Ethnicity and Indian Politics

Ethnicity is the third axis of identity politics in India, and the least well understood of the three. Caste turns on ritual rank and religion on faith, but ethnic politics turns on something harder to name — indigeneity, land, language and the fear that a way of life will not survive the next generation. It is also the axis on which the Indian state has been tested most severely, because ethnic claims are made in the language of territory, and territory is the one thing a state cannot share without ceasing to be one.

What Ethnicity Is

• William Graham Sumner, in Folkways, coined ethnocentrism — the habit of taking one’s own group as the centre of everything and rating all others by reference to it — while the noun ethnicity is a mid-twentieth-century coinage built on the older adjective “ethnic”.
  • The pairing matters: they are two faces of one process, since a group acquires a sense of itself precisely by marking off those who are not in it.
  • The word derives from the Greek ethnos, a people or nation, and its adjective ethnikos, reaching English through Late Latin ethnicus.
• The working definition used across the literature is that ethnicity is the sense of collective belonging to a named community of common myths of origin and shared memories, associated with an historic homeland.
  • The definition does not require the myth of descent to be true, only that it be believed and transmitted; nor does it require present possession of the homeland, since association with a territory is enough. That is why displaced and dispersed groups remain ethnic groups.
• Anthony Smith set out the criteria most precisely, and Indian ethnic claims can be tested against them: a distinct collective name recognised by members and outsiders; a myth of common ancestry; historical memories diffused across generations; a distinctive shared culture; association with a homeland; and a sense of common solidarity.

Two Functional Types

• Ethnicity in its political form divides into two types, distinguished by what the group is afraid of losing.
  • Instrumental ethnicity emanates from material deprivation — the group mobilises because it is poor, under-employed and out of the way of public investment. Its demands convert into budgets, jobs, quotas and councils.
  • Symbolic ethnicity rests on anxiety about cultural survival — that a language will die, a script go untaught, in-migration make the group a minority in its own place. Its demands are about recognition and are much harder to buy off.
• The distinction is decisive because the two types respond to different remedies. A development package answers instrumental ethnicity; it insults symbolic ethnicity, which reads it as an offer to be paid for a surrendered identity.

Ethnicity Against Its Neighbouring Concepts

Concept	Basis	Relation to territory	Political claim
Ethnicity	Believed common descent, shared memory, culture	Association with a homeland	Recognition, autonomy, protection
Race	Asserted biological or phenotypical descent	None inherent	Usually a claim against discrimination
Nation	Political community claiming self-determination	Sovereign claim to a territory	Statehood
Nationality	Legal membership of a state; citizenship	Defined by the state’s borders	Rights against the state
Community	Shared way of life, often local; may be religious	Frequently none	Cultural and welfare claims
Tribe	Descent group with distinct social organisation, historically outside the caste order	Occupation of a defined habitat	Protection of land, custom and autonomy

• Race is the concept most often confused with ethnicity — Sumner’s own usage denoted race, and in practice race is always mixed up with the identity of religion, culture or language.
• Ethnicity is at the core of the idea of the nation, but the two are not the same. A nation makes a claim to sovereignty; an ethnic group need not, and mobilisation on ethnic lines is usually undertaken to secure a better deal within the system.
  • Only where a historical claim to a territory can be established does politicised ethnicity turn into ethnic nationalism.
• Tribe is closest to ethnicity in Indian usage but carries an administrative meaning — it is a schedule, an entitlement — so whether a community is a tribe is finally a question of law, and that is why the ST list is contested ground.

Ethnicity Is Not Static

• Ethnicity is dynamic, not given. Ethnic identity is constructed and reconstructed, ethnic consciousness is often something a movement sets out to create, and the concept is contextual, situational and relational — which of a person’s identities becomes politically operative is decided by the situation and by whoever is organising it.
• Hamza Alavi, analysing the politics of ethnicity across India and Pakistan, found ethnic categories in the subcontinent neither given nor objective: what look like natural communities are better read as attempts at mobilisation and manipulation. In a multi-cultural and prismatic society, ethnic mobilisation is the normal form politics takes, not an aberration.

Three Ways of Explaining Ethnicity

Every serious question about ethnic politics resolves into a question about where ethnic attachment comes from, and the discipline offers three answers. Each implies a different prediction about whether ethnic conflict will fade, and a different prescription for what the state should do about it.

Primordialism

• Primordialism holds that ethnic attachment is given, affective and prior to interest — it comes with birth, language, kinship, religion and place, and it commands loyalty that no calculation of advantage can explain.
• Clifford Geertz gave the classic formulation: primordial attachments flow from the assumed givens of social existence, and his concern was with new states, where the polity asks for civil loyalty at exactly the moment primordial sentiments are being politicised.

“Congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness in and of themselves.” — Clifford Geertz

• Edward Shils supplied the underlying idea, distinguishing primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties and arguing that the primordial bond of kinship carries a significance not reducible to interaction or interest.
• It is strong on the intensity of ethnic feeling — the willingness to die for a language — and on why ethnic conflicts resist settlement by bargaining. It fails on change: if ethnic identity is given, why do groups appear, merge, split and disappear?

Instrumentalism

• Instrumentalism treats ethnicity as a resource that elites deploy for material and political advantage. Ethnic identity is real, but it becomes politically active only when someone finds it useful.
• Paul Brass is the leading exponent for South Asia: ethnic identity is the product of competition among elites for the resources the state controls, and leaders select from a group’s cultural inventory the symbols that will mobilise most efficiently.
  • The corollary is that ethnic conflict is elite conflict in a mass costume, which is why it can be turned on and off faster than a primordial account allows.
• Abner Cohen made the general case: ethnicity is a form of political organisation among interest groups, an informal way of doing what a trade union or a party does where formal organisation is unavailable.
• It is strong on timing: mobilisation appears where there are resources to compete for — state employment, university seats, contracts, reserved constituencies — and intensifies as they grow scarce. It fails on why the mobilised follow, since elites cannot mobilise a symbol that carries no resonance.

