“Sarkar humko basa de kahin, humko isi desh me basna hai (Let the government settle us somewhere, we want to settle in this country).”

By desh or country, V* and her husband means a permanent location that also offers them livelihood. Moving from place to place in eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) , their dearest wish, when I met them in 2022, was to settle in Varanasi.

Falling through the loopholes or blank spots in India’s social and legal system, and unaware of their citizenship rights, local officials denied them a basic element of dignity: shelter.

Living on the pavements of Varanasi for almost three decades, V, a slim, middle-aged woman in her 40s, and her family belong to the Bansphor community, a sub-group of UP’s Dharkar scheduled caste, occupying the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system.

Classified as a “nomadic and denotified tribe” (NT-DNT), the Bansphor are a community of wandering bamboo weavers, their name derived from the bamboo that sustains them (bans is bamboo and phorna is to break).

Because of their nomadic way of life, and as a repercussion of a colonial legacy that criminalised such communities in 1871 under the Criminal Tribes Act, millions like V and their families are still denied the right to shelter, often reiterated by the courts. Such communities are called “denotified tribes”, which means they were “notified” in colonial government records as being “born criminals”.

The Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1952, but it was replaced in many states by a Habitual Offenders Act (here, here, here and here). The stigma of being “habitual offenders” has continued since, impeding their integration, so to say, with India’s social, economic and political mainstream.

Taking into its sweep, nomadic tribes and semi-nomadic tribes as well some settled Adivasi, Dalit and minority communities, the term ‘habitual offenders’, is sustained by attitudes, law and informal practices, as Article 14 reported in May 2020.


Read more - https://article-14.com/post/in-varanasi-a-community-exists-in-the-shadow-of-a-dead-colonial-law-unable-to-live-even-in-slums-65ee6da382bfa