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A RECENTLY proposed bill around ‘anti-social’ behaviour in Punjab has received extensive scrutiny both within opposition political circles and media outlets. An excellent primer by lawyer Ali Javed Darugar on the online pages of this newspaper identifies a range of fundamental rights violations within the legislation and traces its core ethos to various colonial statutes, such as the Criminal Tribes Act and the Habitual Offenders Act from the late 19th and early 20th century respectively.
While much has already been said, it’s worth remembering that the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was essential to the type of social engineering experiment colonial bureaucrats were undertaking in Punjab. Working towards the objective of irrigating and settling the lands between Punjab’s western rivers (what we call ‘bar’ in the vernacular), colonial administrators ran into the problem of dealing with pastoral populations that actually did inhabit this supposed ‘crown wasteland’.
Displacement of pastoral communities thus became central to the bureaucratic management of land in Punjab, with many communities being consequently classified as criminal tribes to facilitate punitive action against them. This was done in order to aid the mass societal transition from pastoral life to settled agrarian life around cash crop farming, as is well documented by a number of writers, notably Neeladri Bhattacharya and Bilal Zahoor.
