Identity Conflicts and Internal Security

The Tribal Question

In the previous discussion of the development deficit, land alienation and displacement appeared as drivers of grievance. Here we descend from the abstract to the concrete, to the specific constitutional promises the Republic made to its tribal citizens, and to the manner in which those promises were left largely unkept.

This is the heart of the matter, because the map of India’s most entrenched insurgency overlaps, almost exactly, with the map of its Scheduled Areas. The tribal question is therefore not a welfare footnote to internal security; it is close to its centre.

The Constitution did not treat tribal India as an afterthought. It built a distinct, protective architecture around it, one designed to shield tribal land, culture and self-governance from the pressures of the mainstream.

The tragedy, and the security lesson, is that a robust legal shield left unused offers no protection at all, and its very existence on paper deepens the sense of betrayal when it fails on the ground.

The Constitutional Architecture — Fifth and Sixth Schedules

The foundational provision is Article 244, which provides for the administration of tribal areas through two separate schedules.

• Article 244(1) applies the Fifth Schedule to the Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes in states other than the four north-eastern states named below.
• Article 244(2) applies the Sixth Schedule to the tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. A related provision, Article 244A, empowers Parliament to create an autonomous state within Assam, a demand that still echoes in the region.

The two schedules embody two very different philosophies of protection, and the contrast between them is one of the most instructive in the entire subject.

Feature	Fifth Schedule	Sixth Schedule
Applies to	Scheduled Areas in ten states of mainland India (Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh)	Tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram
Key institution	Tribes Advisory Council (TAC) — advisory only	Autonomous District Councils and Regional Councils — genuinely empowered
Nature of powers	Protective and advisory; real authority rests with the Governor and the state	Legislative, executive, judicial and financial powers devolved to the councils
Role of the Governor	Wide special powers to bar or modify laws in Scheduled Areas and make regulations	More limited; councils exercise substantive self-rule
Effect in practice	Largely a dormant shield; protections seldom activated	Substantive self-governance, though not free of friction

The design intent of the Fifth Schedule was to create a protective, self-governing enclave, insulating tribal land and custom from acquisitive outside interests while the community found its own pace of engagement with the mainstream.

The dysfunction lies in the gap between this intent and its use: the Sixth Schedule devolved real power to elected councils, while the Fifth Schedule’s central institution was left merely advisory and its most potent tools were left, in effect, asleep. It was precisely this asymmetry that the later official review of tribal policy would identify as a core failure.

Tribes Advisory Councils and the Governor’s Special Powers

Two instruments sit at the core of the Fifth Schedule, and understanding why both fell into disuse is essential to understanding the growth of extremism in these areas.

The Tribes Advisory Council is constituted in every state with Scheduled Areas, with up to twenty members, three-fourths of them drawn from the tribal legislators of the state. On paper it is the tribal community’s voice in its own governance.

In practice its remit is purely advisory, it can recommend but not decide, it meets rarely and irregularly, and its counsel is easily set aside. A voice with no vote is soon ignored.

Even more consequential are the Governor’s special powers. The Governor may direct that a law of Parliament or the state legislature shall not apply to a Scheduled Area, or shall apply only with modifications, and may make regulations to protect tribal interests, prohibiting or restricting the transfer of tribal land and regulating money-lending.

These are formidable protective tools. Yet they have been invoked so seldom that they amount to a sleeping safeguard, present in the text, absent in the life of the Scheduled Areas. The importance of this point cannot be overstated, for it is the very hinge of the argument connecting the Fifth Schedule to the spread of Left-Wing Extremism.

PESA 1996 — Promise and the Implementation Gap

If the Fifth Schedule was the shield, the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, universally known as PESA, was meant to be the sword of tribal self-rule.

Enacted on the recommendation of the Bhuria Committee (1995), it extended the Panchayati Raj system to the Scheduled Areas but with a radical difference: it placed the Gram Sabha, the assembly of the whole village, at the very centre of governance.

The promise of PESA was genuinely far-reaching. It recognised the competence of the Gram Sabha to safeguard tribal customs, community resources and customary modes of dispute resolution, and it gave the village assembly a decisive voice over the things that matter most to a tribal community.

• Consultation before land acquisition in Scheduled Areas and before resettlement of those displaced by projects.
• Mandatory recommendation of the Gram Sabha before granting prospecting licences or mining leases for minor minerals.
• Ownership of minor forest produce, and control over local plans, institutions and functionaries.
• Power to prevent land alienation and to restore unlawfully alienated tribal land.

