Tribe and Nation-State: Indigenous Rights, Settler States and India Compared

Anthropology Optional › Paper II › Unit 08: Religions, Tribes and the Nation-State

8.2 Tribe and nation state – a comparative study of tribal communities in India and other countries.

Official Syllabus: Paper II, Unit 8.2

This article compares how states, India among them, treat the tribal and indigenous peoples inside their borders. The Fifth and Sixth Schedules are explained in 7.1, Nehru’s Tribal Panchsheel in 7.2, national integration in 7.3a, and the colonial administration of tribal areas in 7.3b and 9.1a; each is summarised here only where a comparison needs it.

1. Tribe, Nation and State: The Concepts

Example first: the Naga claim to be a nation. In 1951 the Naga National Council under A.Z. Phizo held a plebiscite in which, by its own count, almost all voters chose independence. The Indian state saw the Naga Hills as part of the territory it inherited from British India; many Nagas saw themselves as a nation that had never agreed to join any state. In Indian law the same people were Scheduled Tribes; in their own politics they were a nation. Nagaland became a state in 1963, and talks with Naga groups still continue. The case shows the core problem: tribe, nation and state are different kinds of unit, and they rarely coincide.

1.1 State, nation and nation-state

The three words are often used as if they meant the same thing. The table separates them.

Term	Meaning	Key scholar	Example
State	A political organisation claiming supreme authority over a territory	Max Weber: the state claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in a territory (“Politics as a Vocation”, 1919)	The Indian Union
Nation	A people who see themselves as one community through shared history, language or myths	Benedict Anderson: an “imagined community” (1983)	The Naga or Mizo sense of peoplehood
Nation-state	A state whose boundaries are claimed to coincide with one nation	Ernest Gellner: the political and the national unit should be congruent (1983)	Iceland, Portugal, Japan
Multinational state	A state that openly contains several peoples	Anthony D. Smith: nations grow from an ethnic core, the ethnie (1986)	India, Switzerland, China

• Weber, the German sociologist, stressed force and territory: the state claims the last word over land, forest and law everywhere, including where a tribe has its own customary authority.
• Gellner, the British-Czech philosopher and anthropologist (Nations and Nationalism), linked nationalism to industrial society, which needs one language, mass schooling and mobile labour. Modern states therefore push cultural uniformity, and small, distinct groups feel this push most.
• Anderson, the Irish-born political scientist (Imagined Communities), showed that nations are built through print, schools, maps and censuses. This explains how “Naga” or “Jharkhandi” identities were made through contact (the theory of ethnicity is in 7.3a).

Why this matters: the nation-state idea assumes one people per state, and almost no state fits it. The gap produces minorities, and tribes are the minorities whose claims rest most on land and prior presence.

1.2 Types of state in relation to their peoples

States differ in how close they come to “one nation, one state”.

Type	Feature	Examples
Near-ideal nation-state	Ethnic and political boundaries largely coincide	Iceland, Portugal; Japan, though it has the indigenous Ainu of Hokkaido
Multinational state	Several language or ethnic groups share one political identity	Switzerland (four national languages), India
Stateless nation	A strong national identity but no state	Kurds across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria
Settler state	Built by colonists on lands of indigenous peoples who became minorities	USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand

In settler states the line between “indigenous” and “settler” is sharp and recent. In India, centuries of migration and mixing blur it. This single difference explains much of India’s position on the word “indigenous” (§3).

1.3 Tribe and nation: are tribes “nations”?

• Tribe as a political form: Marshall Sahlins, the American anthropologist (Tribesmen, 1968), described tribes as segmentary societies of similar kin units with no central ruler, between band and chiefdom.
• Tribe as a product of states: Morton Fried, an American anthropologist (The Notion of Tribe, 1975), argued that most historically known tribes were “secondary” formations, shaped by states and colonial powers that needed bounded units to rule, tax and count. Colonial censuses in India did the same (see 7.3b).
• Tribes as nations: in North America many peoples call themselves nations (the Navajo Nation, Canada’s First Nations); the word claims political standing. George Manuel called them the “Fourth World” (1974).
• Tribes that built states: Surajit Sinha, the Indian anthropologist, showed in “State Formation and Rajput Myth in Tribal Central India” (1962) how Bhumij chiefs became kings by claiming Rajput descent; the Gond kingdom of Garha-Mandla and the Ahom kingdom of Assam are further examples. The tribe–state relation is old and two-way.

