Adivasi tribes were never conquered and now wage armed resistance against the Indian state

Evidence

Ambedkar’s opinions about Adivasis betrayed a lack of information and understanding. First of all, Hindu evangelists like the Hindu Mahasabha had been working to ‘assimilate’ the Adivasis since the 1920s (just like they were Balmiki-ising castes that were forced into cleaning and scavenging work). Tribes like the Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds did not wish to be ‘civilised’ or ‘assimilated’. They had rebelled time and again against the British as well as against zamindars and Bania moneylenders, and had fought fiercely to protect their land, culture and heritage. Thousands had been killed in these uprisings, but unlike the rest of India, they were never conquered. They still have not been. Today, they are the armed, militant end of a spectrum of struggles. They are waging nothing short of a civil war against the Indian state which has signed over Adivasi homelands to infrastructure and mining corporations. They are the backbone of the decades-long struggle against big dams in the Narmada Valley. They make up the ranks of the People’s Liberation Guerilla Army of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that is fighting tens of thousands of paramilitary forces that have been deployed by the government in the forests of Central India. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 365

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in caste annihilation—Adivasis remain a separate axis of subordination that Ambedkar’s framework failed to incorporate.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Ambedkar’s Adivasi blind spot interact with the larger caste-annihilation agenda he otherwise built?