00:00 Outlook brings to you excerpts from its latest issue titled 'Adivasi' or 'The Earliest Inhabitants'.
00:07 This issue of Outlook looks at the politics of appropriation and resistance in the wake of recent
00:13 developments in the states like Jharkhand and the Union Territory of Ladakh. With the general
00:19 elections due this year, it remains to be seen how the Adivasis, who form more than 8% of the total
00:27 population, participate and how the identity politics shape up in the future.
00:33 Tribal Turmoil by Anisha Reddy from Outlook. Despite government's renewed outreach,
00:40 tribals in the Andhra Telangana region continue to lose their homelands and their grip over their
00:45 rights. Earlier this month, more than a dozen tribal families living in the Meduvai village
00:51 in Andhra Pradesh's Bhadrachalam district had a rude awakening in the dead of night.
00:57 Andhra police and state administrative officials pulled tribal women like Lakshmi,
01:02 who were in her late 40s by their hair, from their homes and warned them to leave their
01:08 ancestral lands before sunrise. The government machinery alleged that the tribals were occupying
01:14 the territory illegally. "What was our crime, sleeping peacefully at home?" asks Lakshmi,
01:21 who hails from the Konda Reddy tribes, which have generational ties to Meduvai village
01:26 and nearby areas. Her eyes are red from anger and fatigue. "I looked straight into the eyes
01:32 of the officials wielding guns and said, 'I will not leave my land,'" she says. Despite her courage
01:39 in the face of adversity, Lakshmi, along with 15 families from the same tribe, were vacated from
01:45 their ancestral lands on that February night. "You belong in the jungles. You should go back there,"
01:51 they were told by the officials, who orchestrated the government's drive to vacate tribals living
01:57 in the area. Lakshmi now works as a maid in an upper-middle-class household in Bhadrachalam.
02:03 The tall building she works in now looms over her new home, a thatched hut, which she moved into
02:10 after being displaced by a multi-crore irrigation project. Lakshmi had shut her eyes for what
02:16 seemed like a minute, while her home was razed by officials right in front of her.
02:21 She did not see the walls crumbling, but the sounds of demolition continue to echo in her
02:27 ears. The Konda Reddys, or the Hill Reddys, completely unrelated to another dominant Hindu
02:33 caste, also known by the Reddy surname, are a primitive tribe of Andhra Pradesh. Throughout
02:39 their lives, they perform rituals associated with the Godavari River. But with the coming
02:45 of the Polavaram project, an under-construction multi-purpose irrigation facility on the Godavari
02:51 River in AP's Elluru and East Godavari districts, these tribes have been forced to shift away from
02:57 from the ground.
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