Constructivism and Ethno-Symbolism

• Constructivism holds that ethnic and national identities are historically made — by print, by state policy, by education, by census categories — but that being made does not make them false or weak.
• Benedict Anderson described the nation as an imagined community — imagined because its members never meet most of their fellow-members yet hold a live image of their communion. His mechanism is print-capitalism: vernacular print created reading publics able to conceive of themselves as simultaneous.
• Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger supplied the companion idea of invented tradition — practices of recent and deliberate origin claiming continuity with a suitable past, manufactured precisely when rapid change weakens the old patterns.
• Fredrik Barth shifted the question from content to boundary. What defines an ethnic group is not its cultural inventory but the maintenance of the boundary between members and non-members.
  • The cultural content can change completely while the boundary persists. Ethnicity is about who is in, not about what they do.
• Anthony Smith occupies the middle position, and ethno-symbolism is its name. Modern nations are constructed, but out of pre-existing ethnies — durable ethnic cores carrying a name, myths of descent, memories and symbols that pre-date the modern era.
  • Nationalists do not conjure nations from nothing; they rediscover and reinterpret an existing symbolic stock, which is why some nation-building projects succeed and others cannot start. Smith also broke with the modernisation consensus by holding that the modern state produces ethnic revivals rather than dissolving ethnic ties.

Position	Origin of ethnic identity	Key figures	Prediction	Implied prescription
Primordialism	Given at birth — kinship, language, faith, place	Geertz, Shils	Ethnic ties endure; conflict is chronic	Separation, or guaranteed group protection
Instrumentalism	Constructed by elites competing for state resources	Brass, Cohen	Conflict rises and falls with the stakes	Change the incentives facing elites
Constructivism	Made by print, state and education	Anderson, Hobsbawm and Ranger, Barth	Identities are fluid and reconfigurable	Reshape the categories the state uses
Ethno-symbolism	Modern construction on a pre-modern ethnie	Anthony Smith	Only identities with symbolic depth mobilise	Accommodate the durable, resist the manufactured

• Indian scholarship sits between instrumentalism and constructivism — Muni, Gupta, Alavi and Kothari all hold that Indian ethnic categories are made rather than found, which is why they conclude that ethnicity does not threaten the union.

Ethnicity and the Nation: Cultural Nations and Political Nations

• Since the end of the Cold War, ethnic movements and ethnic conflicts have become the prominent form of political conflict, displacing the ideological cleavages that organised the previous half-century; Donald Horowitz observed that from the 1990s ethnic questions became a core field of social science research rather than a specialist corner of it.
  • There are roughly 190-odd sovereign states but several thousand ethnic groups, and on one reckoning fewer than fifteen states are ethnically homogeneous.
• This produces the distinction on which the Indian argument rests. Homogeneous nations are cultural or “natural” nations; multi-ethnic nations are political nations, and political nations have to be built.
  • The European nation-state was, at least in its self-description, culturally given: a common language, a dominant faith, a shared history furnished the nation, and the state expressed it.
  • India and the United States are multi-ethnic nations. No pre-existing cultural homogeneity was available to them. The nation had to be constructed through political institutions, and the constitution is the principal instrument of that construction.

Model	Metaphor	What happens to the group’s identity	Where associated
Melting pot	Ingredients dissolve into a new alloy	Surrendered — the immigrant becomes American	United States
Salad bowl	Ingredients keep their form in a shared dressing	Retained, and the whole is the combination	India
Mosaic	Distinct tiles set in a common frame	Retained and formally recognised as distinct	Canada, and multicultural theory

• The salad bowl is the standard description of the Indian model: communities keep their language, faith and custom, and the political community is what holds them together rather than the residue left after they dissolve.
  • The mosaic fits parts of India better still, because it implies that group distinctness is given formal constitutional standing — which is what the Sixth Schedule, Article 371A and personal law do.
• The constitution supplied the tools. Federalism gave territorial communities a level of government they could win, and secularism removed the question of which faith the state belongs to — the question that broke Pakistan’s relationship with its eastern wing and Sri Lanka’s with its Tamils.
  • The welfare state made the union worth belonging to, and linguistic reorganisation, asymmetric arrangements and reserved seats did the rest.

Gellner, Smith and Connor on the Nation

• Ernest Gellner argued that nationalism is a product of industrial society’s need for a mobile, literate and culturally standardised workforce, delivered through state-run education: nationalism does not awaken nations to self-consciousness, it invents nations where they do not exist.
  • The Indian implication is that if a standardised high culture is what a modern state requires, every state-building project generates a language question, and India’s was the Hindi question.
• Anthony Smith‘s objection is that industrialisation cannot explain which nations form. Nations coalesce around a pre-existing ethnie with usable myths — which is why some Indian linguistic communities produced durable political identities and others did not.
• Walker Connor coined ethnonationalism and pressed the sharpest point: what is called nationalism is very often loyalty to an ethnic group rather than to a state, and the two are conflated because scholars use “nation” to mean “state”.
  • His warning is that modernisation intensifies ethnonational consciousness rather than dissolving it, because it brings separated groups into contact and comparison.

Tagore and Nehru on What Holds India Together

• Rabindranath Tagore rejected the nation as a category altogether. The nation, for him, was the political and economic organisation of a people at its most mechanical and least human — an idea imported from the West that turns a society into a machine for power.
  • India’s genius, on his account, was never political unification but the absorption of difference into a social order wide enough to hold it. He was hostile to nationalism as an ideal even while supporting the freedom struggle, warning that a free India imitating the European nation would reproduce the exclusions it had suffered.
• Jawaharlal Nehru gave the opposite answer, and it is the one the constitution encodes. India’s unity is real but is a unity discovered in diversity, held by shared historical experience and secured by a modern state, industrialisation and a common citizenship.
  • Where Tagore looked to society, Nehru looked to the state. The Nehruvian settlement was integrationist and not assimilationist: it demanded political loyalty and offered cultural non-interference in exchange.

India did not solve the ethnic problem by producing agreement about what Indians are. It solved it by making that question one the state does not have to answer.

