Last fortnight, a violent agitation erupted over a move to allow nomination of non-tribal settlers in the election to the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council in Meghalaya mandated by the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. Two lives were lost and several properties damaged.
Meghalaya has three autonomous district councils or ADCs, one each for the Khasi, Jaintia and Garo tribes. ADCs are local self-governance institutions under the panchayat system, but are exclusive to northeastern tribal communities and have more juridical powers under tribal customary laws.
The law was conceived for Assam after India’s independence, when almost all of the Northeast, except Tripura and Manipur, were part of the state. The intended targets were Assam’s tribal hill districts beyond the British-era Inner Line drawn by the Bengal Eastern Regulation, 1873. This line divided Assam’s hills and valleys not just in temporal space, but also in metaphoric time—between ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’, ‘law’ and ‘no-law’, as Boddhisatva Kar explains in When Was the Postcolonial? A History of Policing Impossible Lines.
The ADCs introduced a good measure of administrative autonomy to Assam’s tribal domains that were once designated as ‘excluded areas’ or ‘partially excluded areas’. Most of them have now been carved out as full-fledged states. The Sixth Schedule should have become redundant for them. It initially did so in most places except in Meghalaya, where the ADCs almost totally overlap with the state’s administration, except in capital Shillong.
When erstwhile Assam’s Lushai Hills—now Mizoram—gained Union Territory status in 1987, the Sixth-Schedule ADCs were allowed to lapse. In 1972, when Mizoram was upgraded to a state, three small pockets of non-Mizo communities—the Chakma, the Lai and the Mara—were again given their own ADCs.
The case of former Naga Hills district is peculiar. By the time of Indian independence, a strong movement for Naga sovereignty had taken shape. The Sixth Schedule was meant to pacify such discontents. The Naga leaders, however, rejected this concession and insisted on sovereignty. Ironically, the Naga Hills were the first to be bifurcated from Assam to become a fullfledged state in 1963.
Arunachal Pradesh always had autonomy as the North East Frontier Agency, though under the charge of the Assam Governor during the British days. Today, this tribal-majority state is covered by the panchayat system, not the Sixth Schedule.
The peculiar status of Meghalaya was predicated by its administrative structure under the British. These hills were classified as ‘partially excluded areas’, giving the population some representation in Assam’s provincial government—though through nomination by the Governor, not by popular choice.
Shillong was also the capital of undivided Assam. Therefore, it was inevitable that immigration would bring a cosmopolitan tendency to its demography. This resulted in a unique sense of insecurity among its original population, which prompted a felt need for Sixth-Schedule protection even after separation from Assam to become a full-fledged state in 1972.
This brief historical background should make clearer the deeper causes of the recent violence in Meghalaya. Such flames could not have been fanned if there was nothing to burn in the first place. In this sense, Meghalaya represents an extreme manifestation of an inherent anxiety shared across most of the Northeast. Similar troubles have erupted elsewhere in the region in the past and can spark again in the future if corrective measures remain wanting.
From this vantage, last December’s agitation by the Naga Students’ Federation against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), in coordination with the North East Students’ Organisation, was driven by this same anxiety. The same can be said of the current agitation in Manipur demanding the preparation of a National Register of Citizens ahead of the national census exercise.
This wide opposition to CAA in the Northeast must, however, not be equated with the objections to it in other parts of the country. In the latter, the protest was against what was deemed discriminatory against Muslim immigrants who, unlike immigrants of other faiths, were not to be accorded a fast-track route to Indian citizenship. In the Northeast, the protest was against the provision for fast-track citizenship to any immigrant at all.
The Mizo Marriage and Inheritance of Property (Amendment) Bill, 2026 passed on February 24 this year by the state assembly is yet another symptom of this underlying insecurity. Under this law, Mizo women who marry non-Mizo men would lose their Mizo identity, and their children the Scheduled Tribe status.
In Assam, where assembly elections are less than a month away, the ruling BJP under Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has been trying to whip up this public anxiety, while also portraying it as solely the residue of Bangladeshi-Muslim illegal influx to give it a nationalistic air in the hope of reaping electoral gains.
Nari Rustomji, a civil servant at the time of India’s independence who was intimately associated with the Northeast, has some valuable insights on this attribute of the region. In his book Imperilled Frontiers: India’s North-Eastern Borderlands, he empathically watched the struggles of small indigenous groups negotiating the challenges of modernity and development, and observed that these changes must have to be regulated so that the pace of their march is not beyond the capacities of the demographically small communities to absorb without detriment to their social organisms.
Just as migration has been a human reality, integration of immigrants with host communities has been an organic part of social evolution. But the pace and size of population influx are also often what makes the difference between migration and colonisation.
India inherited a peculiar administrative cartography in the Northeast from the British. Considering social mobility is also a reality, communities in the Northeast too must be ready to leave behind the inherited pre-modern mindset as and when ready, and not begin to see the category as inherent right. A confluence of this readiness and Rustomji’s caution probably is where all stakeholders can win together.
Pradip Phanjoubam | Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics
(Views are personal)
(phanjoubam@gmail.com)