Introduction: If we can name the land, why can’t we name its people?

Banswara is not quiet anymore. Its narrow lanes tremble under the roar of voices— “6.5% abhi chahiye!” It is not a slogan tossed into the air; it is an urgent cry, born from generations of silence. Dust rises from the marching feet of men, women, and children who have nothing left to lose but their invisibility. The air vibrates with the beat of drums, the clapping of hands, and the unflinching determination of a people who refuse to be erased.

At the centre of this restless tide stands an elderly Bhil woman. She grips a worn-out file of land records, its pages brittle, its stamp of Rejected smudged but still legible—a cruel reminder that her family’s claims were dismissed without ever being heard. Her eyes, clouded with age, carry not just her own story but the stories of ancestors who sowed seeds in these hills long before highways and mines claimed them. Around her, schoolchildren raise placards demanding scholarships that never arrive, farmers carry posters with pictures of their barren fields, and mothers march with babies tied firmly to their backs, refusing to let another generation inherit silence.

This is not just a protest. It is the eruption of survival, written on the streets for the world to see. It is a declaration that Rajasthan’s tribals have been patient for too long—pushed to the margins of maps, budgets, and memories. This fight is not about a number carved into a reservation chart; it is about dignity, belonging, and the right to exist as equals.

“This is not a numbers fight. It is a struggle for recognition.”

Custodians Forgotten Are Histories Erased

Long before Rajasthan was carved into districts and tourist maps, the Bhils, Garasias, Damors, Meenas, and Saharias lived in harmony with its forests, hills, and rivers. They were not just residents of the land—they were its keepers. They planted crops on slopes without scarring the soil. They worshipped rivers, not as resources, but as kin who sustained them. They protected groves as sacred, passing down stories and rituals that bound nature and community together. Their festivals were not staged for cameras—they were living rituals of gratitude, sang and danced in rhythm with the seasons.

But today, those rhythms are broken. The thundering of mining trucks drowns out their folk songs. The smoke from blasted hillsides chokes their stories. Rajasthan’s brochures celebrate palaces, deserts, and luxury hotels, but leave no space for the villages where the heartbeat of the state still lives. Schools stand as hollow shells, with no teachers inside. Children walk barefoot for miles only to return to families who find their land claimed by yet another project.

What the state calls development often comes to the tribals as dispossession. Mines bite into ancestral hills where their gods once dwelled. Sacred groves are bulldozed to make way for luxury resorts. A dam that lights up a city also swallows an entire village, and with it, centuries of memory. Each eviction is not just a relocation notice. It is a language silenced, a ritual broken, a way of life buried under concrete.

As one tribal leader in Udaipur said with quiet force, “We are not against development. We are against being developed over.”

And that is the cruel paradox: those who preserved Rajasthan’s balance for centuries now pay the highest price for what is called progress. Their knowledge, their culture, their very right to exist are sacrificed at the altar of economic growth. Erase the tribals, and you erase Rajasthan’s memory. Silence them, and you silence the land itself.

Equity Without Equity Is Injustice Disguised

Rajasthan’s tribals form 13.5% of the population, yet the benefits of the 12% Scheduled Tribe quota do not trickle evenly among them. In districts like Banswara and Dungarpur, where Bhils and Garasias make up the overwhelming majority, a painful question is asked again and again: “If we are the majority in our own lands, why do we remain the minority in colleges, in government jobs, in politics?”

The answer, whispered with frustration, points towards an imbalance within. The Meenas, more settled and better placed, concentrated in eastern Rajasthan, are accused of cornering most of the opportunities. For the poorest tribes, this feels less like solidarity and more like betrayal from within the same fold. It leaves the weakest still at the margins, watching others move ahead while they are held back by invisible walls.

Reservation without sub-classification becomes a cruel irony. It promises equity but delivers exclusion. It builds a house of rights where only some tribes find shelter, while others remain standing outside in the rain.

The demand for a 6.5% sub-quota is not about slicing percentages on a chart. It is about survival. It is about fairness within fairness. When the Supreme Court upheld sub-classification in Davinder Singh (2024), many tribals saw a door open at last—law finally seemed to recognise what lived reality had screamed for decades. And yet, politics remains stuck, refusing to walk through that door.