1.4 Theocratic state and secular, liberal, democratic state

A theocratic state draws political authority from religion: rulers govern in the name of God or as sacred persons, and religious law is state law. A secular, liberal, democratic state keeps the state apart from any one religion, rests authority on the consent of citizens and protects individual rights, including freedom of belief.

Point	Theocratic state	Secular, liberal, democratic state
Source of authority	God, sacred law or a sacred ruler	The people, through a constitution and elections
Law	Religious law is state law	Made by legislatures, equal for all faiths
Examples	Vatican City; Iran since 1979; historic Tibet under the Dalai Lamas; Shilluk divine kingship	India (secularism part of the basic structure, S.R. Bommai, 1994); France (1905 separation law); USA (First Amendment)

• Tribal theocracy: E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the British anthropologist, described the Shilluk of southern Sudan, whose king (reth) embodied the founding hero Nyikang, so that the king’s health stood for the kingdom’s welfare (The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk, 1948). In the Himalaya, Sikkim‘s Buddhist Chogyal kings ruled from 1642 until Sikkim joined India in 1975.
• Separation within tribes: among the Munda, the headman (munda) handles secular affairs and the priest (pahan) the rites; among the Santal, the manjhi and the naeke are different men. Ritual and political life are linked but not fused.
• Today: India’s secular Constitution protects tribal faiths (Article 25) and lets Sixth Schedule councils apply customary law; the demand for a Sarna religion code in the Census uses a secular state’s language of rights (see 8.1).

2. Why Tribes and Nation-States Clash

Example first: Niyamgiri. The Dongria Kondh of the Niyamgiri hills (Odisha) worship the hilltop as the seat of their god Niyam Raja. A company planned to mine its bauxite. For the state the minerals were national wealth; for the Dongria the hill was a sacred being and the source of their streams and forest food. In April 2013 the Supreme Court (Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forests) ruled that the gram sabhas of the affected villages must decide whether the project harmed their religious and forest rights; all twelve gram sabhas consulted rejected it. The case shows two logics over the same land, and one way a democracy can settle the clash: by consulting the people.

2.1 Two logics

Real cases are mixtures, but the contrast explains why conflict recurs.

Domain	Nation-state logic	Tribal logic
Authority	One supreme authority over the whole territory	Authority in clans and village councils
Land	Private or state property; eminent domain (the state’s power to take land for public use)	Community land tied to ancestors and deities
Resources	Minerals and forests belong to the state	Forest, water and hills are sacred commons
Law	One written law	Customary law, settled by elders
Boundaries	Fixed international borders	Kin and trade across borders
Development	Growth in output and income	Security, autonomy and continuity

Unrest so often follows projects because the state sees national resources where the tribe sees its homeland. Consent mechanisms (gram sabha decisions under PESA and the Forest Rights Act) reduce conflict because they let the tribal logic speak inside the state’s own procedures.

2.2 Anthropological readings

• Pierre Clastres, a French anthropologist (Society Against the State, 1974), argued from Amazonian peoples that some societies actively prevent a ruling power from forming: chiefs had prestige but no command. Such tribes are not “pre-state” but anti-state by design.
• James C. Scott, an American political scientist and anthropologist (The Art of Not Being Governed, 2009), described the uplands of South-East Asia, which he called Zomia (reaching into north-east India), as a refuge where hill peoples escaped lowland states through shifting cultivation, mobility and oral tradition. Roads and fenced borders have since closed most such refuges.
• The Indian debate: G.S. Ghurye saw tribes as “backward Hindus” to be absorbed; Verrier Elwin first favoured protection, then helped shape integration in the North-East (the debate is in 4b). Virginius Xaxa, the tribal sociologist, argues that tribes are peoples with a claim to self-governance, not only “backward” citizens awaiting development.

