The peculiar political position of chieftains of the Dangs

Just outside of Ahwa town, in the centre of the Dang district, 37-year-old Kiransinh Panwar steps out of his home. It’s a ground floor house with a tin shed on its terrace, between a tyre shop and a construction site, off the Ahwa main road. Dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark grey trousers, he sits on a plastic chair on his porch. His white SUV is parked beside him, sporting a board on the windshield. ‘King of Dang, Gadhvi State’, it declares, an emblem of a man drawing his bow and aiming his arrow on each side of the titular assertion.

About 15 kilometres north, deep inside the Dangs forests in Gadhvi village, Gulsinhbhai Ullashbhai Panwar, 75, also sits on a porch, but of an under-construction house, his back to its bare cement walls. He wears a polycot checked shirt, with a pen tucked into his breast pocket. Another SUV is parked there with the same emblem. It’s a house that Kiransinh has been building for the last five-odd years.

Gulsinhbhai is one of Gadhvi’s naiks, a hereditary title accorded to leaders of small groups of villages of the erstwhile kingdoms of the Dangs. He puts on his spectacles and, with a heavy sigh, begins, “Our forefathers protected these forests from invaders for centuries. They were tricked.” Gulsinhbhai asserts that after India got Independence, the tribal kings were co-opted into the Union without their consent, the forest lands they ruled over were taken away from them, and a paltry sum was given yearly.

Over the years, the rulers of the Dangs have questioned various aspects: the amount of compensation, the unilateral settlement, and the disrespectful way in which they say they were treated. While the Instrument of Accession for other rulers addressed them as “His Highness”, the Dangs rulers, in a government resolution, were called “illiterate” and people unaware of their “financial obligations”, who were “likely to squander the whole amount [of monetary compensation] in no time”. While the other rulers were “guaranteed” their “titles, rights to succession, and privileges”, the government resolution for the Dangs rulers was meant to “settle their status, rights, and privileges”.

Old wounds

The five Bhil Adivasi chieftains of the Dangs, of whom Kiransinh is one, spend most of their time in the villages that were once their kingdoms, deep inside Dang’s forests, where electricity is erratic, water for drinking and irrigation is a problem for half the year, and pitch roads are still reaching. The erstwhile kingdoms are today the villages of Gadhvi; Pimpri, where Trimakrao Panwar is the chieftain; Daher, where Tapat Rao Panwar is the head; Linga, where Chatrasinh Suryavanshi is in charge; and Vasurana, where Dhanrajsinh Suryavanshi is in command. Here, their forefathers ruled over 1,683.5 sq km of forested hills full of teak trees. Now, the villages are run by panchayats.

Every year, a three-day festival called the Dang Darbar is held just before Holi. Here, the chieftains arrive in chariots and the district administration gives them the honour of kings. Kiransinh says of the Dang Darbar, “We have been reduced to being treated like kings for just a day once a year, because we are Adivasi, and our forefathers could not read and write.”

At the Darbar, the Gujarat government, through the Governor, ceremonially hands over the political pensions. This is “a permanent payment in lieu of the rights and privileges of the Dangs’ chiefs, naiks and their relatives”, as described in government documents. At the Darbar this year, the final instalment for the 2024-25 payment was made to the tribal leaders, bringing the total payout for the year to ₹14.73 lakh, to be split among the five chieftains.

The region was merged with the Bombay Presidency through an order of the then Governor-General, Lord Mountbatten, in January 1948. In 1954, the Government of Bombay (the political entity that governed the Bombay Presidency, which subsequently evolved into the State of Bombay that was, in 1960, restructured into the States of Maharashtra and Gujarat), under then Chief Minister Morarji Desai, decided that the forest, of which the Bhils of Dang claimed ownership and collected rent from, was the property of the State. “What happened to the Dangs is a betrayal,” says Dhanrajsinh, 69.

Until 1971, rulers of erstwhile princely States were given yearly payments. At the time of accession to the Indian Union, they had been given the assurance of all their private property. In 1949, the Gaekwad of Baroda, which was the closest kingdom to Dang, took home ₹26.5 lakh. However, in 1954, the tribal rulers of the Dangs got about ₹1.22 lakh to be split among the chieftains and their relatives, comprising 700-odd people at the time. The government, in an order, said, “The Collector of Dang should call the principal Chiefs and tell them what the Government has decided to do.”

At the Dang Darbar this year, Dhanrajsinh rose to address the crowd: “We are citizens of the Government of India, and we fully respect the Constitution. But for the sacrifices of our forefathers and our rights, we are ready to take the British to human rights bodies, if need be.” For the past two years, the Governor has not been physically present, he says.

Rights and privileges

In the past, the Bhils have taken the government to court over the Indian government’s “unilateral” decision to co-opt them into the Indian state, but the courts ruled it to be “in public interest”. The efforts to organise legally were spearheaded by Shramik Vikas Sansthan, founded by veteran Congress leader and former Gujarat Minister Sanat Mehta.

Since Gujarat was carved out as a separate State, Dang district has voted for the Congress, with the BJP getting the seat twice in a row only after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister.

In the last five years, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ruling political party at the Centre and in Gujarat, has strategised to woo India’s Scheduled Tribe voters. As a first step, they are building a narrative of tribal identity by employing the histories of Adivasi resistance movements. The BJP situates Adivasis as an inseparable part of “Bharatiya sabhyata and sanskriti (Indian civilisation and culture)”, by pushing stories of their rebellions as resistance to British and Muslim invaders, though the movements were against oppression of different kinds, including against caste.

