Tag Archives: Scheduled Tribes

“The purpose of a system is what it does,” Stafford Beer once said: not what its charter claims, not what its founders intended, not what its defenders insist it’s secretly working toward once the numbers look bad. The line comes from Beer’s work in cybernetics and systems theory, but it travels well, because it was really a warning against taking any institution’s word for itself. Apply it to the state and the sentence stops being quippy and starts being uncomfortable. A state does not do what its Constitution’s preamble promises. It does not do what its bare acts say it must. It does what its politicians ignore until an election forces a promise out of them. It does what a police force using violence on citizens with impunity does. It does the slow torture bureaucrats in government offices administer by attrition. It does the routine ignoring of injustice courts specialise in. Everything else is marketing.

A state’s default setting isn’t a neutral one, but it isn’t a fixed conspiracy either: it simply doesn’t move unless it’s made to. Every gain anyone has pulled out of a state came after someone made not conceding more expensive than conceding.

Reservation itself carries the memory of that fact in its own founding story. Ambedkar’s original demand, at the Round Table Conferences, was a separate electorate for the Depressed Classes: our own constituencies, our own voters, our own representatives answerable to no one else’s veto, a political existence independent of Hindu society rather than embedded inside it. The Communal Award of August 1932 granted exactly that. Gandhi, in prison, announced a fast unto death to force its withdrawal, blackmailing the Depressed Classes and its leaders as well as the British rulers, on the ground that a separate electorate would permanently divide Hindu society. Ambedkar held out against a starving man for days before the political pressure, not the argument, became unbearable on practical grounds, and what emerged from the negotiation at Poona was not the separate electorate but reserved seats inside a joint electorate: more seats than the Award had granted, 148 in the provincial legislatures instead of the original allotment, but folded back into the same political body Ambedkar had tried to exit. Reservation was not the original ask. It is what remained after the original mandate was made impossible by someone else’s leverage and the Hindu moral bankruptcy behind it. The instrument defended for ninety years since it has itself been a settlement, arriving at under duress, from a wider claim.

Rahul Sonpimple, founder of the All India Independent Scheduled Castes Association (AIISCA), made a version of this point at a press meeting on private sector reservation in Delhi on 27th September, framing reservation as something closer to a treaty than an entitlement: a thin, fragile thread and the only one tying Dalits, Adivasis and OBCs to the Indian state, functioning not as generosity but as a negotiated peace. It buys the state and the dominant castes who still hold most of the country’s assets a measure of calm from a majority whose rightful share has otherwise been denied, while giving the numerically dominant Bahujan population some working proxy for the democratic weight their numbers should carry. A contract, not a gift. Except a contract is only as good as what a party can be made to perform under it, and a state that already treats its own preamble as marketing will treat a contract no differently.

A contract implies parties, and a state, unlike a private employer, actually has one with its citizens. It demands loyalty, taxation, submission to its law, alongside the monopoly to dictate the political fates of those within its territory, in exchange for a set of standing obligations back. A private firm asks for labour under a contract either side can in principle at least walk from, and owes nothing back to someone who was never bound to it in any comparable way. That asymmetry is a large part of why a claim on the state’s own hiring is different in kind from a claim on a firm’s, not because the state behaves more responsibly in practice, as we are all well-aware, but because it owes something on the terms of the relationship itself. Although an obligation the state owes but doesn’t perform is worth exactly as much as a preamble it doesn’t act on.

A private firm is not identical to the state, and the case for reaching it anyway doesn’t depend on pretending otherwise. It rests on two separate facts. The economy itself has changed since the framers drew the line at public employment, and a social justice framework confined to the public sector now leaves most of economic life untouched, because most of it no longer sits inside the public sector at all, a gap widened further by the same state’s ongoing privatisation of what public capacity remains, shrinking the one terrain where proportional representation currently carries legal force. But the second fact runs deeper and doesn’t depend on how recent liberalisation is: a private sector built on land, credit, licenses and infrastructure the state provides, privatising its profits while routinely and unsparingly socialising its costs through subsidy, tax concession and public investment, has never sat outside the state’s reach in the first place, this was true of Indian capital before 1991 as much as after it. A firm that depends on the state which itself takes from the public commons for that much can never be allowed to answer to nothing beyond its own balance sheet.

Even so, there’s a real limit to what representation alone produces. Elevated individuals from a movement or caste often become instruments of the institution’s own legitimation rather than being accountable to the base that elevated them, and when they try to push further beyond the constraints and the logics of those systems, they get cut down by the sheer weight of social forces unwilling to tolerate the progress already made. Despite that, political reservation has still converted into something more durable than individual token presence, an independent structure of Bahujan power that didn’t exist before it, even as oppressor-caste violence against that rise has grown alongside it. What government service has that the private sector doesn’t is exactly this: decades of organised structure built up around the reserved seat, structure that keeps contesting the ceiling even where it doesn’t break through it. The private sector has never had an equivalent foothold, and no amount of employer voluntarism has ever built one. That’s the case for statutory reservation even in its thinnest form: not that a quota alone delivers equality, especially substantively, but that it’s the minimum legal anchor around which durable, organisable power can be built at all.

