Our governments seem bent upon creating a new crop of ‘criminal tribes’, by imposing laws that are alien to group lifestyles

I have a beef with unnecessary laws and bans. It has to do with our colonial history.

We Indians know of the so-called ‘criminal tribes of India,’ legislatively defined and hence effectively created by the British. These were groups that, according to colonial policy makers, practised ‘hereditary’ crime. Therefore, they had to be policed in particularly oppressive ways.

The colonial variant

Though they are now called the ‘de-notified tribes,’ the legacy of criminality bestowed on them by the British has been difficult to erase and police officers are still known to view them with generic suspicion. This much is common knowledge.

What we Indians usually do not know is that all the tribes and castes listed as ‘criminal’ by the British shared some definitive non-criminal characteristics. Of these, two were predominant: these were nomadic tribes and they had a strong, internal social structure. Hence, the brunt of this colonial legislative definition fell on gypsies and aboriginal tribes which had traditionally moved around as part of their lifestyle, and which had independent laws and rules administered by their own panchayats (or their equivalents).

Once this is realised, the nature of these ‘criminal tribes’ is exposed. Their main ‘crime’ was an inability or refusal to accept the settled, propertied order and the supremacy of (Indo-British) civil and criminal codes being imposed on India. This is not to deny the fact that socio-economic pressure might have driven some members of such tribes to break laws — but even there most of the laws being broken seem related to property ones (pilferage, poaching, trespassing, etc.) or the imposed omnipotence of British authority (for instance, when a panchayat imposed its own tribal codes of conduct on its members).

In short, these ‘criminal tribes’ did not simply exist; they were created by legislation that failed to take their socio-economic lifestyle into account. In cases where there were genuine problems — for instance, something like ‘honour killing’ — the British failed to work with educational and social reforms. Instead, they legislated from a position of power — calling for violent policing — and in the process turned ordinary tribes into criminal ones. It is almost two centuries now, and we are yet to erase this violent legacy. Worse, various Indian governments — mostly, but not only Bharatiya Janata Party ones — seem bent upon creating a new crop of ‘criminal tribes.’ The easiest way to do so is to impose laws that are alien to group lifestyles and have nothing much to do with maintaining law and order. Attempts to impose food restrictions on Indians are among this kind of prohibition, as is the ban against alcohol in Bihar (and other States). State-sanctioned vegetarianism, especially in its stronger beef-ban versions, is aimed at Muslims, Christians and the lower castes and aboriginal tribes in particular, all of who have been and are meat-eating peoples.

The alcohol ban in Bihar, justified on the flimsy grounds that it is pro-women, is going to lead to what alcohol bans have always led to, not just in India but also in the U.S. and parts of Europe: distillation of illicit liquor (and deaths as a consequence), the creation of a liquor underworld (remember Al Capone, the most famous of American mafia dons), and the criminalisation of those whose lifestyle includes consumption of alcohol. The beef ban is just as complex. I empathise with the feeling, among many upper-caste Hindus, that the cow, venerated by them, should be protected. Let’s protect the cow, I say too.

Let us not worry about the economic consequences of millions of cows shredding the sparse vegetation of our land, and millions of people being denied a source of nutrition — after all, human starvation is nothing unusual, is it? Let us talk Indians into not eating beef because the cow is our mother, for it gives us milk — as do the goat, the buffalo and the camel, but why split logical hairs? Let’s go for it: let’s convince Indians to not eat beef.

But let us not go about it with punitive bans, which criminalise entire groups and allow hoodlums to take the law into their hands and kill people on the mere suspicion of hankering after beef. At least, the British did not have bands of colonials going about and bashing up gypsies for not staying in one place. We have bands of youth doing exactly that: going around and bashing up people on the mere suspicion of harbouring evil intentions towards cows.

Not only are we witnessing a forced criminalisation of sections of the minorities with a different socio-economic lifestyle, we are also encouraging the criminal activities of hoodlums who feel that it is fine to take the law into your own hands. Nothing can bode worse for a country than hasty laws that create criminals on both sides of the order/crime divide.