Nation Building in India

• Nation building is the process of converting a population that shares a state into a people that shares a political identity. The distinction that organises the entire debate is integration versus assimilation.
  • Assimilation requires the minority to dissolve into the majority; integration requires only shared political loyalty and common institutions, and leaves cultural difference intact.
  • Across the post-colonial world the Western-educated ruling elite chose assimilation in the name of nation building, and the choice boomeranged, producing precisely the sub-national uprisings it was meant to prevent.
• Myron Weiner‘s framework treats nation building in a diverse society as the management of five overlapping crises, and it maps onto India better than any imported model.
  • The identity crisis, persuading people they belong to a single political community when their primary loyalty is narrower; the legitimacy crisis, agreement about who may rule; and the participation crisis, absorbing newly mobilised groups without the system breaking.
  • The penetration crisis, extending administrative reach into territory the state does not effectively govern; and the distribution crisis, allocating resources across groups in a way each accepts as fair.
• Weiner’s other contribution is the sons of the soil thesis: competition between a local middle class and migrant middle-class competitors for the same urban jobs.
  • The conflict is not between labourers but between educated aspirants for clerical employment, which is why it appears in cities in periods of expanding education, and the remedy demanded is always preference in employment for domiciles.

The Indian Record

• What worked. The integration of 560-odd princely states within a few years of independence; the absorption of language into federal politics; a common citizenship and a single market across a subcontinent no previous state had governed as one.
  • No Indian state has seceded, and every major statehood demand translatable into a constitutional form has eventually been conceded.
• What did not. Nation building was pursued alongside a development model that displaced the very communities it counted as most in need of integration. Penetration remains the weakest of Weiner’s five — where the state arrives only as police, forest guard and contractor, no amount of constitutional symmetry produces belonging.
• The verdict is that integration succeeded where the state offered institutions and failed where it offered only force, and the sequence usually ran from force to institutions rather than the other way round.

Ethnicity in India: The Four Axes

• James Manor, in Ethnic Politics in India, holds that ethnicity in India can be described along four axes, and the list is the standard Indian mapping of the concept.
  • Religion, the largest and most volatile marker, and the one on which the subcontinent was partitioned; language, the marker on which the internal map of the union was redrawn; and race, operative in claims of physical and cultural distinctness from the mainland.
  • Caste is the fourth, included because a jati carries the very properties the definition requires — a name, a myth of descent, endogamy, shared memory and often a claimed place of origin.
• Caste as an ethnic category is Manor’s most contested inclusion, and it needs one clarification and no more.
  • A jati satisfies the formal criteria of an ethnic group, and caste associations behave much as ethnic organisations do elsewhere — but caste lacks the territorial claim that gives ethnic politics its dangerous edge, which is why caste mobilisation has never produced a secessionist demand.
• The four axes rarely appear alone, and most movements combine at least two — the Punjab movement combined religion and language, the Jharkhand movement combined tribe, language and region.

Why Indian Ethnicity Does Not Threaten the Union

• S.D. Muni argues that ethnicity is not a challenge to India’s territorial integrity, because Indian identity markers are not permanent — identities are fluid and can be reconfigured by the political class as convenience requires.
  • The mechanism is the decisive part: if a section of Indians can be united on the basis of language, that unity can be broken on the basis of caste or religion.
  • Every coalition assembled on one marker is vulnerable to a rival assembled on another, so no ethnic bloc can be consolidated permanently enough to sustain a secession.
• Manor reaches the same conclusion by a different route: Indians have overlapping rather than fixed identities. A single voter belongs at once to a jati, a linguistic community, a religious community, a region and a class, and these memberships cut across each other rather than stacking up.
  • Because they cross-cut, the same cleavage never separates the same two populations twice, and lasting fault lines cannot form. Manor’s judgement is that ethnic movements threaten neither territorial integrity, nor democracy, nor social cohesion.
• Dipankar Gupta puts the point more sharply: ethnic mobilisation in India is less a popular passion than a creation of vested interests. Identity is available to be activated, but it is activated by those who profit from activating it, and it subsides when the profit does.
• Rajni Kothari places ethnic mobilisation inside modernisation rather than against it, links it to the state’s own attempts at homogenisation and to a decline in the legitimacy of the state.
  • He reads it as an assertion by peripheral communities that have borne the costs of a destructive model of development — a symptom of the development path rather than of cultural difference.

The Indian argument is not that ethnic identities are weak. It is that there are too many of them, and that they overlap too much, for any one of them to become the basis of a rival state.

Why Ethnicity Persists: The Explanations

Ethnicity was expected to fade. Sociological modernisation theory and the Marxist tradition both held that ethnic competition belonged to the pre-modern era and survived only as irrational behaviour or false consciousness, and theorists of nation building agreed, expecting social mobilisation to dissolve distinct identities into the nation. The evidence has run the other way.

The Co-existence of Modernity and Tradition

• The foundational Indian explanation, associated with Rudolph and Rudolph, Atul Kohli and Rajni Kothari, is that when democracy is introduced into a traditional society, ethnicity becomes the available idiom of mobilisation. Modernity did not replace tradition; the two coexist, and modern institutions are worked through traditional groupings.
  • A candidate needing a constituency in a society organised by community will build it out of communities, because no other organised constituency exists. Elites therefore take the ethnic basis of mobilisation, and do so rationally.
• The Rudolphs’ larger claim is that this is not a pathology. Traditional structures proved capable of carrying modern functions — the caste association became an interest group, the community an electoral bloc — and tradition was transformed rather than merely preserved.
• Modernisation actively sharpens ethnic difference rather than smoothing it.
  • Education, urbanisation and media exposure increase cultural awareness and put separated groups into comparison; competition for jobs, seats and contracts makes the ascriptive marker an efficient vehicle for group interests; and within the group modernisation produces a younger, educated leadership that challenges the traditional leadership by raising more extreme demands.
• The paradox is documented and counter-intuitive: the more people are educated, the more ethnic demands are manifested; the greater the economic incentives, the more numerous the ethnic conflicts.