The implementation gap has been vast. PESA has been widely described as having been reduced to a “paper tiger.” State governments were slow to frame the subordinate rules needed to operationalise it; existing state laws that contradicted PESA were left unamended; and a bureaucratic culture often contemptuous of tribal self-governance simply declined to cede control.

Most cynically, in some places the letter of the law was evaded by converting rural panchayats in Scheduled Areas into urban local bodies, since PESA’s Gram Sabha consent applies to village councils, hundreds of such conversions allowed mining and industrial clearances to proceed without the tribal consent PESA demanded.

Forest Rights Act 2006, Samatha and Niyamgiri

The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, the Forest Rights Act or FRA, was framed to undo what its own preamble calls the “historical injustice” done to forest-dwelling communities whose ancestral rights had never been formally recorded. It recognises both individual forest rights to land under cultivation and community forest rights over common resources, and, crucially, it makes the Gram Sabha the authority that initiates and verifies claims.

Two landmark judgments give this framework its teeth, and both are indispensable to a strong answer.

Two Landmark Judgments on Tribal Land Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997): The Supreme Court held that in a Scheduled Area the transfer of land, including government land, to non-tribals and to private mining companies is barred by the Fifth Schedule. The judgment affirmed that tribal land in Scheduled Areas is to be protected from commercial alienation, and that even the state may not hand it to private extractive interests in violation of the Schedule’s spirit. Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forests (2013) — the Niyamgiri case: The Court ruled that the consent of the Gram Sabha is a precondition before a mining project can proceed where it affects the cultural, religious and community rights of a tribal community. In what became known as India’s first environmental referendum, all twelve Gram Sabhas of the Niyamgiri hills unanimously rejected bauxite mining sacred to the Dongria Kondh. The case fused the powers of PESA and the FRA into a real veto in the hands of the village.

Yet on the ground the FRA has stumbled badly. The rate of rejection of claims has been extraordinarily high, community forest rights and the habitat rights of Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups have seen very little progress, Gram Sabha meetings are often not convened at the proper level, claimants are frequently not even informed of rejection, and the administration of the Act by the forest department, whose institutional culture many tribals experience as adversarial, has repeatedly worked against the very people it was meant to empower. A right that is recognised in law but denied in the field breeds a deeper cynicism than no right at all.

RFCTLARR Act 2013 — Consent and Social Impact Assessment

Displacement without fair rehabilitation, examined earlier as a driver of grievance, was addressed head-on by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which replaced the colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Its central innovations were designed precisely to correct the historic imbalance between the acquiring state and the displaced citizen.

• Consent: the prior consent of eighty per cent of affected families for private projects, and seventy per cent for public-private partnership projects.
• Social Impact Assessment, a mandatory study of who will be affected and how, before acquisition proceeds.
• Rehabilitation and resettlement as a legal entitlement rather than a discretionary favour, together with enhanced compensation.

The Act was widely welcomed as pro-people and progressive. Its weakness has been in what followed: an attempt to dilute the consent and Social Impact Assessment requirements through an ordinance route did not survive political resistance, but several states have since diluted these safeguards through their own amendments in the name of attracting investment and improving the ease of doing business. The familiar pattern recurs, a protective law on the statute book, its protections thinned in practice.

The Committees — Bhuria and Xaxa

Two official inquiries frame the debate on tribal governance and are worth citing precisely in any answer on this theme.

Committee	Mandate and outcome	Key recommendations
Bhuria Committee (1995)	Examined the extension of Panchayati Raj to Scheduled Areas; its report became the direct basis for PESA, 1996	Democratic decentralisation in Scheduled Areas; supremacy of the Gram Sabha; genuine self-governance rooted in tribal custom
Xaxa Committee (constituted 2013, reported May 2014)	High-Level Committee under Prof. Virginius Xaxa on the socio-economic, health and educational status of tribal communities	Extend Sixth-Schedule-style autonomous councils to Fifth Schedule areas; align all state laws and rules with PESA; strengthen Gram Sabhas; treat involuntary displacement and land alienation as central failures to be remedied

The through-line connecting both committees is unmistakable: the instruments of tribal self-governance exist, but they must be implemented in earnest and harmonised with the ordinary machinery of the state, or they remain hollow. The Xaxa Committee’s central diagnosis, that the Fifth Schedule areas were denied the substantive self-rule the Sixth Schedule areas enjoy, leads directly to the question the examiners have asked.

Regionalism and Sub-nationalism

If the tribal question is largely a story of deprivation and constitutional neglect, regionalism introduces a different and equally powerful driver: identity, and the perception that one’s region has been slighted, exploited or ignored by the rest of the nation.

