What is ethnonationalism? Examine the critical factors responsible for tribal discontent in India. (2019)
Ethnonationalism is the claim that the nation is constituted by descent rather than by residence or citizenship. In tribal India it is the form discontent takes wherever a community is territorially concentrated — which is why the two halves of this question belong together.
What ethnonationalism is
- Walker Connor (Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding, 1994) argued that a nation is a self-aware ethnic group — people who believe themselves ancestrally related. Loyalty is to kinship, real or imagined, so nationalism properly understood is always ethnonationalism, and state-building is not nation-building.
- Anthony D. Smith (The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 1986) showed that modern nations grow from pre-modern ethnies carrying myths of common descent, shared memories and a homeland.
- The contrast is with civic nationalism, where membership follows territory and citizenship rather than descent.
- For India, T. K. Oommen supplies the pivot: an ethnie holding its ancestral homeland is a nation. A tribal claim to homeland is therefore a national claim in the ethnic key — the Naga rejection of the Constitution in 1947, the Mizo insurgency from 1966, the Bodo demand, the Kuki-Zo demand for separate administration in Manipur.
- Dipankar Gupta sharpens the difference from communalism: ethnic mobilisation questions a group’s loyalty to the nation-state itself; communal mobilisation contests only the government’s even-handedness.
Examining the factors behind tribal discontent
- Land alienation is the oldest and strongest. Yet protective law already exists where discontent is fiercest — the Chotanagpur and Santhal Parganas tenancy laws. The grievance is about exceptions and enforcement, not absence: attempts to amend those laws in Jharkhand provoked the pathalgadi assertion of 2017–18, in which Munda villages declared gram sabha sovereignty.
- Forest law converts customary use into trespass. The Forest Rights Act, 2006 was meant to reverse this — 25,11,375 titles by 31 May 2025 — but as on 31 December 2025 about 36.4 per cent of claims stood rejected. A rights statute that turns a third of claimants back into encroachers manufactures the discontent it was meant to end.
- Displacement: the Xaxa Committee (2014) estimated that around 40 per cent of those displaced by dams are Scheduled Tribes. But displacement alone does not explain protest — Narmada and Koel-Karo produced movements where comparable projects produced only silent dispersal.
- Recognition and scheduling. Where tribes are territorially concentrated, ST status is a claim on land, seats and power, not a description of life. Manipur since 3 May 2023 is the extreme case; in September 2026 the state reported some 24,000 of about 60,000 displaced still in camps. Where tribes are dispersed, the same factor yields quiet exclusion rather than revolt.
- Political form. The Fifth Schedule offers protection where the Sixth Schedule offers self-government, and PESA, 1996 remains weakly implemented. The correlation is instructive: conflict subsided in Mizoram once autonomy was conceded in 1986, while the Fifth Schedule mineral belt carried left-wing extremism — affected districts falling from 126 in 2018 to 8 in December 2025, by coercion rather than redress.
What the examination shows
The factors are not additive. Following Neil Smelser, structural strain stays inert until a generalised belief and organised agents convert it. Virginius Xaxa adds the reflexive point: the identity now asserted against the state was partly produced by the state’s own classification. Discontent becomes ethnonationalism only where dispossession meets territorial concentration and a leadership able to speak the language of homeland.
Conclusion
Ethnonationalism is not the cause of tribal discontent but its most demanding expression. Where tribes command a territory, grievance is voiced as a nation’s claim; where they do not, it surfaces as a rights claim within the Constitution. The state has answered the first with accords and the second with schemes — which is why autonomy has settled conflicts that development has not.