“Reservation without fairness is just another form of exclusion.”

Representation cannot remain a token or a name on a poster. For Rajasthan’s tribals, representation must mean real dignity, genuine justice, and equity even within equity. Otherwise, the very system built to uplift them becomes another way of keeping them invisible.

When Land Is Lost, Memory Is Stolen

The Forest Rights Act (2006) came as a promise, a recognition that the people who had lived with forests for centuries finally deserved security over them. Yet by 2023, only 77,323 individual and 940 community titles had been issued in Rajasthan—a drop in the ocean compared to the number of families who depend on the land. Each rejection is not a mere stamp on paper. It is the tearing away of roots, the stripping of identity, the quiet erasure of belonging.

In 2019, the Wildlife First judgment briefly ordered the eviction of those whose FRA claims were rejected. Panic spread like wildfire through tribal hamlets. For weeks, families slept in fear, convinced they would be uprooted by morning. Entire villages whispered about disappearing overnight, as if history itself could be deleted with one court order. Though the eviction was stayed, its shadow still hangs over them, heavy and unshaken.

Consider Kalia, a Bhil farmer from Dungarpur. His family had cultivated the same patch of forest land for three generations. He applied for recognition under the FRA, attaching maps, testimonies, affidavits—every proof he could muster. Still, his claim came back stamped Rejected. A few weeks later, bulldozers rolled in. His standing crop of maize was flattened in minutes. The police told him coldly, “This is forest land. You have no rights here.”

For Kalia, the loss was not just maize and soil. It was the breaking of continuity. It was the end of stories told around the fire, of how his grandfather cleared the land with his bare hands, of how the first seed was sown. His children, once proud of their lineage, now migrate seasonally to brick kilns far from home. A legal entitlement that was meant to secure his life turned instead into exile.

This is not an isolated story. It is the reality repeated across Rajasthan’s tribal belt. PESA (1996) and Samatha v. Andhra Pradesh (1997) were meant to be shields, protecting communities like Kalia’s. But here, bulldozers often move faster than laws. The ground that fed generations can be declared illegal in an instant.

“Our forest is our mother. How can a mother be illegal?” — Elder, Udaipur

When land is lost, memory is stolen. And when memory is stolen, people are pushed to the edge of forgetting themselves.

A Culture Silenced Is a Democracy Denied

Every forest cut down buries a ritual. Every river dammed silences a song. For Rajasthan’s tribals, culture has never been decoration—it has always been survival. To erase the land is to erase everything that breathes through it: the language spoken at the hearth, the festivals that honour the monsoon, the herbs gathered to heal wounds, the stories that carry memory forward.

The Mangarh massacre of 1913, where British forces slaughtered hundreds of Bhils who followed Govind Guru, is a wound that remained invisible in Indian history books for more than a century. Only in 2022 did Mangarh receive the recognition of a National Monument. Yet what does it mean to honour the dead with stone while the living descendants of those martyrs are still denied dignity? A plaque on a hilltop cannot feed hungry children or protect disappearing traditions.

Bhili, Wagdi, Garasia, and Saharia languages are thinning out, their words lost as the young migrate to cities for work. Festivals once held under banyan trees shrink in scale as forests are cleared. Knowledge of medicinal plants—once the only healthcare in remote villages—is dismissed as superstition, even where government health centres stand locked and useless.

For the people, each lost word, each forgotten song, is not just culture vanishing—it is identity dissolving. A Saharia elder in Kota once said, “When the drum falls silent, we forget who we are.” His words echo the truth: erasure is not only physical but also spiritual.

“If we can honour our dead with a monument, why not honour our living with rights?”

The choice is stark and urgent. Rajasthan can nurture Adivasi culture as a living, breathing force—rooted in community, language, and land—or it can turn it into a museum exhibit, stripped of its people and meaning. A democracy that silences culture is not a democracy at all. And a Rajasthan without its tribals would be a Rajasthan without its soul.