Regionalism can coexist with prosperity; it is as much about pride, culture and a sense of fair treatment as about income. Understanding it requires us to separate its constructive expressions, which strengthen a federal democracy, from its dangerous ones, which threaten it.

Understanding Regionalism and Its Types

Regionalism is the political, economic or cultural expression of a collective identity rooted in a particular geographical region, in which people come to prioritise regional interests, traditions or aspirations over national concerns.

It is not, in itself, anti-national. In a country as diverse as India, a healthy attachment to one’s region is the very stuff of federalism; the linguistic reorganisation of states in 1956 accommodated regional identity and, by doing so, strengthened rather than weakened the Union. The security concern arises only at the extreme end of the spectrum, where regional feeling curdles into a demand to break away or turns violent against fellow citizens.

It helps to distinguish the forms regionalism takes, because they pose very different orders of threat.

Type	What it seeks	Illustrations
Secessionism	Complete separation from the Indian Union — the gravest form	The Khalistan demand; early Naga and Mizo movements; the sovereignty demand of some Assam outfits
Separatism / autonomy	Greater self-rule short of full independence, often within the Constitution	Autonomy demands channelled through the Sixth Schedule and autonomous councils
Sons-of-the-soil / nativism	Primacy for locals over ‘outsiders’ in jobs, land and political voice	The ‘Marathi Manoos’ assertion; anti-migrant mobilisations in several states
Statehood demands	A separate state within the Union through reorganisation — the constitutional route	Telangana (achieved), Gorkhaland, Bodoland, Vidarbha, Bundelkhand

The reassuring reality is that the overwhelming majority of Indian regionalism belongs to the last, constitutional category, the demand for a state of one’s own within the Union, not against it. Only a small fraction has ever been secessionist, and India’s record of absorbing regional demands through peaceful reorganisation is, by world standards, remarkable. The security challenge is to keep regionalism on the constitutional side of that line.

Roots of Regional Movements

Why do regional movements arise? The causes cluster around identity and grievance, and a strong answer names several rather than reducing them to economics alone.

• Linguistic identity, the sense that a language and the culture it carries deserve their own political space, as in the Dravidian assertion in the south.
• Ethnocentrism and nativism, in which locals claim primacy over migrants perceived to be taking jobs, land and opportunities.
• Tribal aspirations, where a distinct tribal culture and socio-economic profile seek self-determination, as in the long movement for Jharkhand.
• Resource inequality and perceived neglect, the feeling that a region’s wealth flows outward while it is left behind, as voiced by the Gorkha movement in Darjeeling.
• Administrative neglect and regional imbalance, uneven development within a state that leaves one region convinced it is a colony of another, the grievance that powered the demand for Telangana.

The economic roots deserve special emphasis, because they recur across almost every case. The core intuition is one of internal colonialism: a region comes to believe that its resources, its taxes, its water and its minerals, are being used to develop other parts of the state or country while it receives neither its fair share of investment nor its fair share of jobs.

When this economic grievance fuses with a distinct linguistic, tribal or cultural identity, a regional movement is born. Telangana felt its revenues and opportunities were captured by the more developed coastal Andhra region; Vidarbha believes its cotton economy and mineral wealth subsidise western Maharashtra while its own farmers fall into distress.

Uneven development is thus the economic engine of most regional movements, precisely the relative-deprivation dynamic examined in the conceptual frame, now operating at the level of the region rather than the individual.

For internal security, unchecked regionalism carries real costs: it can threaten national unity where it turns secessionist, fuel insurgency by giving armed groups a ready reservoir of local grievance, aggravate inter-state disputes over borders, water and resources, spill into ethnic violence where regional and communal identities overlap, and undermine national policies where states resist central initiatives in the name of regional interest.

Case Studies

Four movements, at four different stages of resolution, together map the full arc of Indian regionalism, from a demand successfully accommodated to one still simmering.

Telangana — the Resolved Case The demand for a separate Telangana state, carved out of the erstwhile united Andhra Pradesh, was rooted in a decades-old sense that the region’s water, revenues, government jobs and investment were being captured by the more developed coastal districts. After a long, sometimes turbulent movement, the demand was met through the constitutional route: Telangana was formed on 2 June 2014 as India’s twenty-ninth state. Telangana is the model of regionalism as a safety valve, a regional grievance absorbed peacefully through reorganisation within the Union. The cautionary corollary is that its success also reignited dormant statehood demands elsewhere, a reminder that accommodation and precedent must be handled with care.