Recognition and the Limits of Liberal Democracy

• Charles Taylor reads ethnic movements as assertions by marginalised communities — claims not for goods but for recognition. Identity is dialogically formed, so misrecognition inflicts real damage: a demeaning picture of a group, internalised, is a form of oppression.
  • This is why development packages fail against symbolic ethnicity — a group demanding recognition cannot be paid.
• Taylor holds that there is an inbuilt tendency towards exclusion in liberal democratic states.

“Arising from the fact that democracies work well when people know one another, trust one another, and feel a sense of commitment toward one another.” — Charles Taylor

• The very solidarity that makes democracy function makes it define a “we”, and every “we” produces those outside it. Formal citizenship is therefore not enough: liberal democracies recognise full citizenship formally and produce unequal citizenship in practice, because structural accommodation through citizenship and affirmative action does not by itself deliver the change intended.

The State’s Own Homogenising Projects

• Neera Chandhoke locates the source in the state rather than in society: the state’s own attempts to homogenise the population — and the exercises of ethnic mapping by which it classifies its subjects — make people conscious of ethnic identities they had not politically inhabited.
  • The census, the schedule, the reserved list and the language policy are all acts of categorisation, and a category, once official, becomes something to organise around.
  • The colonial state began this work; the developmental state continued it with better instruments.
• The interventionist modern state compounds the effect: its reach into land, forest, education and custom is experienced as centralisation and loss of traditional autonomy. Assimilationist policy pursued in the name of nation building then strengthens hardliners on both sides, since the state’s crackdown validates the ethnic hardliner and the ethnic hardliner validates the crackdown.

Elite Preference

• S.D. Muni states the instrumentalist position bluntly: ethnicity is not the choice of the people but the preference of political parties. The demand is supplied.
• Dipankar Gupta concurs, and the pattern confirms it: ethnic demands escalate around elections and subside between them, and movement leadership is very often drawn from the group’s most educated and least deprived section.

Uneven Development and Social Exclusion

• The theory of uneven development explains the sub-regional cases in particular — Telangana and Vidarbha are the standard Indian illustrations, and Robert Hardgrave is the associated scholar.
  • The claim is that development in India has been spatially unequal within states, so that a backward sub-region inside a prosperous state acquires a grievance that is measurable and a boundary that is drawable.
• Marshall Wolfe‘s taxonomy of social exclusion is broader than income — exclusion from livelihood, from welfare and security networks, from political choice, from popular organisation, and from understanding what is happening. Exclusion in this sense denies social recognition and self-respect, which is why it produces mobilisation rather than mere poverty.
• Amartya Sen adds the mechanism by which identity turns exclusionary: a sense of one’s identity creates a sense of exclusion from the mainstream. His warning is against the illusion of singular identity, the reduction of a person to one affiliation, which is the precondition of ethnic violence.

Relative Deprivation

The most durable single explanation of ethnic conflict is that groups rebel not when they are poorest but when the gap between what they believe they are entitled to and what they can actually get becomes intolerable. This is the theory of relative deprivation, and it is the one that best explains the timing of ethnic movements — the question that neither primordialism nor pure instrumentalism answers well.

Gurr’s Formulation

• Ted Robert Gurr, in Why Men Rebel, defined relative deprivation as the perceived discrepancy between value expectations — the goods and conditions to which people believe they are rightfully entitled — and value capabilities, the goods they think they are actually capable of getting and keeping.
  • The gap generates discontent; discontent politicised becomes anger directed at the political order; and anger, given organisation and opportunity, becomes political violence.
• The theory is comparative, not absolute. Deprivation is measured against a reference group and against one’s own past, which is why absolute poverty is a poor predictor of rebellion and why the poorest communities are frequently the quietest.
• Gurr distinguished three patterns of the gap, and they explain different movements.

Pattern	What moves	Typical trigger	Illustration
Decremental deprivation	Capabilities fall, expectations stay level	Loss of land, jobs, status or protection	Adivasi land alienation and displacement
Aspirational deprivation	Expectations rise, capabilities stay level	Education without commensurate employment	Educated youth in backward sub-regions
Progressive deprivation	Both rise, then capabilities collapse	A boom followed by a bust	The J-curve cases

• James Davies supplied the J-curve that Gurr’s third pattern generalises: revolutions occur not in steady misery but after a prolonged period of improvement followed by a sharp reversal.
  • Rising prosperity raises expectations continuously, and when satisfaction turns down it is the widening gap between the expected and the possible, not the reversal itself, that produces revolt.
• Gurr’s later Minorities at Risk project moved the argument from psychology to measurement, coding the political, economic and cultural disadvantages of communal groups worldwide relative to others in the same state.
  • Its finding is that disadvantage plus group identity plus organisational capacity predicts mobilisation far better than any of the three alone, and that states which accommodate early face protest while states which repress early face rebellion.

Applying It to India

• The Jharkhand movement is the clearest fit for decremental deprivation. Adivasi communities held land and forest under customary right, and the century after 1850 took both away — through tenancy law, moneylenders, migration into the coalfields, and later through mines, dams and steel towns.
  • The demand was for a state precisely because the loss was territorial, and the movement’s slogan — jal, jangal, zameen — names exactly what had been subtracted.
• Telangana fits aspirational deprivation. The grievance was not destitution but a measurable shortfall in jobs, irrigation and investment relative to the coastal districts, voiced by an educated stratum whose expectations the state had raised.
  • It also shows Gurr’s organisational condition: the grievance ran from the Mulki agitations onward and produced a state only when it acquired sustained organisation.
• The sons-of-the-soil movements are relative deprivation in its purest comparative form. The Marathi or Kannada aspirant in Bombay or Bangalore was not absolutely deprived; he was deprived relative to a visible migrant competitor, and the visibility was the trigger.

