What factors account for the resurgence of ethnic identity movements in India? What, according to you, is the proper strategy of integration of ethnic groups in the mainstream? (2008)
The nation-building model adopted after 1947 assumed that development would dissolve ascriptive identities into secular, class-based ones. Ethnicity instead returned as a resource in modern competition.
Factors behind the resurgence
- Failure of the modernisation premise. Ascription did not fade; it became the most efficient basis for organising claims, because the state itself distributes benefits through ascriptive categories — Scheduled Tribe lists, reservation, the Fifth and Sixth Schedules. The Meitei demand for Scheduled Tribe status, which triggered the Manipur violence from 3 May 2023, is a claim on those categories.
- Uneven development and dispossession. Mining, dams and industrial corridors displaced tribal populations across the resource-rich interior. Susana Devalle (Discourse of Ethnicity, 1992) read Jharkhand’s tribal idiom as the language of a class experience of dispossession.
- Competitive democracy and elite mobilisation. Paul R. Brass (Ethnicity and Nationalism, 1991) showed regional elites selecting symbols to build constituencies; Rajni Kothari located this in the widening participation of the 1980s and 1990s, when coalition politics made ethnic bargaining pay.
- Migration and nativism. Myron Weiner‘s Sons of the Soil (1978) links nativist assertion to competition for modern-sector jobs; Sanjib Baruah (India Against Itself, 1999) showed how Assamese subnationalism grew from anxieties over demography and control. That anxiety persists in the Assam Accord’s Clause 6 and in the 2019–20 protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which in Assam were about identity rather than religion.
- Globalisation and a new vocabulary. Liberalisation weakened the developmental state’s legitimacy, while global indigenous-rights discourse and vernacular and social media gave local assertion a ready idiom — what Manuel Castells calls a resistance identity.
My strategy of integration
Integration must mean equal citizenship with recognised difference. Assimilation provokes the assertion it seeks to end; isolation freezes groups in backwardness.
- Constitutionalise, do not merely negotiate. India already practises asymmetric federalism through Articles 371A–371J and the Sixth Schedule. Accords that are signed and then stall breed cynicism: the Naga framework agreement of 3 August 2015 remains unconsummated, and Assam has accepted 52 of the Justice Biplab Sarma Committee’s recommendations on Clause 6 while deferring those needing constitutional amendment.
- Recognition with redistribution. Nancy Fraser‘s point applies directly: recognition without redistribution is hollow. Autonomous councils need untied funds, real legislative competence and a statutory share of resource rents, and PESA and the Forest Rights Act, 2006 must be implemented in earnest.
- Political settlement before coercion. Shrinking the AFSPA “disturbed area” footprint across Assam, Nagaland and Manipur from 2022 was the right direction; Manipur, under President’s Rule from February 2025 to February 2026, shows force cannot substitute for a settlement.
- Protect the minorities each settlement creates. Every new autonomous unit produces its own outsiders — the Kuki-Zo in Manipur, non-Bodos in the Bodoland Territorial Region. Will Kymlicka‘s Multicultural Citizenship (1995) permits group-differentiated rights as external protections, not as licence for internal repression; T. K. Oommen adds that ethnicity and nationality must not be conflated with nationhood.
Conclusion
Ethnic resurgence is a symptom of unequal development mediated by competitive democracy, not of excess diversity. The test of integration is simple: whether a Bodo, a Naga or a Ladakhi can be fully Indian without ceasing to be themselves.