Union Minister of State for Commerce, Jairam Ramesh, in his capacity as co-chair of the National Advisory Council appointed expert group on the Jarawa community was recently in the islands when he met members of the small and remote community. In what was a pertinent articulation of the situation, he spoke of the ‘dharam sankat’ faced in ensuring an “iterative measured engagement, and on their (Jarawas) terms,” as the only way forward.

The Jarawas are a small community of 300 odd individuals living hunter-gatherer nomadic lives deep in the finest forests that still survive in the Andaman Islands. What happens to this small and vulnerable community that seems headed towards extinction, will in the final analysis be more a statement on the world that pushed them over the edge than their own capacity to survive.

If one were to search for the elusive solutions, one point of beginning, perhaps, is the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR) that the minister and his entourage must have taken to reach into the Jarawa Tribal Reserve. He was taking a road that has been unanimously acknowledged as being one of the most fundamental vectors of bringing in highly problematic influences into the lives and world of the Jarawas. It is one of the primary creators of the dharam sankat that the minister said we are now facing.

History is witness that the ATR was one of the biggest blunders created in the forests of the Andaman Islands; forests that this road now slices through, ripping in the process, the lands of the Jarawa, their very cosmos. The Jarawas weren’t asked when work was first initiated in their forest home in the late 1960s. They had opposed the road even then, violently attacking the work force using their superior knowledge of the forests and perfectly crafted bows and arrows.

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