Where the Theory Falls Short

• It does not explain Punjab, which was among India’s most prosperous states through the Green Revolution decades. Theory can salvage the progressive pattern — plateauing returns and indebtedness after a long boom — but the core demands were about river waters, Chandigarh, state autonomy and religious recognition, and those are not deprivation claims.
• It does not explain symbolic ethnicity at all. The anti-Hindi agitations were fought by a linguistic community not economically deprived relative to the Hindi belt. Gurr’s framework accommodates this only by stretching “value expectations” to include cultural values — at which point it explains everything and predicts nothing.
• It cannot supply the identity. Deprivation is felt by individuals and becomes a movement only when read as a group’s deprivation, and what determines which group people identify with is exactly what the theory takes as given. Deprivation is therefore necessary but not sufficient.
• Prerna Singh‘s work supplies the inverse case: deprivation and identity together do not reliably produce rebellion, and where a shared regional identity existed they produced better welfare outcomes instead.

Deprivation tells you which groups have a reason to rebel. It never tells you which of them will, and it never tells you why the group is the group.

Democracy and Ethnicity: Kohli’s Argument

• Atul Kohli‘s essay “Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism?” is the central text, and its argument moves in three steps that appear to contradict each other and do not.
  • Democracy in a traditional society produces mobilisation on ethnic lines, because competitive elections require constituencies and in a society organised by community the community is the constituency.
  • Traditional elites, fearful of losing their privilege, mobilise people on ethnic lines to defend it — ethnic assertion is often a defensive move by those already dominant, not only a claim by the excluded.
  • Ethnic challenges, if not handled properly, threaten territorial integrity, and Kohli does not minimise the danger.
• The conclusion is the paradox: democracy is one of the factors causing the problem, and democracy is also the only solution.
  • Democratic politics encourages ethnic mobilisation and simultaneously provides the basis for its resolution, which is why India needs more democracy rather than less — greater power-sharing, inclusive growth and sustainable development, not a firmer hand.

The Inverted U

• Kohli’s empirical claim is that most ethnic movements in India have followed an inverted U-shaped curve — rise, peak and decline.
  • Movements rise when expectations outrun what the arrangement delivers and an organisation appears to voice them; they peak in confrontation with the state, which is the phase that generates the alarm about integrity.
  • They decline as the state concedes what can be conceded, the leadership enters institutional politics, and the constituency turns to ordinary distributive concerns.
• The curve is evidence about the state, not about the movements. That mobilisation reliably subsides signifies the accommodative capacity of the Indian state, and the state has emerged from each cycle stronger rather than weaker.
• The downward slope requires three things: leadership on both sides willing to deal, material resources the centre can put on the table, and the willingness of the central authority to accommodate.

The Comparative Record

Case	Leader	Method	Outcome
Tamil nationalism	Nehru	Democratic accommodation of the linguistic demand	Secessionist tendency permanently subsided
Assam and Mizoram	Rajiv Gandhi	Negotiated accords, movement leaders taken into government	Insurgency converted into electoral politics
Punjab	Indira Gandhi	Coercion preferred over accommodation	Escalation, and a decade of violence

• The pattern is that the demand was met at the level at which it was made, while in Punjab coercion was preferred at the point when accommodation was still available. Mizoram remains the strongest evidence that federal accommodation ends what force alone could not.
• Two conditions follow, and they are the operative part of the argument. The leader at the centre must have a democratic disposition, willing to treat an ethnic demand as a bargaining position rather than as sedition.
  • The ruling party must also be strong enough to make a concession credible, since a government without a secure majority cannot deliver what it promises or survive the charge of appeasement, and hardens instead.
• India’s record is markedly better than that of comparable states. The USSR and Yugoslavia disintegrated along ethnic lines having suppressed rather than institutionalised their national questions; Pakistan lost East Pakistan over language; Sri Lanka made Sinhala the sole official language in 1956 and spent half a century in civil war.
  • The common variable is not democracy as such — Sri Lanka was a functioning democracy throughout — but whether the constitutional order was willing to be asymmetric.

Consociation, Centripetalism and Multicultural Citizenship

Prescription	Core device	Logic	Principal theorist
Consociationalism	Grand coalition, group autonomy, proportionality, mutual veto	Make elites of every group co-owners of the government	Arend Lijphart
Centripetalism	Vote-pooling electoral rules, cross-regional distribution requirements	Give politicians an incentive to seek votes outside their own group	Donald Horowitz
Multicultural citizenship	Group-differentiated rights — self-government, polyethnic and representation rights	Equality sometimes requires differential treatment	Will Kymlicka

• Lijphart held that deeply divided societies can sustain democracy if elites cooperate across segments, and read India as a consociational case — coalitions spanning communities, cultural autonomy through personal law and linguistic states, proportionality through reservation, and a minority veto over identity questions.
• Horowitz objected that consociationalism freezes the divisions it manages, and preferred design that rewards moderation.
• India sits between the two, unevenly. It is consociational in its cultural arrangements — personal law, minority educational rights, Article 371A, the Sixth Schedule — and centripetal in its electoral arrangements, because first-past-the-post in heterogeneous constituencies forces cross-community coalitions.
  • Reserved constituencies are the clearest centripetal device: a reserved seat is contested in a general electorate, so the candidate must win votes from outside the reserved group. It guarantees presence without a separate electorate, which the constitution deliberately rejected.
• Will Kymlicka supplies the normative defence: liberal equality does not require identical treatment, because minority-culture members face disadvantages that uniform rights do not remove, so group-differentiated rights are a requirement of equality rather than an exception.
  • His distinction between national minorities entitled to self-government and polyethnic groups entitled to accommodation maps onto India’s split between Sixth Schedule autonomy and the cultural rights of Articles 29 and 30.
• Bhikhu Parekh goes furthest, arguing for a multicultural political community in which no single culture is the norm against which others are measured, constituted through intercultural dialogue rather than by extending the majority’s terms to everyone.
  • His reading of India is that its accommodation is an older civilisational practice of holding difference without requiring agreement, closer to Tagore’s account than to Gellner’s.

India’s answer to ethnicity was never a single formula. It was a willingness to give different units different terms, and to keep negotiating.

