“Bangladesh Has No Indigenous People”

 In 2011, the Bangladesh government enacted the “Small Ethnic Group Cultural Institute Law”, an act that would classify the 40-45 non-Bengali ethnic tribes as “ethnic minorities”. On the eve of enactment, the contemporary Foreign Minister, Dipu Moni, said “Bangladesh does not have any indigenous population”; a similar claim had been made by the Bangladeshi delegate to the 9th UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues a year before. In 2012, an internal official memo, circulated in the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development, stated “steps should be taken to publicize/broadcast in the print and electronic media that there are no Indigenous people in Bangladesh”.

These statements are not isolated remarks made by ultranationalist or poorly informed bureaucrats, but rather a reflection of the government’s attitude towards “ethnic minorities” since the inception of Bangladesh in 1971. In 1972, Bangladesh ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention 107 on Indigenous and Tribal Populations, which guarantees the protection of minority rights through “progressive integration”, but it has not yet ratified ILO’s Convention 169, created in 1991 in response to the criticism that Convention 107 was assimilationist. Convention 169 adopted the term “self-determination” and remains the only binding instrument dedicated to the rights of Indigenous peoples. Bangladesh’s refusal to ratify Convention 169 continues a legacy of tribal populations being viewed as “alien others” in the Bengali-Muslim majority state. From constitutional amendments to economic development policy, a two decades long civil war, and continued oppression, the history of the indigenous people in Bangladesh is one of their right to self-determination being denied. 

The fate of any population in the Indian subcontinent can be traced back to 200 years of British colonial policy. But to solely lay the blame on the British and argue that nascent post-colonial states have inherited land conflicts between “ethnic minorities” and majority populations, as the Center for Development Research, Bangladesh (CDRB) has done in their monograph The Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh: The Untold Story (1992), overlooks the policy decisions the subsequent governments of these states have enacted to prevent indigenous “self-determination”. The Adibashis (indigents) of Bangladesh have not just lost their lands as minorities in successive colonial administrations, but their very way of life. Broken promises by governments, forced assimilations, and state repression threaten their very existence, slowly driving them towards extinction.