The Dang district, whose southern boundary marks the border between Gujarat and Maharashtra, is a region that oral histories claim was once part of Dandakaranya, the forests mentioned in Hindu epic Ramayana. Here, Lord Ram, his wife Sita, and brother Lakshman are believed to have visited during their exile.

In 1947, just as the British were packing up in India, those in power took the position that Dang should be independent. The then Union Home Minister, Sardar Patel, promised that the budget and development of the Dangs would be treated separately from the Bombay Presidency.

At the Dang Darbar, Dhanrajsinh said, “Baroda’s Gaekwads paid us to protect them from invaders. We resisted the British, who were forced to recognise our sovereignty and execute a lease with us for the use of our forests in 1842. As of 1893, the British paid us ₹17,878 per annum in rent, which comes to over ₹1.07 crore in today’s times. We don’t even get 10% of that money today.”

In 1842, the Collector of Maharashtra’s Khandesh region executed the forest lease that Dhanrajsinh spoke about at the Dang Darbar. However, by 1878, the British began administering the district, putting it in a “peculiar political position”, given that it was dealt with as a “foreign territory” under the Foreign Jurisdiction (India) Order.

The origins of the 1954 resolution lay in a letter written to the Government of Bombay by the Collector of Dang in January 1950, which referred to their forest ownership. In the letter, the then Collector, K.T. Satarawala, wrote, “As long as the present loose system is continued, I see the very real danger of mistaken ideas about possession of land, etc. entering the minds of the Chiefs. It may, some future date, be made to appear to them that all the lands in Dang belong to them because the government collects the revenue for these lands on their behalf.”

Forests of the past and present

A month has passed since Dhanrajsinh’s address at the Dang Darbar, during which he had said they’d launch a protest in April if the government did not “decide on their rights” to the forest, their rights of succession, and higher compensation.

Now, the thick teak forests are golden brown, leaves barely hanging on to their branches. The temperature has started to soar. It is the day before Ram Navami and, from the district headquarters of Ahwa to deep into Dang’s forests, the highways are lined with flags of the BJP. There is no visible sign of agitation on the streets of Ahwa.

Under the banyan tree, outside his government-provided house, Dhanrajsinh says, “How were our forefathers any different from the over 500 kings that were offered Instruments of Accession to sign? Like the other kings and queens, why were we not allowed to retain ownership of our forests? That was our property. We were not even consulted for the settlement of our political rights.”

Gulsinhbhai complains, “Today, we are not allowed to use anything apart from our agricultural lands. We have no access to the forests, whereas cooperative societies are being permitted to cut down trees.”

Officials in the Dang-Ahwa Collectorate say that while the heirs of the erstwhile kings, naiks, bhaubands (brothers-in-arms) had been given ownership of large swathes of agricultural land in the district in the 1970s, they do not have free access to the forests.

The offices of the District Collector at Dang-Ahwa and the Resident Additional Collector were unable to confirm whether the chiefs have forest rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, meant to protect the rights of Scheduled Tribes and forest-dwelling communities to use forest resources.

“Not only did our forefathers resist invaders, but they also ensured the survival of forests by stopping forest fires. These fires would originate from poachers trying to smoke their prey out,” Gulsinhbhai continues. Government records from 1954 showed that the Forest Department was paying the Dangs chiefs in “shelas (cloth)” and “silver bangles” for “fire protection”.

Education and empowerment

At Kiransinh’s family home in Ahwa, the district headquarters where the chieftains live, his daughter Rashmita Kiransinh Panwar, 20, is on a semester break from college. “I’m very proud of my father for always encouraging me to study,” says Rashmita, who went to a Christian missionary school for the first 10 years of her life.

Pursuing a postgraduate degree in Economics from the M.R. Desai Arts and E.E.L.K. Commerce College in Chikhli, she is determined to make her own path in life. “In the 11th standard, my teachers advised that an Economics degree would help me crack bank jobs and also give me skills to start my own business if I wanted to,” she says, adding that she lives in a hostel in Chikhli to avoid the commute from Ahwa, 84 kilometres away.

“I feel good that my father is a king, but I’m careful not to be arrogant about it. After all, it is just for a day that he is treated as a king,” she says. A rosary sits on the windowsill of their home. “I am Christian, but my father is not,” she says.

The prominent religious buildings in Ahwa town are churches, but on the outskirts, BJP flags are accompanied by road signs pointing to the closest Hanuman temples. These are built with support from Shree Ramkrishna Welfare Trust (SRWT), which is run by BJP’s Rajya Sabha member and diamond merchant Govind Dholakia.

Over 93% of Dang’s population belongs to the Scheduled Tribes, and more than 90.43% of them identify themselves as followers of Hinduism, as per the 2011 Census, up from 89.75% in 2001. About 9.03% of the district’s STs follow Christianity, a drop from 9.87% registered in the 2001 Census.

Over the last few years, the SRWT has been trying to deliver on a promise to build 311 Hanuman temples in 311 talukas of the Dang district. This, according to Dholakia’s website, was a “resolution” taken by the trust in 2017 for the “awakening of social consciousness of about 2.5 lakh forest dwellers” in Dang.

In the centre of Gadhvi, one of the SRWT Hanuman temples stands prominently in the village square. Inside the forest, atop a hill is the Devasthana, the indigenous place of worship for the Bhil Adivasis. It is a patch of land bordered with dark grey stone slabs dug into the ground. Each stone has carvings of members of the Bhil warrior tribe, atop horses carrying swords and daggers. People believe their forefathers’ weapons were buried here. Some of the stones are strewn around the hilltop, away from the central worship area. Here sits a Shivling, with a Nandi bull facing it.

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Edited by Sunalini Mathew