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PORT BLAIR: A week after the December tsunami struck India's Nicobar islands, tribal leaders wrote to the territory's lieutenant-governor.
The letter asked for neither food nor shelter, although both were desperately needed. Instead, tribal captains from the central Nicobar islands asked the administration to remove illegal settlers from their lands.
The emotive letter starkly reveals the tensions and insecurities faced by the tribal Nicobarese, beset by a tide of illegal settlement which is threatening to overwhelm them on islands which are supposed to be strictly protected tribal areas.
"We are the victims of being a peace-loving people with a good heart, and advantages were taken by the non-tribal," the letter said. "First they have entered our land illegally, then they have taken away our land, then our peace, then exploitation of the tribal, then cheating the tribal.
"We are not settling down in their land, then why should they settle in our land? We have lost everything, our family, our source of income, coconut trees due to the tidal waves. We again repeat ... appeal to your excellency to please remove these non-tribal from our land."
The Nicobarese are a pig- and coconut-farming people, an Indo-Mongoloid race which has been exposed to the outside world for centuries. The most developed and prosperous of the tribes on India's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, many still preserve a traditional way of life in palm-thatched huts, centred on extended families.
TRIBALS OUTNUMBERED: Perhaps 5,000 of the 28,000 Nicobarese died when the Dec 26 tsunami overwhelmed their coastal settlements. Most of the victims came on the island of Katchal where entire villages were wiped out and the whole coastal belt is now under water.
In Katchal, the tsunami has left tribals in the minority. Already they are eyeing higher ground in the centre of the island which more recent immigrants, mostly Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, now occupy.
The Tamils settled on Katchal with the Indian government's blessing to work on a rubber plantation. Families of Indian ex-servicemen were settled on Great Nicobar island in the 1970s, in a bid to cement the strategically vital islands to India. But others have settled illegally, many arriving as labourers for government contractors, and then staying on with the connivance of corrupt local officials.
On Car Nicobar, most of the non-tribals who survived the tsunami fled the island in the days that followed. Already tribal chieftains are insisting illegal settlers not be allowed back.
For the government of India, it is a headache and an embarrassment. Many non-tribal people, traumatised by the tsunami's fatal power, would dearly love to turn their back on the sea and be given new homes on the mainland.
They are unlikely to find room. Lieutenant-General Aditya Singh, spokesman for the relief effort on the islands, say many of the settlers came to do work, as labourers or petty traders, that the tribals were unwilling or unable to do.
"India is a plural society and you can't say in one area there will be only one kind of people," he said. "It's very easy to say we don't want settlers but the fact is the needs of society warrant a mixed population."
Nevertheless, tribal rights advocate Samir Acharya of the Society of Andaman and Nicobar Ecology says the tsunami gives the Nicobarese a new window of opportunity to have their grievances addressed.
"They were being marginalised, and the state was doing whatever it wanted," he said. 'But after this enormous wave of sympathy, the doors of the Planning Commission, of (Congress party leader) Sonia Gandhi, of all the high-ups in Delhi, have opened to them."
The immediate challenge for the Nicobarese is how to rebuild their lives, their economy and especially their homes ahead of April's monsoon. Wary of yet more settlers, tribal leaders have told the government they want only tools and materials, and will build shelters themselves.
With time running out, that may be unrealistic, admits Car Nicobar tribal leader Dr Anwar Musa. "Some workers will definitely be needed to speed the work up, especially skilled people," he said. "But that should not open the floodgates so everyone can come in. -Reuters