2.3 How states have dealt with tribes: five responses

States have answered the tribal question in five broad ways, from the most to the least coercive.

Response	What the state does	Examples
Extermination or expulsion	Kills or drives out the people to take land	Tasmania (nineteenth century); US Indian Removal (1830s)
Isolation	Keeps them apart in reserves	US reservations; British India’s excluded areas (1935)
Assimilation	Erases language and custom	Residential and boarding schools in Canada, the USA and Australia; Soviet policy in the North
Integration	Joins them to national life with safeguards for identity	India’s Panchsheel and Schedules
Self-determination	Recognises self-government, land and treaties	Nunavut (1999); Sami parliaments; US tribal self-determination (1975); Bolivia (2009)

Settler states moved, slowly and unevenly, down this list. India began at integration in 1950, but practice often slid towards assimilation (schooling in dominant languages) and dispossession (projects).

2.4 Tribal unrest as incompatibility with the nation-state

Tribal unrest can be read as a mismatch between tribal life and the demands of the nation-state. Four points of friction recur; causes and cases of unrest are detailed in 7.3a.

• Territory: Nagas, Mizos and Chins live on both sides of the India–Myanmar border. In February 2024 the Union government announced the end of the Free Movement Regime, which had let hill people within 16 km of the border cross without visas; later rules allowed regulated passes within 10 km. Naga and Mizo bodies objected that the border divides clans and families.
• Resources: mines and dams in Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh turn homelands into national resource zones (see 6.3a).
• Authority: the Pathalgadi movement in Khunti (Jharkhand, 2017–18) erected stone slabs declaring the gram sabha supreme, quoting the Fifth Schedule; the state treated parts of it as unlawful.

Why this reading matters: it moves the explanation from “lawless tribes” to structural friction, so the remedy lies in institutions that make room for difference (autonomy, consent, customary law within the Constitution), not only in policing.

2.5 Tribes and the nation-state on issues of governance

Issue	Tension	India’s present answer	Weakness
Land	Loss to outsiders and projects	Fifth Schedule regulations; Samatha (1997); LARR Act 2013	Benami transfers; acquisition for “public purpose”
Forest	State control versus customary use	Forest Rights Act 2006; community forest resource rights	Rejected claims; slow recognition
Self-rule	Officials versus village councils	PESA 1996; Sixth Schedule councils	Weak state rules; councils short of funds
Representation	Small numbers in national politics	47 reserved Lok Sabha seats	Elite capture; party control

3. Indigenous Peoples: The International Frame and India’s Position

3.1 Who are “indigenous peoples”?

José R. Martínez Cobo, the UN Special Rapporteur whose study was completed in 1986–87, gave the most cited working definition: indigenous peoples have a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies on their lands, see themselves as distinct from the now-dominant sectors, are non-dominant, and want to pass on their territories and identity. Four marks recur: priority in time, cultural distinctiveness, self-identification and experience of subjugation. The UN Declaration deliberately gives no definition, so that peoples can identify themselves.

3.2 From ILO 107 to UNDRIP

International law moved from integration to self-determination in fifty years. The table follows the three main instruments.

