New Delhi: On Monday, September 7, in the heart of the capital, a thousand Adivasis from 16 states marched from Bhagat Singh Shaheed park through Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, their enthusiasm and slogans drawing curious crowds. Sonamuni Tudu, a young participant from West Bengal, chanted, ‘Jal, jangal kiska hai – humara hai, humara hai”.Another participant chanted, “Humare purwaj British ke khilaf lade the – RSS! Tumhare purwaj jhuke the” (Our ancestors fought the British – RSS, your ancestors, bowed before them). And the demonstrators cheered!The march, led by chairperson of Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch Jitendra Choudhary and National Convenor Pulin Baskey was the culmination of a two day event which brought the voices of Adivasi resistance on a united platform.The Adivasi Adhikar Sangharsh Sammelan held in New Delhi on September 6 at Mavlankar Hall, Constitution Club, was overflowing with the spirit of Birsa Munda, who was on its walls and in the songs that rang through the day. Over 1,000 delegates from 16 states had come to the sammelan, the national convention organised by the Adivasi Adhikar Rashtriya Manch.The convention was also attended by leaders and representatives of struggles that have made the news for resisting dispossession: Hasdeo Arand in Chhattisgarh, Ken-Betwa in Madhya Pradesh, the fight against eviction from Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in Karnataka and the movements against Polavaram Project in Andhra Pradesh.Leaders and representatives of other organisations that have been at the forefront of struggles among Adivasis such as the All India Kisan Sabha, Bharat Jan Andolan, All India Agricultural Workers Union, All India Democratic Women’s Association, the Sahariya Vikas Manch, the Campaign for Survival and Dignity, the Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan and the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan also participated in the convention.With office bearers of the Manch on the stage, Jitendra Choudhary, Pulin Baskey, Dulichand, Debolina Hembram, Brinda Karat, Vinod Nakole and others, the convention worked through four sessions on forest rights, employment, education and identity and belief.The convention was inaugurated by former Supreme Court Judge Justice Madan Lokur who highlighted the poor implementation of laws and constitutional provisions such as the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, FRA and PESA to protect Adivasi rights on land, forests and natural resources. He pointed to the persistence of bypassing the Gram Sabha and filing of petty cases against Adivasis even after twenty years of the Forest Rights Act.Also read: The Forest Rights Act Can Improve Pastoralists’ Lives, But it Needs to Be Implemented ProperlyHe said that “employment opportunities that the poor and tribal people had are slowly diminishing along with their rights.” In this context, he also pointed to the cases of teenage Adivasi girls who work under abysmal conditions as domestic workers in Delhi and other cities.Four resolutions were placed in the convention and about 50-60 speakers responded with their endorsement, suggestions and experiences.Nearly 60% Adivasis live outside Fifth and Sixth Schedule protectionThe resolution placed by Smita Gupta, representing the Centre for Adivasi Research and Development (CARD) in the session on FRA mentioned that the Fifth Schedule and PESA apply only in the notified Scheduled Areas of ten states, which means, by the estimate placed before the convention, that around 59% of India’s Scheduled Tribes live outside Article 244’s protections altogether.The norms guiding which areas qualify still date to a commission of 1961 and no government has extended the boundaries since.Where PESA does apply, several states took so long to frame rules that the law lay inert for years. Odisha has still not notified them and Jharkhand did so only in January. Most states that did frame rules defined the village as the revenue village rather than the habitation the Act envisages, and treated the gram sabha’s mandatory consultation as a formality.Delegates from 16 states marched in New Delhi on September 7, 2026, as part of the Adivasi Adhikar Sangharsh Sammelan from Bhagat Singh Shaheed park through Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg.“The zilla panchayat and state governments keep overriding the decisions of gram sabhas against the provisions of the PESA Act,” Amol Waghmare, an activist from Maharashtra told the convention. “This is condemned in unequivocal terms.”PESA also stops at the municipal boundary, so turning a rural Scheduled Area into a municipality extinguishes its protections at a stroke. A Bill to close that gap was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in July 2001, but is still pending.The Forest Rights Act shows a second method, which is to capture the process from within. The Act acknowledged historical injustice and put the gram sabha, not the forest department, at the centre of recognising rights. By 2026, on the tribal affairs ministry’s own figures, 47% of claims had been approved and a third formally rejected, including nearly 48,000 community claims.Presenting the convention’s paper on forest rights, Smita Gupta set out how those rejections are produced. She described how communities are asked for written land records and satellite maps that no provision of the FRA requires, how rejections are issued without the written reasons that it does require and how titles are granted for less land than the claimant is entitled to.Though the nodal ministry is Tribal Affairs, the Forest Department has run the process in most states, and Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have added task forces that review pending claims outside the statutory committees entirely. A delegate from Madhya Pradesh described what this looks like at the far end, when eviction drives arrive: “our standing crops are destroyed by grazing animals let loose on the fields and by spraying herbicides indiscriminately”.And to round out the captured process, the