Perhaps the maverick mathematician-poet was examining the colonial Doctrine of Discovery — the idea that the first European nation to “discover” a territory in the Americas acquired exclusive rights over it. Around the same time, British colonists in Australia treated hundreds of Aboriginal nations as inhabitants of terra nullius — nobody’s land.
In India, Lord Dalhousie’s Waste Land Rules enabled the takeover of vast tracts of “unproductive” forests and commons beginning in the 1850s. The Land Acquisition Act, 1894, made the government’s decision the final word for a public purpose, pushing railways, mines and plantations across forested tribal regions, such as Chota Nagpur, Santhal Parganas and Central Provinces.
Few would dispute that each of these policies was profoundly unjust and immoral, if not outright criminal, by today’s ethical and legal standards. Even fewer would argue that the world is worse off because of the railways, industries and cities that emerged from those interventions. But that is no reason to repeat them.
More than a century after the colonial framing of “public purpose”, no claim of public, strategic or national interest can be exempt from the burden of justification today. Especially when a mega project is envisaged in a rainforest island that is home to several endemic wild species and to the world’s only population of fewer than 300 indigenous Shompen people.
The Rs 90,000-crore Great Nicobar Island project spanning 166 sq km at the southernmost tip of the archipelago includes an international container trans-shipment port, an integrated township, a civil-military airport, a power plant and luxury tourism facilities.
Many have demonstrated otherwise but, for a moment, let us accept that the defence installation’s location is non-negotiable, that the trans-shipment port can be financially viable, that the sprawling township is necessary, that the geological risks are manageable, and that the project’s strategic importance is paramount.
But even if every justification is taken at face value, none answers the more important question: Is the project just? By its own submission, the plan requires 73 sq km of tribal reserve areas. On its balance sheet, the project has provided for adding 77 sq km of peripheral land to make up for the loss. The indigenous people are not to be dispossessed, merely displaced.
In 1823, the US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall weighed in on indigenous rights: “The rights of the original inhabitants were, in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily diminished.”
Shifting them from parts of their ancestral home will unsettle the Shompen and the Great Nicobarese, the other indigenous tribe inhabiting the coastal areas of the island. Neither have consented to the plan. The very assertion that these people can be pushed around at will disregards their traditional land use practices.
The proposed arrangement echoes an unsettling past: “Is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilised Christian?… Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing?”
That was US President Andrew Jackson’s message to Congress in 1830. Two centuries have passed since. Today, ancestral rights of indigenous groups to their ancestral land are well established. The United Nations acknowledges that respecting their self-determination and traditional territories is essential to prevent exploitation and displacement.
We do not need to look far to know what risks our civilisation poses to the indigenous people. Contact with outsiders has historically exposed these isolated communities not only to unfamiliar diseases — such as measles, tuberculosis, syphilis and respiratory infections — but also to substance abuse, social disruption, economic dependency and sexual exploitation.
Since the arrival of British settlers in the 1850s, the Great Andamanese population fell from an estimated 35,00-60,000 to fewer than 650 in just five decades. Today, less than a hundred survive on Strait Island.
A similar fate befell the Onge on Little Andaman. The hunter-gatherers could not adjust to forced settlement, and many died of alcoholism, depression and suicide.
The Jarawa resisted outside contact for much longer. But the world entered their home through the Andaman Trunk Road that cut through the heart of the Jarawa reserve in the 1990s. Today, the Jarawa face the same pitfalls of disease and alcoholism, with even their women falling victim to trafficking and abuse.
Knowing this history, can we still justify exposing the Shompen to the same risks? Or are we, in our ambition to build our own “Hong Kong” at their home, echoing an anachronistic entitlement that every corner of the land must be put to productive use on our terms?
“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions,” wrote American political columnist John O’Sullivan in support of annexing indigenous land in 1845. Nearly two centuries should have been time enough to leave behind such impulses.
The doctrine of public trust demands the state to hold vital natural resources — such as air, water, forests, coasts — in trust for the benefit of the public, not only of the present generation but of those yet to come. That intergenerational promise must also extend to our past — or what survives of it, not because of us but despite us. We are duty-bound to protect their right to simply exist where they are, as they are.
Indeed, public interest may sometimes justify imposing the cost of a larger good on a few. But not when those few are the very last survivors of our war on old ways of life.
The writer is associate editor, The Indian Express. jay.mazoomdar@expressindia.com
We do not need to look far to know what risks our civilisation poses to the indigenous people. 
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