Playest thou Satan, in tribal paradise?

Finding the balance between tribal right to cultural autonomy and development is not easy, but has to be done.Assimilation at one end of the policy spectrum and celebration of noble primitiveness at the other are easy options but unacceptable.Integration that allows the tribes to stay who they are, while engaging with modern society on favourable terms, is the least harmful way out.

A balance must be stuck between concerns of the environment and development, said the prime minister recently. But, of course.

So must a balance be struck between protecting the fragile cultures of tribal societies and carrying out ‘development’, particularly mining, in the areas where they reside.

The real question is, how is that balance to be struck? At a conceptual level, the physical environment is relatively easy to handle.

Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek is fond of citing the coal and oil reserves that mankind happily taps for its energy requirements as evidence of the massive environmental catastrophes that are endemic and internal to nature — without such catastrophes, there would be no carbon and hydrocarbon deposits for us to tap.

The point is not that nature has to be forever preserved in its pristine form, nor that nature needs protection from humans. The point, rather, is that human beings sometimes need protection from the consequences of their own shortsighted actions that might force nature to strike a new equilibrium, one in which human survival becomes that much more difficult.

Sustainability, in other words, is not to protect nature and the environment in themselves, but to protect human society from its own thoughtless actions, whether burning a hole in the ozone layer, or saturating the atmosphere with noxious gases.

Here, the question really is of studying the short- and long-term impact of a particular activity. The impact can be mitigated, but the cost goes up. Any deemed benefit, too, could come down, if penalties to mitigate the cost of the activity is factored in, say, a carbon tax.
    
Any project is viable, if the aggregate social benefit arising from the activity outweighs the aggregate social cost. The trick is to interpret social cost and social benefit as widely and inclusively as possible, allocating quantifiable values to things that are often difficult to represent by numbers: how valuable is survival of a species of butterfly or moth, or a lion-tailed macaque? How should the health of future generations weigh on the conscience of the present one, as it maximises happiness here and now?
    
This is tough, but it gets even tougher when it comes to tribal societies that face severe disruption if ‘development’ takes place on their land, in their midst. They themselves have no value for the mineral resources lying below the ground they live on, but mainstream, non-tribal society has plenty of uses for those minerals and wants to mine them.

What would be dug up in the process of mining is not just the land, but also the life of the tribes as they know it. Should that mining be done, or should the tribal people be allowed to retain their lifestyle and culture, that lode of mineral wealth be damned?
    
A popular term for tribal people in India is adivasi, (the original inhabitant or autochthon, in academic jargon). This means that they were here before the others. Their lore has it that they were pushed to the margins by those who came later, and drove them off their land. Might was right.

If that principle is to be used again, the tribes can be asked to take a walk, preferably a long one, and their lands dug up. But we have formed ourselves into a democracy, and morality and the greater good have taken the place of might as the rightful arbiter.
    
What is the morality of displacing the tribes and their way of life? Simultaneously, is it moral to allow the tribes to stay at their stunted stage of evolution, when mankind has attained so much of progress, in knowledge, in the arts, in its ability to subjugate nature?

After all, weren’t we all tribal people at some point or the other? When the serpent offered Eve the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge in Paradise, didn’t he actually do her and Adam a service, making possible the subsequent progress of the human race?
    
Considering that poverty, disease, ignorance, violence and moral depravity mark modern humans, it is difficult to uphold their society as the ideal into which the tribes should assimilate, losing their own unique identities.

In any case, all attempts to assimilate autochthons by force, whether in Australia or the Americas, have been disastrous, producing drunken, drug-addicted, broken outcasts, instead of an accretion to civilisation.
    
Nor does it make sense to celebrate the tribes’ frozen-in-the-past existence, treating them as ideal exhibits for a museum of anthropology, where you take the kids out on a long weekend.
    
The most sensible course would be to let the tribes choose, with elbow room to make that choice, to engage with modern humans and their ways of the world, on terms they find appealing. Impossibly idealistic? Not really.

State-owned SAIL and private sector Tata Steel have shown, in the areas where they operate their captive mines, that such integration is possible. That entails give and take.
    
It is possible to increase the give, and eschew grab. The most primitive, endangered groups should be left alone, while the rest can be offered dignified integration.