Badshah, not bad man

INSIDE his hovel of branches and rags, a grizzled pauper called Badshah Kale keeps a precious object. It is a note, scrawled by a policeman and framed by Mr Kale, proclaiming that he “is not a thief”. For members of his Pardhi tribe, who are among some 60m Indians considered criminal by tradition, this is treasure.

Squatting beside Mr Kale, on a turd-strewn wasteland outside Ashti, a village in India's western state of Maharashtra, Pardhi men and women describe what it is like to be branded criminal at birth. A woman says her husband is hauled in every week or two by the police, against whom the Pardhis have ring-fenced their wretched colony with thorny branches. He has thrice been tried for robbery but was never convicted. Sporting a bright pink turban, another Pardhi says six of his seven sons have been imprisoned numerous times. All, predictably enough, claim to be law-abiding—though, giggling, Mr Kale's wife admits to hawking copper trinkets as gold. “Even if we try to live like normal people,” she says, “the [Hindu] upper-castes will never accept us.”

This stigma goes back over a century. Mostly itinerant—some blue-eyed Pardhis look like they might come from the far north-west—India's “criminal tribes” have always lived on society's edge. Yet their plight was made worse by a series of 19th-century changes, including rapid deforestation, which stopped them from hunting, and the imposition of a tax on salt, which many had traded. No doubt this drove many to crime—which encouraged India's British rulers to a harsh conclusion. Imbued with a bureaucratic aversion to nomadism and a Victorian relish for the Hindu caste system, they adjudged many Indian tribesmen, Pardhis included, to be preordained crooks. According to an 1880 report of the Bombay Presidency, an area dominated by the modern states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, members of a Pardhi sub-tribe are “always ragged and dirty, walking with a sneaking gait”.

To fix these vagabonds, the Raj introduced the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, under which members of around 150 tribes were forced to register with the police, forbidden to move around freely and, in many cases, herded into barbed-wire camps. The law was scrapped soon after India won independence, and the criminal tribes were formally “de-notified” in 1952. Some have prospered: in Rajasthan, the Meenas dominate a preferential-treatment scheme to allocate government jobs to tribal people, which has let them become part of India's elite civil services. Yet the fortunes of many de-notified tribes (DNTs) have scarcely improved.

The Pardhis, of whom there are more than 200,000 in Maharashtra, are especially wretched. They are mostly jobless and landless, and they are often informally barred from villages. Thousands live destitute in Mumbai, Maharashtra's capital. In response, the state government has made two of the three local Pardhi sub-tribes eligible for positive-discrimination measures. Yet few Pardhis have the documentation or education needed to take advantage of this. Around 80% are illiterate, even if more than half of Pardhi children may now be in school. Among 60-odd Pardhis squatting outside Ashti, only one has a formal job, as a school janitor. He credits his success to passing himself off as a dalit, one of Hinduism's former “untouchables”.

To examine the plight of India's estimated 100m-odd DNTs and other nomadic people, the central government appointed a commission which reported back in 2008. Its recommendations, to which the government has not responded, included taking steps to extend positive-discrimination measures to those tribals—perhaps a fifth of the total—who lack them. It also urged state governments, which control policing in India, to scrap draconian laws used by the police to lock up repeat offenders. These are often used against DNT members, enforcing a cycle of poverty and discrimination that keeps many in crime. Pardhi poachers, for example, are one of the biggest threats to India's dwindling population of tigers, which they have eradicated from several national parks.

According to Ashti's police chief, S.S. Gaikawad, a quarter of local thefts are carried out by Pardhis. His deputy reckons half of Pardhi men are criminal. Mr Gaikawad attributes high rates of criminality to poverty, but believes culture also plays a part: “The more criminal cases against a Pardhi man, the higher his status, and therefore the better his marriage prospects are.” In a country where over a quarter of parliamentarians face criminal charges, this is not as surprising as it might seem. Yet Rajendra Kale, a Pardhi activist in the nearby town of Ahmednagar, says it is exaggerated. He reckons no more than 10% of Pardhi men break the law. To help his poor community, Mr Kale, who says he was twice wrongly imprisoned for theft as an eight-year-old, demands a reform that the government cannot easily provide: “Pardhis must be accepted into the village.”

This is happening, he says, but slowly. He points to some bloodied figures, a Pardhi man and two women, waiting on the pavement nearby. The man, Faillu Bhosle, said they had been attacked by high-caste Marathas while they were cultivating common grazing-land. They had come to town seeking treatment for Mr Bhosle's father, who lost an eye in the attack, and to report the incident to the police. The policemen of their own village, who have arrested Mr Bhosle four times, refused to record their complaint.