Budgets Promise, But Hunger Never Lies

In 2024–25, Rajasthan announced ₹1,500 crore for Tribal Sub-Plan districts. Ministers spoke of upliftment, officials released glossy charts, and newspapers hailed it as a historic step. On paper, it looked like progress. But on the ground, the silence of empty classrooms and locked health centres told a different story. By February 2025, most of that money was still trapped in files and signatures.

For tribal families, numbers in budgets mean little when children are still walking barefoot to schools where no teachers arrive. Health centres in entire blocks stay shut for months, their whitewashed walls hiding rusting beds. Ration shops open with hollow shelves. Promises are made in Jaipur, but hunger has the last word in Banswara, Dungarpur, and Sirohi.

“You build flyovers in Jaipur, but not schools in Banswara.” — Protest banner, 2025

The contrast is cruel. Cities flaunt malls and highways, neon lights and celebratory ribbon cuttings. Meanwhile, villages wait for anganwadis that never open, for doctors who never come, for nutrition schemes that exist only in reports. This is not just inequality—it is neglect dressed up as progress, abandonment hidden under the fine print of budgets.

Take Rekha, a young Garasia mother from Sirohi. Her two-year-old son weighed less than ten kilos. She set out on foot, walking six kilometres under the harsh sun to reach the nearest anganwadi. The building stood locked, windows dusty, the silence unbearable. Not giving up, she went to the local health centre. No doctor. No nurse. A clerk told her, without looking up, “Go to Udaipur.” Udaipur was hours away, and Rekha had no bus fare. So, she went back home with her sick child in her arms. Two months later, her son died of malnutrition.

For the state, he was a statistic—one more entry in an annual report. For Rekha, he was her only child, her whole world. His death is not counted as corruption, not written into any budget delay, not acknowledged in any speech. But it lives on in her silence, in the space in her hut where a child should have been.

This is what “budget delays” mean in tribal Rajasthan. They are not about graphs or audit reports. They are about graves dug too soon, about mothers burying children while governments draft new promises.

Youth Carry Rage, Women Carry Resilience

Rajasthan’s tribal youth are no longer waiting for change to trickle down—they are demanding it with their voices, their pens, and their bodies on the streets. With books in one hand and placards in the other, they are turning the whispers of their ancestors into hashtags that echo across the internet, into debates in Jaipur and even Delhi. They are tired of being cast as backdrops in someone else’s story—paraded on posters when convenient, ignored when decisions are made. This generation wants a seat at the table. They want to draft policies, not just be objects of them.

Alongside them stand tribal women—the quiet backbone of every protest, every meeting, every hunger march. For centuries, they have carried the heaviest burdens: of hunger, of violence, of children lost to poor healthcare, of exploitation that no law seems to touch. Yet when the time comes, they walk to the frontlines. Infants tied to their backs, feet blistered from marches, their voices cut sharper than drums. They have been doubly silenced, by patriarchy and by the state, but in struggle, they become unignorable.

Take Sundari, a Meena woman from Pratapgarh. Married off at sixteen, she entered adulthood with a belly full of fear. She lost her first child in childbirth because no ambulance came, no doctor answered, and her cries went unheard. For years, she carried that grief like a stone in her chest. But grief turned into grit. She began gathering women in her village, forming a collective that spoke about wages, safety, and education. In 2023, when police lathi-charged a protest in Dungarpur, Sundari did not run. She stood in front, shielding younger girls with her own body, taking the blows as they rained down. Bruised and battered, she rose the next day to speak again at the Gram Sabha meeting, this time with the same voice that had once been dismissed inside her own home.

“We are not victims. We are leaders.”

This is the new face of Rajasthan’s tribal struggle: youth who refuse to inherit silence, and women who transform wounds into weapons of resilience. The young bring fire—impatient, unyielding, determined to tear down old walls. The women bring endurance—resolute, unbreakable, carrying generations of survival in their stride.

Together, they form not just the support but the spine of Rajasthan’s tribal awakening. Ignore them, and the state will not return to quiet. What it will hear is the sound of a storm gathering—one that carries both the rage of the young and the resilience of the women.

Justice Is Not a Favour—It Is Overdue

Justice, for Rajasthan’s tribals, is not a speech, not a slogan, not an abstract ideal. It is food on the plate, a school that actually opens, a forest that isn’t stolen, a seat in college, a voice in the Gram Sabha that is heard and respected. It is not asking for kindness—it is demanding what has always been owed.