Instrument	Spirit	Key points	India
ILO Convention 107 (1957), Indigenous and Tribal Populations	Integration; paternal protection	Covered “tribal and semi-tribal populations”; protected land but treated distinct cultures as a stage to pass through	Ratified 29 September 1958; still in force for India
ILO Convention 169 (1989), Indigenous and Tribal Peoples	Respect for distinct cultures as permanent	Self-identification (Art. 1); consultation in good faith (Art. 6); peoples set their own development priorities (Art. 7); rights to lands traditionally occupied (Art. 14); relocation only with free and informed consent, save exceptions (Art. 16)	Not ratified; in force for 24 states (2024), the latest being Germany (2021)
UNDRIP (13 September 2007)	Self-determination and collective rights	Autonomy in internal affairs (Arts. 3–4); no forcible removal without free, prior and informed consent (Art. 10); FPIC before projects (Art. 32); contacts across borders (Art. 36); states’ territorial integrity protected (Art. 46)	Voted in favour (143 for, 4 against, 11 abstentions), with an understanding (§3.3)

• The shift explained: Convention 107 assumed tribes would and should merge into the nation; by the 1980s indigenous organisations rejected this as assimilation by law. Convention 169 replaced “populations” with “peoples” (a word implying collective rights) and made consultation central. UNDRIP went on to self-determination, but within existing states.
• The four objectors: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA voted against UNDRIP in 2007, fearing land claims and vetoes; all four endorsed it by 2010 (Australia 2009; New Zealand, the USA and Canada 2010). Bolivia made it national law first (Law 3760, November 2007); Russia abstained.

3.3 India’s position: “all Indians are indigenous”

At the General Assembly in 2007 India read indigenous rights as belonging to peoples descended from the inhabitants at the time of conquest or colonisation, the Convention 169 definition, and declared: “we regard the entire population of India at the time of our independence, and its successors, to be indigenous.” It added that self-determination applies only to peoples under foreign domination and cannot impair a state’s territorial integrity. The argument has three parts:

• No settler colonisation: India had no settler majority that displaced a native population.
• Long mixing: millennia of migration and intermarriage make “who came first” unanswerable.
• Protection already exists: Scheduled Tribes have reserved seats, the Schedules, PESA and the Forest Rights Act.

India restated this view in September 2026 at the Human Rights Council, calling references in an expert study to its tribal communities as “indigenous peoples” contrary to its constitutional framework.

3.4 The anthropological debate: tribe or indigenous?

Anthropologists disagree on whether the word “indigenous” helps or harms in India.

Against using “indigenous” in India	For using “indigenous” for Indian tribes
André Béteille, the Indian sociologist (“The Idea of Indigenous People”, 1998): the idea fits settler societies; in India first-comers cannot be separated from late-comers, and the term may create new hierarchies of belonging	Virginius Xaxa (“Tribes as Indigenous People of India”, 1999): tribes are non-dominant, territorially rooted and culturally distinct, and were colonised internally; the term captures their collective claim to land and self-rule
Adam Kuper, the South African-born anthropologist (“The Return of the Native”, 2003): the concept revives the idea of “primitive” peoples and rests on descent, which can justify excluding others	Benedict Kingsbury, the New Zealand legal scholar (1998), on the “Asian controversy“: use a flexible set of indicators (self-identification, attachment to land, non-dominance, distinct culture) rather than strict priority

Neither side denies that India’s tribes suffered land loss and marginalisation. The dispute is over what follows: Béteille and Kuper fear a politics of origins that sorts citizens by ancestry; Xaxa and Kingsbury see a politics of rights for non-dominant peoples. The Adivasi (“original inhabitant”) movement uses the word as a claim to dignity. The Constitution’s answer is a third way: protection by status (Scheduled Tribe), not by origin.

3.5 “Tribe” in India versus “indigenous” elsewhere

Point	“Scheduled Tribe” in India	“Indigenous” in other countries
Basis	Administrative listing (Article 342)	Self-identification plus historical priority
Historical frame	Colonial classification of “backward” groups	Settler colonisation and dispossession
Rights	Welfare, reservation, protective laws	Collective land title, treaties, self-government
Weakness	Uneven lists across states (705 groups at the 2011 Census; Hattee added in 2023 by political decision)	Hard proof of continuity (Australian native title); blood-quantum rules (USA)

“Tribe” in India is a category of the state’s making that tribes have turned into a political identity; “indigenous” abroad is increasingly a category of self-assertion that states have been made to recognise.