The Instruments of Accommodation

Linguistic Reorganisation

• The Congress had promised linguistic provinces from the 1920s, but partition changed the calculation and the first two official inquiries advised against it.
  • The Dhar Commission (1948) held that linguistic reorganisation would harm national unity and preferred administrative convenience; the JVP Committee (1949) — Nehru, Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya — agreed that the moment was wrong.
• The decision was forced from below. Potti Sriramulu‘s fast unto death and his death in December 1952 produced Andhra State in 1953, and once one linguistic state existed the principle could not be confined to one language.
• The Fazl Ali Commission (1953) then recommended general reorganisation, and the States Reorganisation Act 1956 created fourteen states and six union territories; Bombay divided in 1960 and Punjab reorganised in 1966.
  • The later creations — Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand in 2000, Telangana in 2014 — rested on development grievance and sub-regional identity rather than language, which marks a change in the basis of statehood claims.
• Reorganisation was expected to encourage fissiparous tendencies and did the opposite. By making the state the vehicle of linguistic identity, it removed language from the national agenda and converted a potential secessionist grievance into ordinary state politics. A linguistic community that governs a state has something to lose from secession.
  • The comparative proof is Pakistan, where refusing Bengali co-equal status converted a linguistic grievance into a national movement and then into a separate state.

The Language of the Union

• The compromise of 1950 made Hindi in Devanagari the official language of the union with English continuing for fifteen years, which set a deadline of 1965 and guaranteed a crisis at it.
  • The anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu, most intensely in 1965, were the sharpest symbolic-ethnicity mobilisation in independent India, and the claim was about the standing of a language, not about deprivation.
• The Official Languages Act 1963 provided that English may continue alongside Hindi after 1965; the 1967 amendment converted permission into guarantee, providing for the indefinite continuation of English until every state whose legislature has not adopted Hindi agrees to end it.
  • This is a minority veto in statutory form, the purest consociational element in the Indian language settlement, and the reason the language question has stayed dormant.
• The three-language formula, framed in the 1960s and carried into national education policy, requires study of three languages — intended as the regional language, Hindi and English in non-Hindi states, and a modern Indian language in Hindi states.
  • The asymmetry in practice, that non-Hindi states learn Hindi while Hindi states rarely learn a southern language, is the standing grievance against it.
  • The dispute is live. Tamil Nadu refuses to implement the formula and treats it as Hindi imposition in a neutral form; Maharashtra, having issued orders in 2025 introducing Hindi as a third language from Class 1, stayed them within weeks after political opposition and referred the question to a committee.

Asymmetric Federalism

• Article 371 and Articles 371A to 371J provide special arrangements for Maharashtra and Gujarat, Nagaland, Assam, Manipur, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Sikkim, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa and Karnataka. The union does not offer the same terms to every unit, and that is the design rather than a defect.
• Article 371A for Nagaland is the strongest, and the detail is the point: no Act of Parliament applies to Naga religious or social practices, customary law and procedure, the administration of justice under it, or the ownership and transfer of land, unless the state assembly so decides by resolution.
  • This is a conditional legislative veto held by a state assembly over Parliament, and there is nothing else like it in the constitution.
• The Fifth Schedule governs Scheduled Areas outside the North-Eastern four: the Governor may direct that a law shall not apply, or apply with modification, and a Tribes Advisory Council must be constituted. Its purpose is protection against land alienation; its weakness is that the powers are discretionary and sparingly used.
• The Sixth Schedule provides autonomous district and regional councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, with legislative powers over land, forests, shifting cultivation, inheritance and social custom, and their own courts. It is self-government rather than protection, which is why other communities — Ladakh most prominently — now demand it for themselves.
• PESA 1996 — the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act — extended panchayati raj to Fifth Schedule areas on modified terms, and is the most radical statutory recognition of tribal self-rule outside the Sixth Schedule.
  • The gram sabha, not the elected panchayat, is the primary unit, competent to safeguard community resources and customary law. It must be consulted before land acquisition and resettlement, and its recommendation is mandatory for prospecting licences and minor-mineral leases.
  • Implementation has been the weak point — states framed rules late or diluted them, and consultation has been treated as a formality to record rather than a decision to take.
• Reserved seats and the scheduled lists complete the architecture, and who gets onto the ST list is itself high politics, because the list converts an ethnic claim into a legal entitlement. Inclusion is pressed by communities seeking access and resisted by those already listed who would have to share a fixed quota.
  • The criteria — primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact and backwardness — are administrative rather than constitutional, have been criticised as dated and paternalistic, and remain unrevised.

Adivasi Ethnicity in Central India

Tribal politics outside the North-East is the most under-examined part of Indian ethnicity and is structurally different from the rest. Its grievance is not language or ritual rank but land — a century in which forest, mineral and river were converted into national assets and the people living on them into encroachers. It is the axis on which India’s development model and its integrative promise contradict each other most directly.

The Naming Question

• Adivasi — “original inhabitant” — is a political self-description asserting prior occupancy and a prior claim on land; Scheduled Tribe is the constitutional category under Article 342, and it is what entitlements attach to. The choice of word is the argument, and movements pick accordingly.
• The Indian state has consistently rejected “indigenous peoples” in international forums, on the ground that in India the question of who arrived first is unanswerable — which keeps Indian tribal claims outside the international indigenous-rights framework built through the ILO conventions and the UN working group.

