The migrating villager whom we refuse to see
Hatingaram’s life is less “here”, more “there”. Here — his village. There — in the open, across the country, under the sky.
The ‘Raika’ — a semi-nomadic pastoralist from Rajasthan — are always on the move, lock, stock and barrel. Literally. In his home state, he is a near-absent citizen; in Madhya Pradesh, a seasonal visitor; in Maharashtra, an unacknowledged guest camping on open fields with sheep herds, camels, guard-dogs, and his immediate and extended family. For the most part of a year, he’s a wandering soul.
Call him a non-resident villager, an ever-migrating Indian who the census finds difficult to enumerate. At least the 2011 census could not. We don’t know if he’ll be counted in 2021 when the next census is done. He and his ilk, various estimates say, number at about a hundred million and are categorized differently in different states — Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Tribes, or Vimukt-Jati/ Nomadic Tribes.
In Modi-Shah’s New India, what’ll he be? An illegal immigrant? Or an un-enumerated someone without rights?