For decades, these demands have been the same, repeated at every protest, every march, every petition carried to Jaipur, only to be met with nods, committees, and delays. The patience has worn thin. Justice cannot remain on paper anymore—it must live in practice.

• 6.5% sub-quota for southern tribes: In Banswara, Dungarpur, and Sirohi, Bhils and Garasias say this is not charity. This is fairness within fairness, equity inside equity. The law, through the Davinder Singh ruling, already permits sub-classification. But politics hesitates, bargaining with lives as if dignity were negotiable. For a Bhil youth who clears an exam but loses the seat to a better-placed Meena candidate, the difference between 6.5% and nothing is the difference between hope and despair.
• Real enforcement of FRA and PESA: Gram Sabha consent must not be reduced to a box-ticking ritual. It must mean real power. No bulldozer should move until the people agree. No contract should be signed without their voice. For tribals, the Gram Sabha is not a formality—it is democracy in its most raw and authentic form.
• Transparent TSP budgets: Every rupee announced must travel the full distance to the last anganwadi, to the last school in the remotest hamlet. Too often, funds vanish into files, eaten up by middlemen. For Rekha in Sirohi, whose son died of malnutrition, the ₹1,500 crore meant nothing. Justice will mean that not a single rupee gets “lost in transit.”
• Cultural corridors at Mangarh: The hill where Bhils were massacred in 1913 should not only be a monument of mourning. It should be a living space where history fuels livelihood, where tribal artisans, musicians, and healers keep their culture alive and earn from it. And it should be run by tribals themselves, not handed over to contractors who see only profit, not memory.
• Scholarships and coaching for youth: Delayed stipends are more than inconvenient—they break dreams. A Bhil child who has walked barefoot to a government school deserves the same shot at college as a child in Jaipur’s elite institutions. Justice means no excuses, no delays—opportunity must reach them on time.
• A watchdog for reservation fraud: Fake caste certificates and misuse of quotas push the weakest even further down. Tribals already fighting to be seen cannot afford to be cheated out of their meagre share. A strict, independent body is the only way to protect the rights of those who are most vulnerable.

This list is not radical. It is not excessive. It is the bare minimum democracy owes its first citizens—the ones who tilled its soil, guarded its forests, and paid the highest price for its progress.

“A democracy that cannot deliver justice to its first citizens is not a democracy at all.”

Justice is not a favour. It is overdue. And until it arrives, Rajasthan’s streets will keep echoing with the footsteps of those who refuse to disappear.

Conclusion: We Are Not Shadows, We Are the Land

The march in Banswara is not simply a protest; it is Rajasthan’s conscience, moving in bare feet over hot asphalt. The flags raised, the placards scrawled in hurried chalk, the mothers with children tied to their backs, the elderly Bhil woman clutching her rejected land file—these are not images of despair. They are images of resilience. Proof that Rajasthan’s tribals refuse to vanish into the margins where the state has tried to push them.

How can Rajasthan boast of progress when its own custodians walk miles to reach schools that have no teachers, when their forests are stripped bare by mining trucks, when their songs and festivals are reduced to decorative lines in a tourist brochure? What kind of progress is it when the very people who first cared for this land are left without dignity, without food, without recognition?

“When land is lost, memory is stolen. When voices are ignored, democracy is betrayed.”

The tribals of Rajasthan are not pleading for sympathy. They are demanding what was always theirs—land that carries their ancestors’ footsteps, dignity denied to them in offices and courts, representation in spaces where their fate is decided, and respect for the cultures that have kept Rajasthan alive. They will not remain shadows in the background of the state’s story. They are its heartbeat, its roots, its soil.

And this is the warning in their voices: if justice is delayed, their chants will only grow louder. If dignity is denied, their rage will burn brighter. Each march, each hunger strike, each sit-in is not a plea but a declaration—we are here, and we will not be erased.

In the end, one truth towers above every statistic, every promise, every speech: without its tribals, Rajasthan has no future.

Because they are not guests in this land. They are the land.

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