Sleeping Schedules and Tribal Schedules

“Look who slept all night. Wel­come to India,” said San­jit when I got up this morn­ing. I have been nurs­ing jet­lag for the past few days, up all night email­ing and writ­ing, sleep­ing dur­ing the day despite the heat. Finally, I have slept at night, leav­ing East­ern Stan­dard Time behind for Indian Stan­dard Time. When I got up, San­jit was at his com­puter final­iz­ing a sideshow of his recent work in Myan­mar. Yes­ter­day, I helped him edit the text. You can see the piece fea­tured on his web­site.

On Thurs­day, there were protests and block­ades all around Delhi. The Guj­jar tribe of Rajasthan is protest­ing to be included as a 4th sched­ule tribe. The sched­uled tribes and sched­uled castes sys­tem is a pro­vi­sion of the 1949 Indian Con­sti­tu­tion which set up an affir­ma­tive action sys­tem based on infor­ma­tion gath­ered in the 1930’s around tribes and castes that were sys­tem­at­i­cally dis­ad­van­taged in soci­ety. Accord­ing to a BBC arti­cle, the Guj­jars are look­ing to be down­graded in the sched­ule sys­tem in order to receive more ben­e­fits and hope­fully catch up eco­nom­i­cally and polit­i­cally with another Rajasthani tribe, the Meenas, who have been ben­e­fit­ing from their sta­tus as a Sched­uled tribe since 1954. The protests in Delhi were pretty run-of-the-mill as far as I can tell. Wel­come to India.

Dar­jeel­ing has been active around the issue of sched­ule sta­tus, espe­cially since last fall. Dar­jeel­ing agi­tated for inde­pen­dent state­hood in the late 1980’s. As part of West Ben­gal, the hills peo­ple were eco­nom­i­cally mar­gin­al­ized as a far-flung moun­tain region of Gorkhas (a tribe of Nepali ori­gin) in a state of Ben­gali planes peo­ple. They received few ben­e­fits and lit­tle infra­struc­ture devel­op­ment. Dar­jeel­ing is pros­per­ous due to the tourism and tea indus­try, so when the locals peti­tioned the fed­eral gov­ern­ment for state­hood, West Ben­gal responded with repres­sive tac­tics. The years of armed con­flict cli­maxed with a 40-day strike where the Gorkha resis­tance shut off the region from out­side con­tact. Hun­gry and tired after the strike, the peo­ple of Dar­jeel­ing accepted the com­pro­mise of a local coun­cil, called the Dar­jeel­ing Gorkha Hill Coun­cil (DGHC), under West Ben­gal. The coun­cil has pushed to be included in the 6th sched­ule of tribes, which they achieved in 2005. Many are unsat­is­fied with this pro­vi­sion. The inter­est in state­hood was rekin­dled when Sub­ash Ghis­ing, leader of the DGHC, pro­fessed that 6th sched­ule sta­tus was suf­fi­cient. The rival party did not agree, nor did many of the peo­ple of Dar­jeel­ing. Ghis­ing had to step down from his post in March. The rival party, Gorkha Jan­mukti Mor­cha, took power. Protests for state­hood shortly fol­lowed. Now, the party has set a dead­line of June 27th to dis­solve the DGHC. I believe that the logic behind this is to dis­man­tle any gov­ern­ing bod­ies ori­ented toward West Ben­gal as a way to pres­sure for the estab­lish­ment of Dar­jeel­ing as a state in India.

I cant’ decide if this means that I have good tim­ing in going to Dar­jeel­ing or bad timing.