Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the factors that have led to tribal land alienation in South Asia and how Adivasis' struggles for autonomy constitute a response to their dispossession, based on a comparative study of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh and of the tribal territories of Central India.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to analyse the various factors that have led to tribal land alienation in two South Asian countries and how indigenous struggles for autonomy constitute a response to the dispossession of Adivasis (original inhabitants of India and Bangladesh). These populations are neglected and discriminated against in both countries, where the Hindu and Bengali nationalist governments, respectively, have been contesting the very concept of indigeneity. In the official terminology, "scheduled tribes" form 8% of the Indian population, while in Bangladesh "small ethnic groups" are estimated around 2%.

While critical scholars have made extensive use of the concepts of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession to analyse the so-called "global land grab", the everyday acquisition of tribal lands by the state, domestic corporations, local elites and mainstream agricultural settlers has received less attention in the literature on dispossession. More than forceful seizures taking place through extra-economic coercion, tribal land deals initiated by locally powerful groups often involve fraud, debt or false promises, all mechanisms on which there is little conceptual work and that this paper explores.

Based on a comparative study of indigenous movements for autonomy in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, and of the struggle for a separate tribal Gondwana state in Central India, this paper also tries to determine the extent to which autonomy constitutes a response to the dispossession of Adivasis.