The Hindu Editorial Analysis- 26th January, 2022 | Current Affairs: Daily, Weekly & Monthly - CLAT PDF Download

1. For a Civic Solidarity: The Chakma/Hajong People Deserve Citizenship and not Racial Profiling

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GS 1- Society

Context: The Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister’s announced in August 2021 that they would be relocated outside the State and that steps would be taken for a “census” of the communities.

• In this context, the NHRC has directed the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Arunachal Pradesh government to submit an action taken report against the racial profiling and relocation of the Chakma and Hajong communities in the northeastern State.

About Chakma/Hajong Tribes

• They had fled their homes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in erstwhile East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) after losing land to the construction of the Kaptai dam on the Karnaphuli river in the early 1960s.
• They had sought asylum in India and were settled in relief camps in Arunachal Pradesh.
• Since then they have been well integrated in villages in the southern and south-eastern parts of the State.

The Issue of Citizenship to the Chakma/Hajong People

• Most of the Chakma/Hajong community members were born in the State and have been living peacefully, which has raised the question about why they shouldn't be given a full citizenship.
• In 2015, the Supreme Court directed the State to grant them citizenship, but this had not yet been implemented.
• In a judgment in 1996, the Court had stated that the “life and personal liberty of every Chakma residing within the State shall be protected”.

Problem of State Driven Census

• Given these judgements, and the history of peaceful co-exitence, the Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister’s announcement, in August 2021, that they would be relocated outside the State and that steps would be taken for a “census” of the communities was clearly unwarranted.
• The so-called State-driven census would have amounted to a racial profiling of the two communities that have also been the subject of an antagonist and nativist campaign by organisations such as the All Arunachal Pradesh Students’ Union.
• The issue has not been helped either by statements made earlier by the Union Minister of State for Home, Kiren Rijiju, about relocation.

Way Forward

• It is difficult, but not impossible, for any State government in the northeast to balance the interests of native tribal communities and those of legitimately settled refugees and their progeny.
• Special rights guaranteed in the Indian Constitution in these States in order to protect the tribal people, their habitat and their livelihoods, have more than occasionally been misinterpreted as favouring tribal nativism with overblown demographic fears fanning hatred for communities such as the Chakma/Hajong in Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram.
• Unfortunately, political forces have also limited themselves to using ethnic fissures for power and sustenance. Uprooting communities that fled their homelands under duress and have since been well settled in their adopted areas, contributing to the diversity of culture and the economy, would be a violation of their rights and repeating a historic wrong.
• A dialogue between the State government, civil society and those of the Chakma/Hajong communities would go a long way in addressing concerns in implementing the Court judgment of 2015, rather than the course currently adopted by Itanagar. Implementing the NHRC directive should be a step in the process to reverse that course.

2. Distorting History through a Calendar: By Propagating False Narratives on Indian Ancestry, the IITs are Damaging their Standing

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GS 1- History

Context: In its new calendar for 2022, IIT-Kharagpur’s new Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge System has propagated an unscientific narrative on the beginnings of our ancestry. 4

• Titled ‘Recovery of the Foundations of Indian Knowledge Systems’, this calendar presents a very confusing collage of symbols and images with patently distorted ideas.
• The intention of the calendar is to establish an alternate premise that the Aryans, the carriers of Vedic culture, were indigenous to the Indus Valley and surrounding regions.
• This premise advances the theme that these people were the custodians of the Indus Valley Civilization that had been active for more than 10,000 years and that eventually spread its cultural influence westwards from India. This is called the ‘out of India’ theory.

An Unscientific Narrative

• As the historian Charles Allen stated in his book, such revisionism flies in the face of all the evidence — archaeogenetics, archaeological, linguistic, zoological, botanical, geographical and theological.
• The evidence informs us that the pre-Indian state’s civilizational beginnings are associated with the Harappans, the earliest settlers and belonging to a greater Indus Valley Civilization, whose culture extends from 7,000 to 2,000 BCE.
  • The remnants of their settlements are located around the Indus River, Kutch, Saurashtra and parts of Balochistan and the Makran Coast.
  • Engaged in agriculture and trade, they were adept at designing well-laid-out townships with a good system of water management.
  • They used bullock-drawn carts. Predominantly centred on farming, these communities slowly declined as a result of increasing aridity and declining summer rainfall.
• During the late Harappan period, the Rigvedic people entered the Indian subcontinent through present-day Iran and Afghanistan.
  • These pastoral migrants and their grazing animals including horses came in from the Eurasian steppes into the Indus Valley region, in batches, to mingle with the dark-skinned settlers of the Indus Valley.
  • Although not an ‘invasion’ in the classical sense, as the American archaeologist George Dales had noted, “Harappans met their end not with an Aryan bang, but with an Indus expatriate’s whimper”. But the ‘in-group-out-group’ dynamics that may have played out in such a cultural landscape may have encouraged caste-based social hierarchy, allowing the resourceful newcomers to dominate and forcing the earlier settlers to be marginalised and migrate possibly southwards.
  • The results of excavations from Keezhadi in Tamil Nadu provide further evidence of the extended spread of the non-Vedic culture towards south India until 2,200 years ago.

Recent archaeogenetic studies provide us a firmer scientific foundation to the theory of Aryan migration from the Eurasian steppes.

• The Genetic studies: For instance, the mitochondrial DNA (designated haplogroup R1a1a) of some of the social groups in India share a common genetic ancestral lineage with eastern Europeans.
• It is suggested that haplogroup R1a1a mutated out of haplogroup R1a in the Eurasian Steppe about 14,000 years ago.
• It also means that the original form of Indo-European languages was first spoken in Eastern Europe, the ‘original’ homeland.
• It is likely that a group of nomads who shared the genomic subclade R1a1a left their homeland and moved east towards the Caspian grasslands, where they tamed horses, goats and dogs and learned to build horse-drawn chariots, essential for a nomadic life.
• Around 1,900 BCE, these people broke up and one group proceeded towards what is now Iran, and the other to India.
• Those who entered India, around 1,500 BCE, established the dominant civilization in the north-west. By then, much of the older Harappan settlers had either become marginalised or had moved to southern and central India, and even to parts of Balochistan.
• The newly settled people, the so-called Aryans, who worshipped fire, were not builders like the Harappans but are likely to have been better story-tellers.
• Archaeological studies: Two recently published scientific papers, reporting the archaeogenomic studies of the early settlers of central and south Asia, chart the genetic trail of the hunter-gatherers, Iranian farmers and pastoralists from the Caspian steppes, and explain how they may have intermingled to become the makers of some of the world’s earliest civilizations.
• Obtained from a skeleton of a woman from a 5,000-year-old Indus Valley Civilization settlement in the village of Rakhigarhi, in the Hisar District of Haryana, the companion paper tracks the lineage of the people who settled in the Indus Valley.
• The DNA from the skeleton shows no detectable ancestry from the “steppe pastoralists or from Anatolian and Iranian farmers, suggesting farming in South Asia arose from local foragers rather than from large-scale migration from the west”.
• This conclusion, with a caveat that a single sample cannot fully characterise the entire population, reinforces the prevailing notion on the origins of the Harappan settlers. It is also likely that there could be more genetic commonality between earlier settlers from Africa and the Harappan people.

Conclusion
The calendar-makers of an leading institute must not resort to obfuscation of facts by propagating unscientific theories without proof.