How Yogi’s inclusive vision ended seven decades of neglect for vantangiya, musahar, and displaced families | Opinion

According to the 2011 Census, Uttar Pradesh was home to 257,135 Musahar citizens, representing 0.62% of the state’s Scheduled Caste population, concentrated in eastern districts, among them Jaunpur (37,229), Kushinagar (34,843), Ghazipur (22,123), Chandauli (21,222) and Bhadohi (Sant Ravidas Nagar, 15,264). 

By Sunny Singh

Benjamin Disraeli wrote that “justice is truth in action”. From the perspective of social justice, this statement serves as a sacred canon. For any government claiming to be just, these words stand as a litmus test, for while a government may well know who suffers and why, if it fails to act, it has failed the test of social justice. In “The Republic”, Plato uses “dikaiosyne” for a well-ordered society in which every constituent part, no matter how small, receives what is rightfully its own.

In Uttar Pradesh, political rhetoric about the poor had been abundant for decades, but public life has witnessed this truth in action only since 2017. For nearly seven decades, social justice functioned as a convenient slogan during election season, frequently turning into a mechanism for building family dynasties and dividing voters into competing caste blocs. In this fractured system, an actual well-ordered society remained out of reach, and the communities at the very bottom stayed exactly where they were. Part of the reason was a lack of political intent, but a significant part was simpler: the state chose not to see them. Without visibility, justice is impossible. As philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, citizenship is the “right to have rights,” a principle that directly underpins social justice. No family can claim a home, a legal land title, or food security until government records admit they exist. For seventy long years, the state denied even this basic recognition to several marginalized communities in Uttar Pradesh.

During the colonial era, British foresters introduced the Burmese Taungya afforestation method to raise Sal forests, drafting landless, marginalized labourers into what became the Vantangiya community. Gradually, their settlements spread across Gorakhpur, Maharajganj, Gonda, Balrampur, and Bahraich. For generations, these families nurtured and guarded the forests, yet remained legally invisible, unable to prove their residence or caste, which denied them foundational civil identity and basic banking services. Early administrative surveys show that residents belong predominantly to Other Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes, particularly the Nishad community. In hamlets like Jungle Tinkonia No. 3, which has 461 families, the residents’ small, scattered numbers left them electorally insignificant, causing successive governments to leave them completely outside the bounds of state recognition.

That isolation ended when Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath overhauled state governance, replacing discretionary political favours with universal welfare coverage. As a Member of Parliament, he had supported Vantangiya land rights and provided mobile medical services for forest hamlets. After taking office in 2017, his government effectively converted forest settlements into official revenue villages. Five Gorakhpur settlements, including Jungle Tinkonia No. 3, received revenue-village status in October 2017. Eighteen further settlements were declared revenue villages on 1 January 2018, and the government later spoke of a second phase that would raise the total. Upon the inclusion of a settlement on the official revenue map, formal rights follow. These include legal land ownership titles (pattas), solid pucca housing under the CM Awas Yojana and PM Awas Yojana, grid electricity under Saubhagya, piped tap water, Ayushman Bharat health coverage, Antyodaya ration cards, and voting rights.

The government applied this same direct approach to the Musahar community. According to the 2011 Census, Uttar Pradesh was home to 257,135 Musahar citizens, representing 0.62% of the state’s Scheduled Caste population, concentrated in eastern districts, among them Jaunpur (37,229), Kushinagar (34,843), Ghazipur (22,123), Chandauli (21,222) and Bhadohi (Sant Ravidas Nagar, 15,264). British officers had classified them under harsh colonial laws, and post-Independence politics ignored them because a thinly spread population held no weight in traditional vote-bank calculus. Under the Yogi administration’s direct delivery model, the test is straightforward: does this household have a pucca roof, a toilet, power, health coverage, and ration support? Under this non-discriminatory approach, the administration has extended welfare coverage to once-neglected Musahar hamlets by implementing universal, need-based distribution instead of political patronage.

For nomadic and semi-nomadic (Ghumantu) communities like the Nat, Kanjar, Sapera, Bawariya, Sansi, Banjara, Gadia Lohar, Madari, Kalbelia, Bedia, Kuchbandiya, and Habura, life without a permanent address meant total civil non-existence. Lacking proof of residence, these families could not obtain foundational identity cards or claim public welfare. The 2018 Idate Commission report showed that 28 denotified and nomadic groups in Uttar Pradesh appeared on no official SC, ST, or OBC list, while the state administration has recognised the Sapera community, for caste-certificate purposes, in only three of 75 districts – Mathura, Saharanpur and Allahabad – on the basis of a pre-Independence population estimate. The Yogi government addressed this historic absence of identity credentials by issuing formal identity documents, enrolling nomadic children through targeted drives under School Chalo Abhiyan, constructing permanent housing under CM Awas Yojana, and constituting a dedicated Development Board for Vimukt Jati and Nomadic Tribes.

For five decades, the plight of persecuted religious minorities, including Bengali Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Christian refugees displaced by the 1960s and 1970-71 East Pakistan genocide, stood as a clear example of the original sin of selective secularism. While post-Independence political elites actively built voting coalitions elsewhere, they deliberately condemned persecuted religious minorities to administrative invisibility. The Yogi Adityanath administration diligently dismantled this decades-old betrayal. Moving beyond decades of political apathy, the Uttar Pradesh government authorized full legal ownership rights for eligible refugee families, beginning with the formal rehabilitation of 63 families in Kanpur Dehat, each allotted two acres of agricultural land and a 200-square-yard residential plot, and extending legal land ownership (Bhumidari rights) to about 2,500 displaced families in Pilibhit and neighbouring districts. Alongside permanent housing under Chief Minister Awas Yojana and complete agricultural assistance, the state finally corrected a historic moral failure, replacing ideological neglect with constitutional duty.

Ongoing efforts from the government across these newly notified hamlets show that this governance model can deliver structural justice. The state acknowledged these long-ignored citizens, recognised their settlements, issued their papers, and delivered formal entitlements alongside civic dignity. For seven decades, previous governments abandoned the Vantangiya, the Musahar, the nomadic tribes, and displaced refugees in administrative limbo simply because their small, scattered numbers held no weight in electoral calculations. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath acted where others only promised. By replacing caste-based vote-bank arithmetic with universal welfarism, Yogi Adityanath fulfilled Plato’s vision of dikaiosyne, giving the most neglected citizens what was always rightfully theirs. In doing so, he has redefined social justice from a political slogan into truth in action, emerging as a genuine messiah for the poor and the definitive vanguard of social justice in modern India.

(Sunny Singh is a research scholar at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, and a research associate at the Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, New Delhi. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Zee News.)
 

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