‘We exist’: A Himayalan hamlet, forgotten by Indian democracy

As India braces for elections, the Totos, one of the world’s smallest tribes, have little hope that they’ll be heard.

Totopara, India — Jiten Toto has lived longer than independent India, all of his 80 years spent in the small hamlet of Totopara nestled in the green foothills of the Himalayas in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

He walks with a bamboo stick to his plot of farmland, the size of a football field, where he grows millets, tomatoes and brinjal in neat rows. It feeds his family, and earns them income from the sale to visiting traders who take the produce to other markets.

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

Totopara gets its name from the Toto tribe that Jiten belongs to. One of the smallest tribes in the world, the total Toto population is estimated at about 1,670 people. Nearly 75 percent of them are eligible to vote. The Indo-Bhutanese community lives almost exclusively in Totopara, a village with narrow lanes surrounded by hills, which sits just 2km (1.2 miles) from India’s border with Bhutan.

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