Land, Forest and Displacement

• Land alienation is the founding grievance. Colonial settlement and tenancy law converted customary collective holdings into individual titles that could be mortgaged and sold, and the moneylender did the rest.
  • Protective legislation followed — tenancy acts in Chotanagpur and Santhal Parganas, later state bans on transfer to non-tribals — and was circumvented through benami holdings, long leases and marriages of convenience.
• Forest law did the deeper damage, declaring vast areas state property and reclassifying customary use as encroachment — a framework independent India retained.
• Displacement by dams, mines and industry fell disproportionately on Scheduled Areas, because the coincidence of tribal habitat and mineral wealth is the structural fact of Adivasi politics. Resettlement was historically cash compensation for titled land only, which excluded most Adivasi claimants by definition.
• The Samatha judgment (1997) held that in Scheduled Areas the transfer of government, forest and tribal land to private mining companies is void, since Fifth Schedule protection binds the state as much as private parties.
  • Its effect was narrowed by later practice and state amendment, but it established that the protection limits the state’s own transactions.
• The Forest Rights Act 2006 is the correction, framed as recognition of pre-existing rights wrongly denied rather than a grant of new ones.
  • It recognises individual forest rights to land under cultivation, community forest rights to produce and grazing, and community forest resource rights to manage a traditional forest area, giving the gram sabha authority to determine claims and requiring its consent for diversion of forest land.
  • Over twenty-five lakh individual titles have been recognised against a little over a lakh community titles — the imbalance is the standing criticism, since the community right carries the governance power.
  • Rejection rates have been high, with large bodies of claims refused without recording reasons or informing claimants.
• The Niyamgiri case (2013) is the strongest application. On bauxite mining in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills, the Supreme Court held that whether the project affected the religious and cultural rights of the Dongria Kondh was for the gram sabhas to decide.
  • All twelve consulted rejected the proposal and the clearance was refused — the only instance in which an Indian community exercised something close to a veto over a major mining project, though the referral came from a court in a specific case and no general statutory consent requirement of that strength has followed.

Movement, Statehood and Religion

• The Jharkhand movement is the longest continuous tribal political movement in India, running from the Adivasi Mahasabha and the Jharkhand Party of the 1930s and 1940s, through the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha‘s combination of tribal and non-tribal poor from the 1970s, to statehood in November 2000.
  • Its demand shifted from tribal homeland to regional development, and the state that resulted has a substantial non-tribal majority — the outcome accommodated the region more than the ethnic group.
• Birsa Munda and the Tana Bhagats are the movement’s symbolic capital, actively worked as political resources. Birsa’s Ulgulan of 1899-1900 combined religious revival with a land revolt, and his birth anniversary is now observed as Janjatiya Gaurav Divas; the Tana Bhagats, an Oraon reform movement from 1914, combined religious purification with non-payment of rent.
• The Sarna code demand is the current constitutional question. Sarna is the nature-worshipping faith of large sections of Adivasi central and eastern India — the sacred grove is its site — and its adherents seek a separate religion column in the census.
  • The census offers six religion codes — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain — and everyone else is recorded under “other religions”, where in 2011 only a small fraction of the Scheduled Tribe population appeared while the large majority was returned as Hindu. The stakes are cultural, numerical and material at once.
  • The Jharkhand assembly resolved in 2020 to seek the code and has pressed it again for Census 2027. Parallel demands use different names — Adivasi Dharma, Koya Punem — which is itself an obstacle, since one national column requires one national name.
• The Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes are the least visible category — notified as “criminal tribes” under the Criminal Tribes Act 1871, denotified in 1952, never adequately absorbed into any schedule, distributed across the SC, ST and OBC lists or appearing on none, and so falling through every entitlement structure.

Adivasi Politics and Left-Wing Extremism

• The relationship must be stated honestly in both directions. Left-wing extremism concentrated in Scheduled Areas because that is where state penetration was weakest, displacement heaviest and land alienation most complete.
• It does not follow that Adivasi politics is Maoist politics. The overwhelming majority of Adivasi political action has been constitutional — parties, litigation, gram sabha resolutions, statehood movements — and Adivasi communities have been the conflict’s principal victims, caught between armed groups and security operations.
• The state’s own expert reviews traced the spread of extremism to land alienation, displacement and unsettled forest rights, and recommended settling rejected forest claims as a security measure.
• The armed movement has now been largely defeated, with severely affected districts down to a handful and March 2026 set as the target for ending it — which converts the question back into a governance question: whether PESA and the Forest Rights Act will be implemented where insurgency no longer forces attention.

Sub-Regional and Other Assertions

• Gorkhaland is the longest-running sub-regional ethnic demand outside the North-East, and its basis is linguistic and cultural distinctness within West Bengal rather than deprivation. The sequence ran from the agitation of the 1980s to the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (1988), then the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (2011), then a further agitation in 2017.
  • Neither council settled the demand, because both offered administrative devolution against a claim for recognition — instrumental remedies for a symbolic grievance.
• Vidarbha and Bundelkhand are uneven-development claims — backward sub-regions of large states with a documented shortfall in irrigation, investment and administration. Vidarbha’s carries the added weight of the Nagpur Pact and of agrarian distress, but has repeatedly failed to survive electoral politics, which is Kohli’s declining slope in operation.
• Saurashtra is the demand that preceded reorganisation and was extinguished by it — a separate state until 1956, merged into Bombay and then Gujarat, leaving an identity that never rebuilt a statehood movement.
• Bhil Pradesh, carved from the contiguous Bhil belt of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, is the newest significant assertion, pressed by a tribal party that won assembly and parliamentary seats after 2023 — evidence that the statehood idiom remains available to tribal politics.
• Bodoland is the North-Eastern parallel, worth naming for one structural point: a group that is a minority in its own claimed homeland cannot be given a state without creating a new minority, which is why the answer there has been councils.
• Sons-of-the-soil politics in Bombay and Bangalore is Weiner’s category in its purest form — Marathi and Kannada nativist mobilisation against migrant competition for clerical employment, demanding domicile preference in jobs.
  • It recurs whenever a regional economy grows fast enough to attract migration, and being directed at co-nationals it sits awkwardly against the Article 19 freedom to move and reside.
• Punjab and the Khalistan movement belong here because they are routinely misclassified as purely religious.
  • The Punjabi Suba demand was pressed in linguistic terms precisely because a religiously worded demand was certain to be refused, and was conceded in 1966.
  • The Anandpur Sahib Resolution (1973) is systematically misdescribed. Its political content was a demand for greater state autonomy, confining the centre to defence, foreign affairs, currency and communications; the centre read it as a secessionist charter, and that reading hardened both sides.
  • The escalation to Operation Blue Star (1984), the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the violence that followed, then the Rajiv-Longowal Accord (1985) and its non-implementation, is the sequence Kohli reads as accommodation attempted too late.
  • The correct label is ethno-religious: religion supplied the boundary, but the demands were about river waters, Chandigarh, territory and federal power.

