When Indian police officers in a small boat pulled within sight of the remote island, they saw a group of islanders huddled on the beach. Carrying bows, arrows and spears, they appeared to be guarding something.
Police officials said it could have been the body of John Allen Chau. The 26-year-old American missionary was killed last week as he tried to spread Christianity to North Sentinel, a forbidden island in the Andaman Sea.
The crew peered at the islanders through binoculars, making sure to stay several hundred yards off shore, out of bow-and-arrow range.
“The Sentinelese were watchful,” Dependra Pathak, the area’s police chief, said Saturday. “They were patrolling the beach, at the same spot John was killed, with weapons.”
“Had we approached,” he said, “they would have attacked.”
So instead of retrieving Chau’s body or determining where it is, the police officers, after sketching out the crime scene, motored away.
“This case is the strangest and toughest in my life,” Pathak said. “We are trying to enter into another civilization’s world.”
North Sentinel Island is home to one of the last undiluted hunter-and-gatherer societies, a rugged, Manhattan-sized island where a few dozen people live trapped in time and in total isolation.
Efforts to retrieve Chau’s body are proving difficult, and some anthropologists say it will be impossible. The search symbolizes the larger quandary India confronts in trying to enforce a society’s rules in a place that has been intentionally set away from the rest of that society.
Indian law says North Sentinel’s culture is so precious and unique that its people should be left totally alone and no outsiders are allowed there. It also says that murderers should be punished. That is the bind police are facing.
The fishermen and one other man who police say helped Chau reach the island have been arrested and charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder and with violating rules protecting aboriginal tribes. Another case has been filed against “unknown persons,” the islanders, for killing Chau.
The investigation is heading into uncharted territory. Will any of the islanders actually face prosecution? And if arrested, would they die in captivity from disease, their immune systems no match for modern microbes?
c.2018 New York Times News Service