Shompen Tribe: No National Development Project Can Justify A Genocide
By
Nava Thakuria, New Age Islam
29 April
2024
Ahead of
general elections 2024 across the country, a group of Indian experts had
written an open letter to the Union government in New Delhi demanding the
scrapping of the Nicobar development project in the Bay of Bengal. Otherwise,
the experts argued, the uncontacted Shompen tribe will be wiped out. They
asserted that the wish of those indigenous people (to be left alone) should be
respected. The letter alleged that if the development project is not scrapped,
both the local authority and New Delhi will be liable for the irreversible
damage to those tribal families in the Indian archipelago near Myanmar.
Shompen
Tribe
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The letter,
endorsed by Vishvajit Pandya (former
director of Andaman & Nicobar Tribal Research Institute), TN Pandit (former
director of Anthropological Survey of India), Nicholas Barla (Adivasi Samanway
Manch Bharat), Ashish Kothari
(Kalpavrish), Madhumita Mazumdar, Manish
Chandi, Ajay Saini, Anstice Justin, Virginius Xaxa, Ruby Hembrom, Purnima Upadhyay and Mukul Sharma, strongly urged the National Commission
for Scheduled Tribes and Union Tribal Affairs
Ministry to intervene immediately over the sensitive matter and put a
halt to the project before it’s too
late.
Months
back, when President Droupadi Murmu visited the Andaman islands triggered a debate
on the development initiatives there. Expressing serious concerns over the
development programs in some parts of the islands, a group of international
genocide experts wrote to New Delhi with
a warning that its plans to turn the island into a mega-port city will wipe out
the entre tribe. They argued that around 300 Shompen hunter-gatherers,
two-thirds of them uncontacted until today, will face extinction if the
development plans go ahead.
Shompen
people are one of the most isolated tribes on Earth, and they live in the dense
rainforests that occupy the islands' interior. Should the project for a
mega-port, a new city, an international airport, a power station, a defence
base, an industrial park and helping 650,000 new settlers go ahead with
original plans, it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, asserted the
experts, adding that simple contact with the Shompen (who have little to no
immunity to infectious diseases) may result in a precipitous population
collapse.
Survival
International, a London-based tribal rights body, has been calling for the
project to be abandoned to ensure the Shompen's ownership rights over their
ancestral lands. Its director, Caroline Pearce, asserted that under
international laws, no government (or company) should proceed with
interventional activities without the indigenous people's consent in their
territories. She also revealed that over 7,000 people, arguing that the Shompen
people had no idea of the ongoing activities, communicated with New Delhi with
their demand to stop the genocide.
The group
of over 830 large & small hilly islands (with only 31 inhabited) shares
maritime borders with Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand and occupies a
total land area of around 8,249 square kilometres with a population of 3.81
Lakhs. Andaman islands in the northern part are primarily home to four tribes:
Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese. These tribes are believed to
have migrated from the African islands thousands of years ago, and most of them
survive by hunting wild animals and natural agri-produces. The Sentinelese are
the most isolated and reject all contact with outsiders.
On the
other hand, the Nicobar Islands in the southern part shelter two tribes, namely
Nicobarese and Shompen, who might have arrived on the islands several thousand
years ago from the Malay-Burma coast. Nicobarese (around one thousand) maintain
contact with outsiders and are now converted to Christianity. However, the
Shompen are still a relatively isolated tribe surviving by hunting local wildlife
and harvesting plants. Many believe they can survive and thrive if their lands
and resources are secure.
Union
minister Sarbananda Sonowal also visited the islands recently and admitted that
some stakeholders raised environmental concerns. However, he pointed out that
those were already addressed. Inspecting the proposed mega port at Atlanta Bay,
Sonowal informed that it's hardly 565 km from Yangon, 765 km from Sittwe, 1000
km from Chittagong and 1100 km from Kolkata. Once the harbour is fully operational,
it will drastically reduce the ship travel time to Kolkata from 72 to 15 hours,
commented Sonowal.
“This is
the second time in a matter of months that a group of experts has demanded that
the Great Nicobar Island Development Project be scrapped. Anyone with any
knowledge of the Shompen and other uncontacted tribes knows that this project
would completely destroy them - they simply won’t survive the catastrophic
transformation of their island that the Indian government is planning,” said
Caroline Pearce adding that no national development project can justify a
genocide and hence the tribal rights body urged New Delhi to alter the plans
before it is too late.
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Nava
Thakuria is a northeast India-based professional journalist who is an
engineering graduate.
URL: https://newageislam.com/current-affairs/shompen-tribe-development-justify-genocide/d/132221