The Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI) and its people are as unknown to the rest of the country as the North East and its hue of cultures. This is one reason that readers here should not feel the detachment with the subject of Pankaj Sekhsaria’s latest book on the shelf, Islands in Flux: The Andaman and Nicobar Story.
Sekhsaria’s collection of articles gives an insight into the fast vanishing world of the most primitive tribes dwelling in the floating patches of land on the Bay of Bengal, their lives and coexistence with nature and the onslaught of development and wrong policies over the years.
“The Andaman and the Nicobar Islands are the largest archipelago system in the Bay of Bengal, consisting of about 306 islands and 206 rocks and rocky outcrops, and covering a total area of about 8,200 sqkm. Only thirty-eight of these islands are inhabited; of these eleven are in the Andaman group and thirteen in the Nicobars. This large archipelago is separated from mainland India by about 1,200 km,” says Sekhsaria, senior project scientist, DST-Centre for Policy Research, Dept of Humanities and Social Science, IIT-Delhi. He adds that the nearest landmass is roughly 280km in Myanmar.
The Andamans had once been associated with kalapani, the gallows where no man would ever want to settle. It was the land that even the landless dreaded to traverse. In the late fifties, even the Bengali refugees of Dandakaranya in Odisha had turned down the then chief minister of West Bengal BC Roy’s proposal to relocate and rehabilitate them in the Andamans.
But with time, modernisation seeped into the rain forests of the islands breeding, at an unimaginably faster rate, greed and corruption which directly affected the aboriginal population comprising the Jarawas, the Onges, the Great Andamanese and the Sentinelese. The total population of these aboriginal groups put together stands at 500, a pathetic number that is dwindling by the day. Government policies from the time of the colonial rule and appalling reluctance of the post-independence State have dealt a fatal blow of the very existence of these groups which have thrived in the islands for over 40,000 years.
The Cellular Jail in Andaman, which stands testimony to a history of struggle, domination and indomitable spirit of freedom, is a must on a tourist’s itinerary. While the light and sound show on the jail premises parrot out incidents and events glorifying the Indian freedom struggle, the moth-eaten history of the country writes off the story original dwellers and their struggle.
Sekhsaria, with palpable disgust, writes about the dichotomy in the first chapter of the book, A History of Alienation (The Hindu Folio, 16 July 2000). However, the contrast in the existence of the aborigines and the ‘outsiders’ and the author’s repugnance at the ignorance of authorities and people in general can be felt in all his essays.
“The Supreme Court of India proposes, the local administration disposes,” writes Sekhsaria while talking about the May 2002 order of the apex court in regard to protection of the fragile environment and the indigenous inhabitants.
Sekhsaria, who is a scientist and journalist, further writes, “The ATR (Andaman Trunk Road that cuts through the forests of the Jarawa Reserve), for example, was to be shut down in three months. This was also the time limit for declaration of the Inner Line Area, while the islanders’ identity cards were to be issued within six months… It has, however, taken only a few months for all to realize that it is one thing to get the court to pass orders and completely another to get them implemented.”
Had the court order been implemented in letter and spirit (while the spirit of abiding by law had completely evaporated what remained was only letters in black and white) the aborigines would not have been marginalised and the ecology would not be in the cusp of an apocalyptic end.
Inflating tourism has also played a crucial role in ruining the peaceful cohabitation of man and nature. The new millennium brought hope and expectations, peppered with speculations, for the rest of the country and the world but for the aborigines of the ANI, it meant the beginning of another level of domination and probably the final century of their life.
The millennium began with a well-planned tourism “tamasha” in the Nicobars. While the government went gung-ho over the first sunrise of Y2K, several environmental groups saw the impending sunset on the indigenous people. The government, pilloried by a strong opposition and criticisms by environment think tanks and experts, finally watered down its plans in 1999 to welcome with open arms hordes of mindless tourists with absolutely no knowledge of the practical implications of the jamboree.
The activists pinpointed the flaws in official data, which came from an international source, and enumerated the impacts of a huge gathering of tourists in the sensitive Nicobar group of islands. In the author’s words, “The resident population of Katchal (the island that was designated for the sighting of the first sunrise of the millennium) is only 12,000 and nearly 4,000 of these are the Nicobari tribals. The impact of suddenly inducting an additional 20,000 people means that a minimum of 20,000 to 30,000 kg of human excreta and thousand litres of liquid waste will be added to the local environment and this will be in addition to unknown quantities of other solid waste like paper and plastic, to name the common ones.”
However, authorities have always remained blind to the long-term effects of any decision, be it civil or military, regarding the islands. This proved true time and again, even after the 2004 tsunami devastated the archipelago. None other than the most scientific brain of the country, Dr APJ Abul Kalam Azad, who was known as a visionary, failed to the danger that was lurking behind his four-point mission to make ANI “an abode having all the infrastructure to receive and service at least 1 million tourists every year”.
Criticising the then president, Sekhsaria, who has worked in the islands for over three decades now, raises questions on the veracity of the mission in the chapter Ignited Minds on Wings of Desire (Tehelka, 25 June 2005).
Sekhsaria also questions the series of military actions in the islands towards the end of the first decade of the millennium. The defence machinery’s clandestine missions in the wildlife sanctuaries of the Nicobar islands, including the BrahMos test fire in March 2008, were proof of the successive governments’ complete lack of responsibility in preserving the rich biodiversity and the people associated in multiple ways with it.
In an email interview to The Shillong Times last December, Sekhsaria had pointed out that nothing much has changed in the attitude of the State that continues to make policies “driven completely by considerations and vitals of the country and its ecology are being grossly neglected and undermined”.
The author, who wears a hat adorned with many feathers, has collected first-hand information through extensive surveys of the islands and documented (the documentation includes some of the rare photographs of the Jarawas when they, for the first time, came out of their secluded forest hideout to the urban locality in search of food in October 1997). His articles are investigative, informative supported by an enriching appendix, far-sighted and sensitive. The other two books by the author, The Last Wave – an island novel (HarperCollins India; 2014), and The Jarawa Tribal Reserve Dossier – Cultural and Biological Diversity in the Andaman Islands (UNESCO and Kalpavriksh; 2010), are equally insightful.
Even for readers in the northeastern region, the book may hold a particular interest for similar circumstances in the states here created by systematically laid down anti-people policies and decades of inaction, myopic view of situations and sheer lack of good intention to rectify the wrongdoings.
~ NM
Book: Islands In Influx: The Andaman and Nicobar Story; Author: Pankaj
Sekhsaria; Publisher: Harper Litmus; Pages: 268; Price: 399
