community may resist violence without making violence its moral ideal.
Bhumkal itself became an armed uprising, and historical accounts record attacks on government institutions, traders and officials, as well as deaths. We should not hide this history.
But neither should we reduce the rebellion to violence and forget what produced it.
This distinction is important for understanding contemporary Bastar. A people may resist domination. A people may take up arms. A people may commit violence. But it does not follow that violence becomes the highest ethical principle of that society.
This is where my Gond perspective enters the debate about Jhiram Ghati. When I remember Gundadhur, I do not remember only a man who resisted British authority.
I remember people defending their relationship with their land.
When I remember Pari Kupar Lingo, I do not remember only a figure from an ancient oral tradition.
I remember an ethical idea:
human beings live through relationships.
When I remember the clan traditions of protecting particular animals, birds and trees, I remember that the Gond imagination placed limits on the human desire to destroy.
And when I look at Jhiram Ghati today, I see the terrible consequences of a politics in which human life becomes expendable.
Therefore, my appeal is simple. Let us not allow Bastar’s history of resistance to become an endless history of killing. Let us not confuse resistance with revenge. Let us not confuse justice with execution. Let us not allow the State to answer one death with another.
The State may call an execution a sentence. But for the land, it is another death. And Bastar has already seen too many.
Therefore, I appeal to the judiciary and to the constitutional authorities concerned with the fate of the ten convicted persons: Do not execute them.
