Comment on the growing assertion of tribal community for autonomy in India. (2019)
Tribal assertion for autonomy is often read as a survival of primordial tribalism. The sociological evidence points the other way: it is a modern politics, produced by contact rather than isolation, and it asks for self-government within the Constitution rather than outside it.
The forms the assertion takes
- Statehood: Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh (2000) after decades of agitation; the Bodo demand, settled for now by the accord of 2020 creating the Bodoland Territorial Region.
- Extension of the Sixth Schedule: the sustained campaign in Ladakh for statehood and Sixth Schedule cover, which has run through fasts, mass marches, rounds of talks with the Home Ministry and, in September 2025, fatal violence in Leh.
- Self-rule under PESA: the pathalgadi movement in Khunti district of Jharkhand (2017–18), where Munda villages erected stone slabs declaring the gram sabha sovereign under the Fifth Schedule — met with sedition cases, later withdrawn.
- Resource sovereignty: after Niyamgiri (2013), gram sabha consent became the language in which mining is contested.
- Cultural autonomy: the Sarna code demand for a separate religion column, carried by a Jharkhand Assembly resolution in 2020 and pressed again before Census 2027.
Why it grows
- An educated tribal middle class, created by reservation and residential schooling, supplies leadership and translates grievance into constitutional vocabulary.
- Relative deprivation: tribals are a small share of the population but, on Walter Fernandes‘ widely cited estimate, some 40 per cent of the development-displaced. Dispossession is experienced as ethnic, not merely economic.
- Political opportunity structure: electoral democracy rewards ethnic mobilisation, so identity becomes a resource rather than a residue. Nandini Sundar, in Subalterns and Sovereigns (1997) on Bastar, shows that the state itself helped construct the tribal identity now turned against it.
The case for caution
- Autonomy institutions are capturable. Councils and new states have been dominated by tribal elites, and Jharkhand has not converted statehood into tribal control over land or minerals.
- Autonomous areas generate their own internal minorities — non-tribal residents and smaller tribes with no protection against the newly dominant group.
- Competitive scheduling and rival autonomy claims can fragment rather than empower, as overlapping demands in Assam show.
Conclusion
The assertion is best read as a demand for fuller citizenship, not for exit: its idiom is the Constitution’s own. The real difficulty is asymmetry of response — the state offers protection through the Fifth Schedule where it is being asked for self-government of the Sixth Schedule kind. Where autonomy has been conceded, as in Mizoram, conflict has subsided; where it is deferred, assertion hardens. That correlation is itself the argument for taking the demand seriously.