Category Mistake

On 17 July 2019, in Uttar Pradesh’s Sonbhadra district, about three hundred men belonging to the Gujjar community—led by village headman Yagyadutt—murdered 11 people from the Gond tribe, including four women, and injured over thirty others. The gruesome massacre in broad daylight was connected to a dispute over land that Gonds had cultivated since before Independence. However, that mattered little. As one villager told a reporter, “If you till the land, we till documents, they said.” Gujjars are a dominant land-owning caste and are classified as an Other Backward Class in Uttar Pradesh. They exemplify the kind of power dominant castes wield over Adivasi communities.

Violence against tribal communities, particularly over land, is not new. Ancient Brahminical texts have demonised them as asura, rakshasa or danava, and they have been subject to dominant-caste violence and displacement even before 1947. Yet the Sonbhadra massacre stood out for its scale. It was among the first instances in independent India where dominant-caste Hindus murdered such a large number of Adivasis. The massacre demonstrated that tribal communities are not exempt from systemic and ongoing caste violence. And a peculiar factor that contributes to their vulnerability is the issue of misclassification.

The Gonds killed in the massacre were landless and had been earlier classified as Scheduled Castes in Uttar Pradesh, which limited their access to the protections available to Scheduled Tribes under the constitution.

Sonbhadra was carved out of Mirzapur, which had earlier been part of the United Provinces. Portions of Mirzapur were listed as “Partially Excluded Areas” under the Government of India Act of 1935; after Independence, many such areas came under the Fifth Schedule of the constitution. A 1947 document titled “Report of the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas (Other than Assam) Sub-Committee” recommended safeguards for Mirzapur’s tribal population: an advisory committee of tribals, constitutional prohibitions on the transfer of tribal land to outsiders without official sanction, and a reserved seat in the Provincial Assembly. But since Gonds and others in the region were not categorised as a tribe, these protections never applied. The reserved Assembly seat, moreover, was created only in 2012, when Obra was declared an ST constituency.