4. Comparative Studies: Tribal and Indigenous Peoples in Other Countries

4.1 United States: from removal to tribal sovereignty

• Removal: the Indian Removal Act (1830) forced eastern peoples west of the Mississippi; on the Trail of Tears (1838–39) an estimated 4,000 Cherokee died.
• Allotment: the Dawes Act (1887) broke reservations into individual plots and sold the “surplus”; tribal land fell from about 138 million to 48 million acres by 1934. The aim was to dissolve the tribe into individual farmers.
• Boarding schools: a federal inquiry (2024) listed 417 schools and at least 973 child deaths; President Biden apologised on 25 October 2024.
• Reorganisation: citizenship (1924); the Indian Reorganization Act (1934) ended allotment; after a failed 1950s “termination” of tribes, the Self-Determination Act (1975) reversed course.
• Sovereignty today: 575 federally recognised tribes (the Lumbee added by law in December 2025) act as “domestic dependent nations” with their own governments, courts and police. Tribal casinos (Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 1988) enriched some tribes and not most. In McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) the Supreme Court held the Muscogee (Creek) reservation had never been dissolved. Poverty and diabetes remain far above the national average.

4.2 Canada: residential schools and reconciliation

• The Indian Act (1876) made the government guardian of “Indians” and for decades banned ceremonies such as the potlatch (the North-west Coast gift feast studied by Franz Boas).
• At least 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children passed through church-run, state-funded residential schools until the late 1990s. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2008–2015) called the policy “cultural genocide” and issued 94 Calls to Action.
• Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 affirms “existing aboriginal and treaty rights”; the Inuit territory of Nunavut was created on 1 April 1999; the UNDRIP Act followed in 2021. Indigenous people number about 1.8 million, 5% of the population (2021).

4.3 Australia: from terra nullius to native title

• Terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”) let Britain treat Australia as empty in 1788, so no treaties were made.
• Stolen Generations: between about 1910 and 1970, between one in three and one in ten Aboriginal children were removed from their families (Bringing Them Home, 1997); Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised on 13 February 2008.
• Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (3 June 1992): the High Court rejected terra nullius and recognised the native title of the Meriam people of the Torres Strait; the Native Title Act 1993 followed. Claimants must show a continuing connection under traditional law, which many dispossessed groups cannot.
• Voice referendum (14 October 2023): a constitutional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament was defeated, 60.06% voting No and no state voting Yes. Indigenous Australians number 812,728, 3.2% (2021); Closing the Gap (2020) tracks gaps in health, schooling and imprisonment.

4.4 New Zealand: a treaty and biculturalism

• Treaty of Waitangi (6 February 1840): the English text ceded sovereignty; the Māori text ceded kawanatanga (governance) while guaranteeing tino rangatiratanga (full chieftainship). The two readings still shape politics.
• The Waitangi Tribunal (1975; claims back to 1840 from 1985) has led to settlements; Māori seats have existed since 1867 (seven today); te reo Māori is official since 1987.
• Nature as a person: the Te Urewera Act 2014 and Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) Act 2017 gave legal personhood to a forest and a river, following the Māori view of land as kin.
• A Treaty Principles Bill redefining the Treaty was defeated 112–11 on 10 April 2025. About one in six New Zealanders is Māori (2023).

4.5 Scandinavia: the Sami

• The Sami of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula faced policies of “Norwegianisation” that suppressed their language in schools.
• Protests against the Alta dam (1979–81) led to reform: Sami Parliaments in Norway (1989), Sweden (1993) and Finland (1996); Norway was the first state to ratify ILO 169 (1990).
• In the Fosen case (11 October 2021) Norway’s Supreme Court held that wind farms on reindeer pastures violated the herders’ right to enjoy their own culture (Article 27, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights); settlements with the herders followed by 2024. Even rich welfare states face the clash between “green” development and indigenous land use.

