NOTES AND COMMUNICATIONS 59
Therefore, the only other function such a conference could have, considering its advice is neither mandatory nor has it any independent channels of popularising its recommendations, is to pull the wool over peoples eyes and to satisfy the intellectuals whose frustration in attempting to pursue their study recently took sharp expression in the suicide of Dr Shah of the IARI. Neither of these goals are worthy of intellectual effort or in the name of science. The scientist must take full political responsibility for his action and must be fully aware of the political implications of his participation in such a programme. The question to ask is whether a Government that has impoverished the poor and enriched the rich, through taxation and its failure to control prices, is able to implement a policy that favours the underdog. Would the same interests that can shake the resolve of the Congress reformers over the issue of land ceilings baulk at the prize of tribal lands, as reported in Andhra, or dislodge them once they have taken them over ? No, it is more likely that a new tribal policy will only act as a palliative and the committed scholar will be a mere tool for creating an ideology. This was the role the anthropologist played under his colonial master, and this is what the Congress Government is seeking to revive.
Another effect of this uncritical attitude of the apparently autonomous5 bodies like the ICSSR and HAS collaborating with Government agencies is that the prejudices of the governing classes creep in as scientific facts. One has only to look at the ICSSR policy statement in order to see this. Once the decision has been made to abandon a thorough scientific study of the tribes ("Salvage anthropology...will not require a major share of our research endeavour'5 p. 1) in favour of an attempt to identify 'problem areas', the major hurdle is reached '' whose problems and from whose perspective ?
There are two clear perspectives here, one of the bourgeoisie and the landlords (who see nothing wrong in putting a number of Santhals into a hut and setting it alight, as happened recently in Bihar) and the other of the tribes and the masses who are being moulded in the outdated image of their rulers, their most valuable institutions, collective ownership and co-operation being undermined by the forces of private profit and individual ownership ; and this in an age when even the Indian Government has to maintain the fiction of "socialism' to stay in power.
The ICSSR has made its choice in favour of the Government and the administration and has even given its scientific endeavour a time-limit ("as much of this reasarch is intended to inform and support policy-making, it is essential that the results of the major projects promoted by the Council become available within a reasonably short time, say two years", p. 3) ; and the results of such an identification are bizarre.
Among the emergent problems, for example, we are told that "in many tribal zones the situation is very sensitive ; some have been vulnerable to appeals of separatism and have adopted the idiom of violence in their politics5' (p. 2, italics ours). The facts, even if we restrict our-