India government orders probe into abuse of tribe

(January 13, 2013) The Indian government has ordered a probe into a controversy over police allegedly forcing women of a primitive tribe in a remote corner of the Andaman Islands to dance semi-naked before tourists for food. The UK newspaper ‘The Observer’ released the video on January 7 to accompany a report saying its journalist had recently seen tourists throw bananas and biscuits to tribespeople on the roadside and had been told by local traders how much to bribe the police to spend a day out with the Jarawa people. The Jarawa tribe has just 403 members, who live in deep jungles in south Andaman in the Indian Ocean. They are among endangered tribes of the island who came in contact with the outer world only in 1998. In 2007, the government created a buffer zone to protect the community from outside contact and exploitation. The video showed a group of Jarawa women being ordered to dance for tourists by a policeman, who had reportedly accepted a £200 bribe to take them into the reserve. The video shows a group of women dancing topless. Federal tribal affairs minister V. Kishore Chandra Deo has ordered the chief secretary and the director general of police in Andaman and Nicobar to investigate the case. Indigenous rights group Survival International has denounced the Andaman tourist attraction as a human zoo.