4.6 Latin America: Bolivia’s plurinational state

• Evo Morales, an Aymara, became Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2006. The 2009 Constitution made Bolivia a “Plurinational State”, guaranteed self-determination of indigenous nations within the unity of the state and made Spanish and 36 indigenous languages official.
• A highway through the TIPNIS indigenous territory (2011) set lowland peoples against that same government: recognition did not end the conflict between extraction and territory.

4.7 Africa: indigenous minorities in states of many tribes

Nationalism in India and Africa. In India the freedom movement built a mass national identity on shared civilisational symbols; Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and Its Fragments, 1993) argued that Indian nationalists conceded Western superiority in the material sphere but claimed sovereignty in the spiritual sphere of religion, family and culture. In Africa, borders drawn at the Berlin Conference (1884–85) enclosed many tribes in one colony, and mission Christianity spread widely, so leaders sought other unifying ideas: Ethiopianist churches that broke away over racism in mission hierarchies, Léopold Senghor‘s négritude (pride in Black African values), Pan-Africanism. Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan scholar (Citizen and Subject, 1996), showed how British indirect rule turned “native authorities” and customary law into tools of control, making tribe an administrative unit of the colonial state.

Point	India’s states for tribes	Africa’s “tribal” nation-states
Status	Units of a federation (Nagaland 1963, Meghalaya 1972, Mizoram 1987; Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh 2000)	Sovereign states
Tribe and state	Tribes are minorities (8.6%) with protective rights	Tribes are building blocks of national politics; ethnic voting and patronage
Conflict	Autonomy movements met by statehood or councils	Civil war and secession bids (Biafra, 1967–70); genocide in Rwanda (1994)
Borders	Redrawn by Parliament	Colonial borders kept by the OAU’s 1964 decision

Indigenous peoples in Africa. Since almost all Africans are literally “indigenous”, the term is used for hunter-gatherer and pastoral minorities marginalised by farmer-dominated states; the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights adopted its Working Group’s report on them in 2003.

• San (Botswana): after removals from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the High Court held on 13 December 2006 (Sesana) that residents had been deprived of their land without consent.
• Ogiek (Kenya): the African Court held on 26 May 2017 that evictions from the Mau Forest violated their rights to land, culture and religion.
• Maasai (Tanzania): in June 2022 the government demarcated 1,500 sq km of Loliondo as a game reserve and promoted relocation from Ngorongoro; it calls the relocation voluntary, while UN experts and rights groups reported forced evictions. The case mirrors Indian disputes over tiger reserves.

4.8 Asia: China, Russia, Japan and India’s neighbours

Asian states, like India, mostly avoid the word “indigenous” but handle minorities very differently.

Country	Category	Arrangement	Note
China	55 minority nationalities (shaoshu minzu), 8.89% (2020)	155 autonomous areas (5 regions, 30 prefectures, 120 counties)	Fei Xiaotong‘s “pluralistic unity” (1988); UN bodies criticise assimilation pressures
Russia	About 40 “small-numbered” peoples of the North, Siberia and Far East (under 50,000 each; about 250,000 people)	1999 law; clan communities, traditional-use territories	Soviet collectivisation and oil and gas extraction disrupted herding; RAIPON (1990) represents them
Japan	Ainu	Diet resolution (2008); Ainu Promotion Act (2019)	Recognition after long assimilation
Bangladesh	“Tribes, minor races, ethnic sects and communities” (2011 amendment)	Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord (1997) with hill councils	Rejects “indigenous” in law, like India
Philippines	Indigenous cultural communities	Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (1997): ancestral domain titles, FPIC	Strong law, uneven enforcement

The Asian cases show that institutions matter more than labels: Bangladesh and India reject “indigenous” yet have autonomy councils; China recognises nationalities yet keeps tight central control; the Philippines grants title, but enforcement depends on the state’s will.

