Write short note : Sources of tribal unrest in India. (1994)
Tribal unrest in India is chronic rather than episodic: a chronology compiled in 1971 counted some seventy tribal revolts between 1778 and 1970, and scarcely a major tribe of middle or eastern India has gone through the last two centuries without protest. Its sources lie in a single structural fact — outsiders have steadily acquired control over resources that tribal communities held by custom rather than by title.
Loss of the resource base
- Land alienation. Colonial settlement converted customary occupancy into transferable property, admitting moneylenders, traders and settlers. The tribal cultivator became a tenant, then a bonded labourer, on land he had cleared. The diku — the outsider — is the oldest category in tribal political language.
- Indebtedness. Cash obligations without cash income made the moneylender the point at which land changed hands, which is why so many revolts, from the Kol and Santhal risings to Birsa Munda’s ulgulan, targeted lender and landlord before they targeted the state.
- Forest law. State monopoly over forests from the nineteenth century criminalised shifting cultivation, grazing and the collection of minor produce. The Forest Rights Act, 2006 was intended to reverse this, yet as on 31 December 2025 some 36.4 per cent of claims stood rejected — a remedy that reproduces the grievance.
Development and displacement
- Dams, mines, steel towns and sanctuaries were built disproportionately in tribal districts. The Xaxa Committee (2014) estimated that about 40 per cent of those displaced by dams are Scheduled Tribes, against a population share of 8.6 per cent in Census 2011.
- Resettlement transfers people without transferring the commons, so compensation never covers what was lost. Displacement also breaks the link between community and territory on which tribal social organisation rests.
Identity, recognition and administration
- Cultural threat. Language loss, missionary and Hindu reform pressures, and the demeaning of tribal religion generate revivalist and reform movements — the Bhagat movements among the Bhils, Raghunath Murmu’s work among the Santhals, and today the Sarna code demand before Census 2027.
- Recognition as a scarce good. Because Scheduled Tribe status carries land protection, reservation and Fifth Schedule cover, inclusion in the list is contested, as the violence in Manipur after 3 May 2023 showed.
- Administrative failure. Where police, revenue officials and courts are ignorant of customary tenure, the law itself appears as the instrument of dispossession. PESA, 1996 and the Fifth Schedule remain weakly enforced.
How sociologists have classified these sources
- Surajit Sinha grouped tribal movements into ethnic rebellion, reform movements, political autonomy within the Indian Union, secessionist movements and agrarian unrest.
- K. S. Singh classified post-independence movements as agrarian, sanskritising, cultural and political, and read the Jharkhand movement as a passage “from ethnicity to regionalism”.
- Ghanshyam Shah‘s simpler triad — ethnic, agrarian and political — captures the recurring pattern: an economic source, expressed in a cultural idiom, seeking a political remedy.
Conclusion
The sources of tribal unrest are not many but one, refracted: dispossession of a territorially rooted community by an expanding market and state. What changes over time is the idiom — millenarian revolt in the nineteenth century, statehood and autonomy demands in the twentieth, rights litigation and gram sabha consent in the twenty-first. Unrest will persist while protective law continues to be honoured in its exceptions.