exits have been widened. The Van Sanrakshan Adhiniyam of 2023 narrowed the legal definition of forest and lifted projects dealing with security, linear infrastructure and eco-tourism out of the standard clearance regime, and with it out of the reach of gram sabha consent. Environmental impact assessment rules were rewritten to exempt more projects from public hearings.The Samatha judgment of 1997, which barred the transfer of land in Scheduled Areas to private companies for mining, is now routinely bypassed through mine developer contracts and joint ventures routed via state public sector companies.Adivasi mass displacementDelegate after delegate returned to the issue of gram sabha consent and to how easily it is fabricated. “Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo forest case and the cutting of four lakh trees there shows how the PESA Act was blatantly violated for the gain of Adani, manipulating gram sabha numbers,” leaders Bal Singh and Ram Lal Kariyam said.From Telangana came an account that drew the loudest applause of the morning: “The Kumram Bheem Conservation Reserve announced in Telangana is going to evict 339 tribal villages from the Asifabad and Singur forest divisions. The GO [government order] surrounding it blatantly lies about conducting gram sabhas that took permission of the people. Our struggle has suspended this project for now.”Umesh, a researcher from CARD, presented a survey conducted in a part of the Raj Mahal project in Santhal Parganas which showed the connivance of the administration and the company in manufacturing false gram sabha minutes of meetings in the most deprived villages of the PVTG communities of pahadias, which never ever took place.How many people such projects have displaced is a question the state has decided not to answer. In July 2025 the government told parliament that data on displaced and project-affected families are not centrally maintained.The last serious reckoning came from the Xaxa Committee in 2014, which found that 85.4 lakh Adivasis had been displaced by development projects between 1951 and 1990, roughly 41% of all those displaced, from a community that is 8.6% of the population. Nothing comparable has been attempted since. Meanwhile, the District Mineral Funds, created to compensate the affected, have collected over Rs 1.5 lakh crore, and gram sabhas have no role in deciding where a rupee of it goes.Also read: Nooses Around Necks, Laying On Pyres: Villagers Are Protesting in Unusual Ways in Madhya Pradesh. Here’s WhyConservation removes people through the same old tired route – by fencing forests. Project Tiger has displaced or earmarked for relocation an estimated 5.5 lakh people since 1973, and the pace has changed sharply of late. 2.9 lakh across just six reserves notified after 2021, against 2.54 lakh across fifty reserves in the programme’s first five decades. Both the FRA and the Wildlife Protection Act require settled rights and informed consent before anyone is moved.Examples of Similipal, Kanha, Nagarhole and Kaziranga show how that consent is actually obtained – through electricity cut off, home repairs banned, grazing prohibted and false trespass cases filed – until the forms are signed. Delegate Shibu from the sustained struggle at Nagarhole gave details of their plight and also the determination of their struggle that they will remain in their “forest motherland”.Unemployment is widespread, but vacancies are fewThe afternoon session on employment, with the convention’s paper presented by Duli Chand, traced how the reservation guarantee is being defeated by subtraction at both ends. The pool of jobs has shrunk, from about 2 crore in government employment in the 1990s to 1.7 crore by 2012, with the decline continuing since then. Within what remains, posts go unfilled.Delegates from 16 states marched in New Delhi on September 7, 2026, as part of the Adivasi Adhikar Sangharsh Sammelan from Bhagat Singh Shaheed park through Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg.Central vacancies nearly doubled between 2014 and 2024, and in nine ministries alone, over 12,000 posts reserved for Scheduled Tribes were lying vacant in 2023. The result is visible at every level. ST representation among central government employees fell from 8.55% in 2014 to 7.33% by 2022, and of the 87 secretaries to the Government of India, four are from the SC or ST categories.As M.L. Kishore, a leader from Kerala’s Scheduled Tribe community put it from the floor, the Scheduled Tribe ratio in public sector jobs is nowhere near being met. The record is also getting harder to inspect, since the Union government has stopped publishing comprehensive employment reviews and now details reservations in only a fraction of its posts. And MGNREGA, the one statutory guarantee that reached Adivasi households directly, is on its way out with the coming of VB-G RAM G.Employment provided to Adivasis under it fell by 13% in its final year before being replaced by a scheme that pushes the cost onto the states.Significant drop in schools in tribal areas, miserly servicesThe education session, with the convention paper presented by Ram Narain Kuraria, addressed a right made fundamental by a constitutional amendment in 2002 and now coexisting with the first absolute decline in the number of schools since Independence. More than 79,000 schools have closed since 2018-19, almost all of them government schools, under a merger policy pursued in the name of efficiency.Schools run by Tribal Welfare Departments have fallen from about 70,000 to under 40,000. Of the more than 700 flagship Eklavya schools promised, 511 function. “Dropouts in tribal area schools have increased. Seven hundred schools have been closed in our region because of budget cuts, and we don’t have the money to send children to private schools. Higher education is a far reality,” said Sachin, a tribal youth activist from Telangana.Nisha Sable, a hunger striker among the Maharashtra Gen Z hostel protesters and SFI joint secretary in Maharashtra, spoke for the institutions that survive. “A student died due to neglect, eating from the central kitchen located several kilometres away. The water quality in the ashram school is unhygienic. Students and parents should come out on the streets demanding justice.”The convention’s paper recorded the same conditions, where two or three girls are assigned to a bed, sick rooms are permanently shut, and [where there have been] some 680 deaths of Adivasi students in Maharashtra’s hostels alone.’ Nisha had been on hunger strike for 17 days. She was greeted with loud applause and cheers.Tribal identity and languages challenged like never beforeThe final session, on identity and belief, with the convention’s paper presented by Suknath Lohra from Jharkhand, gathered what the earlier sessions had left implicit. Alongside the taking of land and the retreat of the state runs a contest over who Adivasis are, and it begins with recognition itself. Tamil Nadu’s assembly has unanimously recommended ST status for communities the Union government still refuses; Assam’s tea tribes remain outside the list for reasons that are political rather than anthropological.The criteria in use descend from a committee of 1965, whose tests of primitive traits, isolation and shyness of contact would, applied honestly today, strip most Adivasis of their status for the offence of having roads. Holding on to recognition has meanwhile become a form of harassment.Delegates from 16 states marched in New Delhi on September 7, 2026, as part of the Adivasi Adhikar Sangharsh Sammelan from Bhagat Singh Shaheed park through Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg.“Since 2014, tribal rights have been violated like never before. In Madhya Pradesh, fifty years of records are demanded from those seeking scheduled tribe certificates,” said Tej Kumar Tigga, a tribal leader from Bhopal, before compressing the entire forest story into a pun: “PESA kanoon is just ‘paisa kanoon’ now, favouring private companies over our people.”Recognition is also being weaponised through the demand to delist. The Janjati Suraksha Manch, led by known BJP and RSS figures, campaigns to strike converted Adivasis off the ST lists, even as Sangh affiliates elsewhere encourage non-tribal communities to agitate for inclusion.“The delisting of Adivasis in the name of conversion to other religions is a tactic by the BJP to cut them off from reservation,” said Prem Pargi, a tribal activist from Rajasthan. The campaign has crossed into violence, including the desecration of graves and the exhumation of Christian Adivasi bodies, and it works in tandem with the law.Anti-conversion statutes in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat place the burden of proof on the accused, while Rajasthan’s exempts return to what it calls the “ancient religion”, meaning a Hindu identity.Also read: ‘Yet Another Conspiracy’: Jharkhand Adivasi Leaders Call for Boycott of RSS-Linked Tribal Conclave in DelhiLanguage is the last front of this culture grab. Article 350A promises primary schooling in the mother tongue, yet of hundreds of Adivasi languages, only Santhali and Bodo sit in the Eighth Schedule. Gondi, Bhili and Kok Borok, the last spoken by nearly a third of Tripura, are neither recognised nor funded nor taught.“Each word in tribal dialects has a great history of tribal existence hidden behind it. It has great potential to liberate our people,” Waghmare said, adding, “The government’s move toward erasure of our languages and imposition of Hindi is anti-Adivasi at its core.”The erasure has an administrative form. Recruitment to the Eklavya schools, once handled by states under local reservation norms, was centralised with Hindi proficiency made mandatory nationwide, and the first centralised batch sent to schools across South India could not speak the state language, let alone a tribal one.Inside those schools, cultural programming increasingly features the Ramayana and the Mahabharata rather than Adivasi histories. “We have been opposing the forced worship of Hindu deities at the Eklavya schools,” Sachin said. “It is opposed to tribal identity and indoctrinates our children with Hindutva and hatred towards other religions.”Read together, the four resolutions adopted at Mavlankar Hall are less a charter of new demands than an insistence that existing law be obeyed. The demands reflect the reality of the assault on the constitutional and legal rights of Adivasis by the current regime.A time-bound review of rejected forest claims, PESA rules that mean what the Act says, a municipal extension law of the PESA, enforcement of Samatha, the publication of employment data, the filling of reserved posts: nearly every item asks the state to do what Parliament or the Constitution already promised. And equally importantly, the Convention demanded a separate column in the ongoing census to give Adivasis the opportunity to register their own faith.Closing the convention, Brinda Karat in a rousing speech said that the discussions and the resolutions presented clearly show that today there is an undeclared war against Adivasis to impose Hindutva codes and Corporate interests under the Modi-RSS regime. She said when Adivasis face displacement along with the land being lost, the fundamental sense of community, identity, culture and belief is lost. Karat said 2.15 lakh hectares of forest land had been diverted to corporates – private companies – in the past ten years.“There is company raj in all mining areas today. At the same time, resistance is strong. Every issue is interlinked as is our struggle our resistance. Our answer to the assault on our very lives is our history of ulgulan, of resistance, of unity,” Karat said.The speech was followed by a formal adoption of the four resolutions. The hall did not empty when the resolutions had been passed. Participants were on their feet, raising slogans of solidarity and struggle. The delegates danced, hand in hand, to their own beat.The Manch plans to meet the relevant authorities to present the findings of the convention and their demands.Ambika Subash is a political economist and doctoral researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University.