5. India Compared: Protection, Autonomy and Affirmative Action

5.1 India’s model in brief

• Constitutional safeguards: STs are notified under Article 342; the Fifth Schedule gives the Governor powers over land transfer and regulation with Tribes Advisory Councils, and the Sixth Schedule sets up 10 autonomous district councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram (both explained in 7.1).
• Philosophy: Nehru’s Panchsheel (1959) asked that tribes develop “along the lines of their own genius“, keep their land and forest rights and be governed through their own institutions (record assessed in 7.2).
• Laws: PESA 1996, the Forest Rights Act 2006, the LARR Act 2013. The meaning of integration and “mainstream” is discussed in 7.3a.

5.2 Affirmative action in the USA and protective discrimination in India

Both countries use law to help groups that suffered historic injustice, by very different means. Marc Galanter, the American legal scholar (Competing Equalities, 1984), called India’s system “compensatory discrimination”; Indian usage also says “protective discrimination”.

Point	USA: affirmative action	India: protective discrimination for STs
Origin	Executive orders of 1961 (EO 10925) and 1965 (EO 11246)	The Constitution (1950)
Beneficiaries	Racial minorities and women; Native Americans as members of political units (tribes)	Notified Scheduled Tribes as groups
Method	Outreach, goals, diversity in admissions; quotas barred (Regents v. Bakke, 1978)	Quotas: 7.5% of central posts and seats; reserved legislative seats (Articles 330, 332)
Legal base	Equal protection, read strictly	Articles 15(4), 16(4), 46, 335; National Commission for STs (Article 338A, 2003)
Limits now	SFFA v. Harvard (2023) ended race-conscious admissions; EO 14173 (January 2025) revoked EO 11246	50% ceiling (Indra Sawhney, 1992), with the EWS exception (2022)
Critique	Benefits to the better-off; now largely dismantled	Benefits captured by advanced tribes; unfilled posts; no creamy layer for STs

• The key contrast: US preferences for Native Americans rest on tribal political status (the Supreme Court upheld an Indian hiring preference as political, not racial, in Morton v. Mancari, 1974); Indian ST benefits rest on a constitutional list. India gives quotas and reserved seats; the USA gives self-government and land held in trust.
• Why it matters: quotas bring individuals into jobs and legislatures but do little for collective land and self-rule; sovereignty protects the collective but leaves many members poor. A complete policy needs both.

5.3 India and other countries: the overall comparison

Dimension	India	Settler states	Others (Nordic, Bolivia, Africa, China)
History	Colonial land and forest laws; no settler majority	Conquest, removal, settler majority	Assimilation; conquest; colonial borders
Category	Scheduled Tribe (listed)	Indigenous, First Nations, native title	Sami; indigenous nations; nationalities
Land	Protective laws, forest rights	Trust land, treaties, native title	Grazing rights; territories; weak in Africa
Self-rule	Sixth Schedule councils, PESA	Tribal governments, Nunavut	Sami parliaments; autonomous regions
Facing the past	No formal apology; the Forest Rights Act admits “historical injustice“	Apologies (Australia 2008, Canada 2008, USA 2024); truth commissions	Norway’s commission (2023)

India’s formal framework compares well: few countries reserve legislative seats or write protections into the founding constitution. Its weakness lies in implementation and land loss, where the recent turn elsewhere to title, consent (FPIC) and truth-telling offers lessons; in turn, India’s guaranteed representation and territorial autonomy are models others have debated. Every case, from Norway to Bolivia, meets the same conflict when national development meets indigenous land.

6. Anthropology and Nation-Building

• Knowing the people: the Anthropological Survey of India (1945, first director B.S. Guha) documented communities; the People of India project under K.S. Singh (from 1985) profiled 4,635 communities and showed how much they share as well as how they differ.
• Shaping policy: Verrier Elwin, adviser for tribal affairs in NEFA, wrote A Philosophy for NEFA (1957), whose 1959 edition carried Nehru’s Panchsheel; ethnographic knowledge informed the Dhebar Commission (1960–61) and the Lokur criteria (1965), and Virginius Xaxa chaired the high-level committee of 2014. B.D. Sharma, as Commissioner for SCs and STs (1986–91), and B.K. Roy Burman argued for tribal self-rule, ideas that fed into PESA.
• Integration as a two-way process: N.K. Bose described the “Hindu method of tribal absorption”; Surajit Sinha explained the tribe–caste continuum. Both told the state that integration is slow and reciprocal, not an order.
• Beyond India: Ruth Benedict‘s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) informed American policy in post-war Japan; Talal Asad (Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, 1973) warned that anthropology had also served colonial rule.

