Madhya Pradesh wants to snoop on denotified tribes, reviving colonial-era injustice, activists say

In January, the Maharashtra forest department arrested Ajit Pardhi, a member of the Pardhi community. At the end of the month, on January 29, the Madhya Pradesh forest department wrote to all wildlife circles and forest officials in the state, noting that Pardhi was “a notorious tiger hunter” who had been “absconding for 11 years”.

The letter made broad statements about the Pardhi community, a denotified tribe that was once classified as “criminal” under colonial laws that are now repealed. The letter stated that the department had learnt that members of the community were active in various parts of the state: specifically, in the seven forest circles of Narmadapuram, Siwani, Chindhwada, Betul, Bhopal, Jabalpur and Balaghat.

“Keeping in view the criminal record of such communities,” the letter said, forest officials were to engage in “intense patrolling and surveillance of them”.

The letter instructed forest departments to carry out this surveillance in four ways: searching settlements of the communities with dog squads; conducting inquiries in the settlements; surveilling those who sold products such as medicinal herbs, food articles, plastic items and bedsheets; and recording their names, addresses, and Aadhaar card details, to be submitted to the state’s “tiger strike force”, which would integrate the information into a...

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