India's small Himalayan tribe, forgotten by the world's largest democracy | Policy

Totopara, India— Jiten Toto has lived longer than independent India; His 80 years were spent in the small village of Totopara, nestled in the green foothills of the Himalayas, in the state of West Bengal, in eastern India.

He walks with a bamboo pole to his farmland, the size of a football field, where he grows millet, tomatoes and eggplants in neat rows. He feeds his family and generates income from sales to visiting merchants who take the product to other markets.

Jiten has seen dozens of harvests and 17 national elections pass. Now, as India prepares for its 18th general election, there is little hope that anything will change in a small corner of the country whose sole residents feel they have long been forgotten by the world's largest democracy.

Totopara is named after the Toto tribe to which Jiten belongs. One of the smallest tribes in the world, the total population of Toto is estimated at about 1,670 people. Almost 75 percent of them have the right to vote. The Indo-Bhutanese community lives almost exclusively in Totopara, a town with narrow streets surrounded by hills, which is located just 2 kilometers (1.2 mi) from India's border with Bhutan.

When India votes between March and May, election officials will come – as they have in previous elections – to set up a camp where villagers can cast their votes on electronic machines. But despite that exercise in democracy, many Totos say their small numbers and remote geography mean politicians have repeatedly ignored their concerns.

“Not much has been done for our development. We still face bad roads and pathetic health services,” says Jiten. “No political leader has come here after the elections to assess our situation.”

There is also a more recent tension that is enveloping Totopara and bothering the Totos: migration from Bhutan has now made them a minority in the village, stoking concerns that the small community could be driven from their own traditional home.

Demographic changes

The exact history of when and why the Totos settled in Totopara is unclear, says Samar Kumar Biswas, professor of anthropology at the University of North Bengal.

“But they may have moved here from Bhutan to avoid confrontation with the powerful and hostile Bhutia in the mid-18th century,” he says. The Butia are the majority community in neighboring Bhutan.

What is known is that until 1939 the Totos were the only inhabitants of the town. Then, in the 1940s, a dozen Nepalese families came from Bhutan and settled there, Biswas says. “After that, many non-Toto families came and settled permanently in Totopara village,” he adds.

In 1986, and then again in the early 1990s, the Bhutanese government expelled many ethnic Nepalese communities: one-sixth of the Himalayan kingdom's population had to flee.

“Some of those Nepali families settled in Totopara to survive,” says Biswas.

Today, Totapara has a population of about 5,000 people, of which only a third are Totos. Nepalese communities make up much of the rest of the village's population, followed by a small number of residents from other parts of West Bengal and the neighboring state of Bihar.

This has affected the land properties available to the Totos. Until 1969, all 1,996.96 acres (808 hectares) of the village belonged to the community, according to land records, says Riwaj Rai, a researcher whose work has focused on the Toto tribe. The land was the collective property of the community.

Then in 1969, the government introduced private land ownership and declared more than 650 hectares (1,600 acres) open for others to settle and claim. The rest, about 17 percent of the village's land, was reserved by the government for the Totos. But community members say they don't even control that land; In fact, they say, they don't even know the exact areas of the village that legally belong to them.

“We don't have any problem with non-Totos,” says Bakul Toto, secretary of Toto Kalyan Samity, a community group fighting for their rights. “But we want to recover our portion of land that was granted to us in 1969.

“The state government carried out a land survey after our persistent requests in 2022, which gave us hope of getting our properties back. But the result of the survey is yet to be made public, even after two years.”

This, he says, raised doubts in the minds of the Totos about the seriousness of the state government – ​​led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress – in addressing their concerns.

Prakash Newar, who hails from a Nepalese community, says it would be a mistake to label non-Totos as outsiders.

“We have lived here for generations after our ancestors settled here,” he says. “We have lived amicably with Totos.” The Nepalese, he says, would be willing to vacate land that courts decide belongs to Totos, “after all legal options have been exhausted.”

Senior government officials did not respond to repeated calls and text messages from Al Jazeera.

We need doctors, not elephants.

But land and tensions between communities are not the only challenges facing Totopara.

The road from the town to Madarihat, the nearest city 21 kilometers (13 miles) away, is riddled with potholes and crosses riverbeds that flood during the monsoon, when Totopara is cut off from the rest of India.

“Sometimes it takes two to three days for the water to recede and (people) to resume their journey. We have been demanding construction of bridges for a long time, but nothing has been done for us and we continue to suffer,” says Ashok Toto, 54, a resident of the village.

He claims that the village's increasing population has also led to deforestation, leading to an increase in human-animal conflicts over the years.

“Earlier, elephants rarely came to the village, but now they come here almost every day in search of food and attack anyone who crosses their path,” he says. “Massive deforestation has not only led to a substantial loss of flora and fauna, but also the drying up of natural streams on which we depended for drinking water. “The water crisis is now a major issue here.”

The town's solitary primary health center has been without a doctor since July 2023: it is run by three other staff members and a pharmacist.

“Serious cases are referred to distant hospitals, about 70-80 kilometers away,” says Probin Toto, 36. During the monsoon, with the road flooded, this is sometimes impossible. “We immediately need a doctor here, but the government has not yet paid attention to our demands.”

The next generation in crisis

The village's only secondary school, the government-run Dhanapati Toto Memorial Secondary School, has only eight teachers when it is entitled to 20. Three years ago, it had 18 teachers, but a government initiative that allowed teachers to transfer to schools nearest public. to their homes caused an exodus. The government has also not hired new secondary teachers since 2011.

The result? An increase in dropouts. The school, which just three years ago had 350 students, now has 128 students.

“Most subjects do not have specialized teachers,” says Annapurna Chakraborty, a teacher. That's why parents “took their children out of school and sent them to distant schools or even to work because of poverty,” she adds.

Bharat Toto, 25, has a postgraduate degree in mathematics and recently began teaching students and dropouts in the village to encourage them to return to school: “We don't want freebies from the government, but we need a solid education that acts as a weapon to fight for our rights,” he says.

The lack of jobs also hurts Totos' prospects, community members say. Most households have tall areca trees in their compounds and sell betel nuts to traders to earn a living.

“Betel nuts have saved us from hunger because there is no work for us,” says Dhananjay Toto, 34, who has a postgraduate degree but works as a farm laborer. “He had applied for the job of a librarian in the government, but I didn't get it.”

Apart from the Trinamool Congress that rules the state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party is the other major political force in West Bengal.

The Totos say they have not decided who they will vote for in the next election:

Not that it matters, Jiten says, as he trudges back home, as dusk falls over Totopara.

“We are part of the largest democracy in the world,” but “our handful of votes hardly matter to any political party,” he says.

“I doubt most of them know we exist here.”