In September, I went to India worried about how I could possibly speak to a daunting audience of 15,000 aboriginals. I left India wondering just who speaks for them.
Indigenous peoples — dwelling in Thailand, Laos, the Philippines, Vietnam, China and even Japan — remain Asia's most marginalized group. India has the largest number of what it calls adivasi, already topping 84 million in the 2001 census (which was the last one — figures from the present 2011 census are not yet available). Inhabiting a place beneath even India's low-caste hordes, exposed to disease, mostly illiterate and barely subsisting, adivasi make headlines when they join the Naxalites, a shadowy Maoist army that has recruited up to a quarter of the forest populace to their slow-motion warfare. Do-gooding NGOs have hardly changed conditions. More Read
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