Is Ethnicity a Threat to the Indian Political System?

• Paul Brass offers the framing judgement: regionalism has been the long-term trend in Indian politics and nationalism the short-term one. Given India’s size and diversity, regional assertion is the normal condition, and it does not become secession because Indian elites find more advantage inside the system than outside it.
• Gurharpal Singh distinguishes movements emerging from the core from those emerging from the periphery, and the distinction predicts the state’s behaviour.
  • Core movements — Maharashtra, the former Andhra Pradesh, the linguistic states — are treated as ordinary federal bargaining; peripheral movements are treated as security problems first, and that difference is part of why they last longer.
• The Indian state’s approach to ethnic demands has four consistent features that together amount to an unwritten policy.
  • Secessionist demands are rejected outright, without negotiation, whatever else is on the table.
  • Demands worded in religious terms are resisted; linguistic or developmental terms are accommodated — Punjab is the proof, where a religiously grounded claim was pressed successfully as the demand for a Punjabi Suba.
  • Attention is paid only once a demand acquires broad support, which rewards sustained mobilisation and sometimes rewards escalation; and the views of other affected groups are weighed, which is why demands that would create a new aggrieved minority stall.
• The operational practice is equally consistent: dialogue always, but never with those using terror; force met with greater force; unconventional solutions, but only within the constitutional framework.
• The Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions reached the same conclusion from the federal side: ethnic movements are never purely ethnic, since political and economic aspirations overlap with cultural ones in every case, and the way forward is democratic decentralisation.
• Prerna Singh supplies the strongest argument that ethnic solidarity can be productive. In How Solidarity Works for Welfare she argues that subnationalism drives better social development, because a shared regional identity generates the commitment to collective welfare that redistribution requires.
  • She compares southern states, where strong subnational identity accompanied superior health and education outcomes, with Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where no comparable identity formed. The implication reverses the standard anxiety: the problem may be too little subnational solidarity rather than too much.
• Regionalism in India is now better read as a crisis of development than as a crisis of nation building. The union is not in question; the distribution of investment, employment and administrative attention is.
• Ryan Griffiths presents the contrary case and deserves an answer rather than dismissal. Counting secessionist movements since 1945, he finds India has hosted more than any other state and treats it as structurally secession-prone.
  • The count is accurate and the inference is wrong. India’s record is one of movements begun and movements ended, with no successful secession. What the count really measures is that India permits demands to be voiced and records them; a state that suppresses at the threshold generates fewer countable movements and more dangerous ones.

Contemporary Developments

• Census 2027 will carry the first full caste enumeration since 1931, with houselisting through 2026 and population enumeration in early 2027, and “Scheduled Caste / Scheduled Tribe / Caste” as a single notified question in the forty-question schedule.
  • For ethnicity the significant part is the tribe column and the religion column rather than the caste column.
  • An accurate ST count will reopen questions about the adequacy of ST reservation and about which communities the list omits — and the Sarna code demand, pressed again by Jharkhand for 2027, is the point at which counting and recognition become the same act.
• Ladakh’s demand for Sixth Schedule status is the most important new ethnic-autonomy claim in India — a demand that the North-Eastern instrument be extended to the Himalayan west.
  • It combines statehood, Sixth Schedule protection, a public service commission and parliamentary representation, grounded in the fear that a small population with no legislature cannot protect its land, employment and demographic composition.
  • The agitation turned violent in Leh in September 2025, with four deaths; Sonam Wangchuk was detained under the National Security Act and released in March 2026, after which talks resumed without agreement.
  • Administrative concessions — eighty-five per cent job reservation for residents and one-third reservation for women in the hill councils, notified in 2025 — have not settled the demand: the instrumental-remedy-for-symbolic-grievance pattern once again.
• Section 6A of the Citizenship Act was upheld in October 2024, sustaining the 1971 cut-off in Assam and with it the validity of a state-specific citizenship regime — asymmetry in the domain where India is otherwise most uniform.
• Delimitation is the emerging federal fault line, and it is ethnic-adjacent rather than ethnic.
  • Seat allocation has been frozen at the 1971 census since the Forty-second Amendment, and the Eighty-fourth Amendment extended the freeze until after the first census taken after 2026 — which 2027 now triggers.
  • Southern states argue that reallocation on current population would penalise them for successful demographic transition, and Tamil Nadu convened a joint action committee pressing for “fair delimitation”. The dispute is structurally ethnic because the north-south division it tracks is also linguistic.
• A permanent settlement for the Gorkha hills is back on the table.
  • After a tripartite meeting the Union government announced in August 2026 a committee headed by a former deputy national security adviser to finalise a “permanent political solution” for the hill areas of West Bengal within the Constitution — language that rules out statehood and leaves the form of enhanced autonomy open.

Conclusion

The Indian answer to ethnicity has been to refuse the question most states in its position asked. It never tried to establish what Indians essentially are, and so never had to decide whose culture the answer would be. It built institutions instead — in which a linguistic community could govern a state, a tribe could keep its customary law, and a region could bargain for money.

• The comparison is the proof that it worked. States that demanded cultural agreement as the price of unity — Pakistan over Bengali, Sri Lanka over Sinhala, Yugoslavia and the USSR over their national questions — lost territory or ceased to exist; India, which demanded only political loyalty, has not lost a state.
• The mechanism is not virtue but multiplicity — Muni’s fluid identities, Manor’s overlapping memberships and Brass’s competing elites describe one thing: too many cross-cutting cleavages for any single one to become a boundary.
• The remaining problems are those the model does not reach — where the state’s presence is administrative rather than political, where a group is a minority in its own homeland, and where the demand is for recognition rather than resources. Those are exactly the places where conflict has lasted.
• The current test is whether accommodation still has room to move. Ladakh asks for an instrument that already exists; the Gorkha hills are offered a third council; the census is about to count communities that have spent decades arguing about how they should be named.
  • The instruments exist, and what has always decided the outcome is whether the leadership at the centre is disposed to use them before the movement peaks rather than after.