Why this matters: a state that does not know its peoples governs them by uniform rules that fit no one. Anthropology supplies the local knowledge, comparison and respect for difference that let integration work without assimilation.

Key Terms

Term	Meaning in simple words
State	A government with supreme authority over a territory
Nation	A people who feel they form one community
Nation-state	A state claimed to be the home of one nation
Settler state	A state built by colonists on indigenous land
Eminent domain	The state’s power to take land for public use
Secondary tribe	A tribe shaped by contact with states (Fried)
Zomia	Scott’s name for the hill zone where peoples escaped states
Indigenous peoples	Descendants of pre-colonial inhabitants who stay distinct and non-dominant
Self-identification	Being recognised as indigenous because a people says so
FPIC	Free, prior and informed consent before projects on indigenous land
Terra nullius	“Land belonging to no one”, a fiction used to deny native rights
Native title	Traditional land rights recognised by courts (Australia)
Plurinational state	A state recognising several nations within it (Bolivia)
Protective discrimination	Reservation and special laws for disadvantaged groups in India
Affirmative action	US measures to widen opportunity for minorities and women
Theocracy	A state ruled in the name of religion

Contemporary Developments

• India at the UN (September 2026): India told the Human Rights Council that its entire population is indigenous and rejected references to its tribal communities as “indigenous peoples”.
• India–Myanmar border: Naga bodies in Manipur sought restoration of the Free Movement Regime in 2025, citing kin across the border.
• USA: the Lumbee became the 575th federally recognised tribe (December 2025); federal contractor affirmative action ended with EO 14173 (2025).
• New Zealand: the Treaty Principles Bill was defeated 112–11 (April 2025).

Diagrams to Master

• Topic map: six themes with one case each.
• Two logics: state versus tribe on authority, land, resources, law and borders; three Indian flashpoints; five state responses.
• Indigenous rights timeline: 1957, 1958, 1986–87, 1989, 2000, 2007 (143–4–11), 2010, 2026.
• Country grid: past policy, turning point and present arrangement for eight cases.
• Affirmative action versus protective discrimination: origin, method, legal base, limits, critique.

Revision Grid

Scholar	Work (year)	Key idea
Max Weber	“Politics as a Vocation” (1919)	State as monopoly of legitimate force
Ernest Gellner	Nations and Nationalism (1983)	Political and national units should be congruent
Benedict Anderson	Imagined Communities (1983)	Nations imagined through print and schools
Morton Fried	The Notion of Tribe (1975)	Tribes as secondary formations
Pierre Clastres	Society Against the State (1974)	Societies that prevent a ruling power
James C. Scott	The Art of Not Being Governed (2009)	Zomia: hill peoples escaping states
Surajit Sinha	“State Formation and Rajput Myth” (1962)	Tribal chiefs became Rajput kings
André Béteille	“The Idea of Indigenous People” (1998)	“Indigenous” fits settler societies, not India
Virginius Xaxa	“Tribes as Indigenous People of India” (1999)	Tribes as non-dominant, territorial peoples
Adam Kuper	“The Return of the Native” (2003)	Indigenism revives “primitive” and descent
Mahmood Mamdani	Citizen and Subject (1996)	Indirect rule made tribe an administrative unit
Partha Chatterjee	The Nation and Its Fragments (1993)	Material and spiritual spheres of nationalism
Marc Galanter	Competing Equalities (1984)	Compensatory discrimination

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