Gorkhaland — the Unresolved Identity Demand The Nepali-speaking Gorkhas of the Darjeeling hills have long sought a separate state on grounds of a distinct language, culture and identity, and a sense of chronic neglect within West Bengal. The movement has passed through several institutional compromises, an autonomous hill council in the 1980s and, in 2011, the semi-autonomous Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, but none has extinguished the core demand for full statehood, which periodically resurfaces. Gorkhaland illustrates regionalism driven primarily by identity and perceived neglect rather than by material deprivation alone, and the difficulty of settling such demands through administrative half-measures.

Bodoland — the Autonomy Route The Bodo movement in Assam, at times violently pursued, sought a separate homeland for the Bodo people on ethnic and identity grounds. It has been substantially channelled towards autonomy rather than separation: a Bodoland Territorial Council under the Sixth Schedule, and the settlement that reorganised the arrangement into the Bodoland Territorial Region under the 2020 accord. Bodoland shows how the Sixth Schedule’s autonomous-council mechanism can convert an armed ethnic-regional demand into constitutional self-governance, though the full story of the north-eastern accords belongs to the study of insurgency in that region.

Vidarbha — the Pending Economic Demand The demand for a separate Vidarbha state in eastern Maharashtra rests on a classic grievance of intra-state economic imbalance: a region rich in minerals and forests yet marked by agrarian distress and farmer suicides, which believes its resources subsidise the more prosperous western part of the state while its own development is neglected. The demand remains unresolved, and Vidarbha stands as the clearest illustration of regionalism as a response to uneven development within a state.

Assessment — Threat and Safety Valve

The balanced verdict is that regionalism is not inherently a threat to internal security; it is an inescapable feature of a diverse federal democracy that can be either its safety valve or its solvent, depending on how the state responds.

Handled with responsiveness, through fair fiscal transfers, balanced regional development and a willingness to reorganise or grant autonomy where the demand is genuine and constitutional, regional feeling is channelled into the ordinary give-and-take of federal politics, as the Telangana and Bodoland settlements show.

Handled with neglect or heavy-handedness, it can harden into secessionism, fuse with ethnic or communal violence, or be exploited by hostile external actors, tipping into the domain of insurgency examined in the chapters that follow.

The way forward is therefore less about suppressing regionalism than about removing its legitimate causes: genuine fiscal federalism and balanced regional development to address the economic roots, responsive statehood and autonomy mechanisms to accommodate identity within the Union, and the strengthening of local self-government so that regions feel governed with rather than governed over.

The distinction to carry into the examination hall is simple but powerful, the demand for a state within India is the health of federalism, while the demand for a state outside India is the disease of secession, and the state’s task is to keep the former from ever becoming the latter.

Current Status (as of July 2026) Tribal demographics and areas: Scheduled Tribes number about 10.43 crore, roughly 8.6% of the population (2011 Census), with close to 90% living in rural areas. The Fifth Schedule covers Scheduled Areas in ten states; the Sixth Schedule covers tribal areas in four north-eastern states. PESA: Subordinate PESA Rules have now been notified by most of the Fifth Schedule states, eight had done so by 2024-25 (Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Telangana), with Jharkhand notifying its rules in early 2026; Odisha remains the notable holdout, and implementation on the ground still lags the letter of the law. Forest Rights Act: By late 2023 about 23.4 lakh titles covering roughly 18 million acres had been recognised, including over one lakh Community Forest Rights titles, but around 18.7 lakh claims had been rejected, an overall distribution rate near 50%, keeping the high rejection rate the central criticism of the Act’s working. Forest law change: The Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam (the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023) exempts land within 100 km of international borders for strategic projects, up to 10 hectares for security infrastructure, and up to 5 hectares in Left-Wing-Extremism-affected areas for public utilities; tribal-rights advocates argue it weakens the Forest Rights Act’s consent guarantees. Regional movements: Telangana (formed 2014) remains the sole recent statehood grant; Bodoland functions under the 2020 territorial accord; Gorkhaland and Vidarbha statehood demands remain unresolved.

Answer-Writing Perspective On the tribal question, the highest-value move is to argue the causal chain explicitly, a strong protective architecture (Article 244, the Fifth Schedule, PESA, the FRA, Samatha and Niyamgiri) that was left unimplemented, creating the vacuum that Left-Wing Extremism filled, while conceding that non-implementation was an enabling condition rather than the sole cause. On regionalism, resist treating it as a synonym for separatism: distinguish the constitutional demand for a state within the Union from secession against it, use Telangana as the safety-valve case and Vidarbha or Gorkhaland as the pending ones, and land on responsive federalism as the answer. Naming the committees (Bhuria, Xaxa) and the judgments (Samatha, Niyamgiri) precisely is what separates a first-class answer from a general one.