Against that backdrop, private sector reservation is not a new demand groping for its first hearing. It has been formally raised for close to two decades. The All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations was pressing the case as early as 2012, organising a march on Delhi backed by three dozen SC/ST organisations, arguing plainly that no nation stays strong while its economic and social levels remain this split. But even before that, in 2003, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee addressed a meeting of SC and ST MPs and said that the private sector cannot exist in isolation and has to be responsive to the needs of the society, making it essential to have reservation in the private sector. This was followed by a broad consensus among electoral parties across the ideological spectrum on the matter, even though it has not yet been translated into political will or substantive action. One concrete effort came in 2006, under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when he appealed directly to Indian industries to become the government’s partner on the question. However, rather than legislate a mandate, the government let industry regulate itself: CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM each adopted a Voluntary Code of Conduct built around four pillars, Employability, Education, Entrepreneurship Development and Employment. That October, the PMO had already constituted a Coordination Committee on Affirmative Action in the Private Sector, chaired by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, drawing on the Department of Personnel and Training, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and serviced by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion. The Committee has met nine times since. By 2010, the government’s own review found adoption of the voluntary codes was slow; by 2013, it was still describing the same dialogue as ongoing; by 2015, industry associations were reporting hundreds of member companies signed on. Twenty years of this arrangement has produced a voluntary code without enforceable duties, and industry associations professing over a lakh of beneficiaries with no verifiable representation data to back the figure. Now we cannot sit once again with a renewed appeal for goodwill. What is needed is to go beyond an empty promise and fight for a statutory guarantee: a binding quota, backed by rule of law, not another code any signatory can stop honouring when they feel like it.

On 26 July 2024, that demand reached Parliament directly. Chandrashekhar Azad, MP for Nagina, introduced a private member’s bill titled the Reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes in Private Sector Act, 2024, one of three private member’s bills he introduced in the Lok Sabha that day. It covers private firms, educational institutions and other establishments employing at least twenty people with no government financial stake. Even this bill stops short of a binding hiring quota: its mechanism is incentive-based, requiring the central government to induce private firms toward reservation through special concessions and lower-interest loans via nationalised banks, with an annual implementation report tabled in both Houses. Structurally, a private member’s bill has almost no chance of becoming law: enactment is the exception, not the rule, and has been for decades. That a bill this cautious, relying on incentives rather than quotas, remains a private member’s bill and is still pending says something about how far Parliament remains from treating this as settled business.

But the case for the demand itself rests on documented discrimination. Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell’s 2007 correspondence study sent matched applications under upper-caste Hindu, Dalit and Muslim names to private-sector job advertisements in the English dailies and found discrimination operating at the very first screening stage, before any interview, before any assessment of merit beyond a name on a page. Zahra Siddique’s 2011 work went further, quantifying the size of the gap and who was driving it: low-caste applicants had to send 20% more resumes than high-caste applicants to get the same callback rate, with the disparity sharpest when the recruiter was male or Hindu, and more pronounced at smaller firms than larger ones. Axmann, Swanson and Cuspinera Contreras, using Indian Human Development Survey data in 2016, found significant wage discrimination against Dalits and Adivasis specifically inside the private sector. Madheswaran and Singhari, drawing on National Sample Survey employment data the same year, found SC workers earning less than equally qualified forward-caste workers in urban labour markets, with the gap wider in private employment than public, and unequal access to occupations itself doing much of the work in producing the disparity. Pattayat’s 2024 study of rural non-farm workers, using NSSO and PLFS data spanning 2004-05 to 2019-20, found the earnings gap persisting across that entire period and examined how much of it discrimination itself accounted for.

Article 15(5) already gives the state constitutional room to act on half of this. Inserted by the 93rd Amendment in 2005 and in force since January 2006, it permits special provision by law for socially and educationally backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in admission to educational institutions, explicitly including private institutions, aided or unaided, with the sole carve-out for Article 30(1) minority institutions. Because education sits on the Concurrent List, both Parliament and state legislatures can act under it, and several states have already legislated on private educational admissions. Tamil Nadu enacted a 2006 law providing 69% reservation for Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes and Denotified Communities, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in private educational institutions. Andhra Pradesh had already applied SC, ST and Backward Class reservations to admissions in private professional institutions through its admission rules. Karnataka’s 2006 Professional Educational Institutions Act provides for 50% reservation for SCs, STs and OBCs in unaided non-minority professional institutions. Maharashtra enacted a 2006 law providing reservation for SCs, STs, Denotified Tribes, Nomadic Tribes and OBCs in private professional educational institutions, while Haryana’s 2016 Backward Classes Act provides reservation for Backward Classes in admissions to educational institutions, including private institutions.

What that record shows is that Article 15(5) has been given statutory effect at the state level, but unevenly and without a nationwide framework. A Parliamentary Standing Committee report presented to the Rajya Sabha in August 2025 said that private educational institutions are currently under no national legal obligation to implement reservation because there is no central statute mandating it. It recommended that Parliament legislate 27%, 15% and 7.5% reservation for OBCs, SCs and STs respectively in private higher educational institutions, with government reimbursement of the associated costs on the model of the Right to Education Act. Although a sincere Caste Census may tell us that the necessary numbers should be much higher, the constitutional ceiling on reservation itself also needs to be revisited.

What Article 15(5) doesn’t reach at all is employment, and that gap isn’t small: education and employment were never separable; a degree that doesn’t convert into a job is a credential, not a livelihood. One state that tried a binding private-sector quota by its own legislation ran straight into that trap. Haryana’s 2020 State Employment of Local Candidates Act mandated 75% reservation for domiciled candidates in private jobs under a salary threshold, with a 10% district sub-cap built in, not a caste quota, a domicile one. The Punjab and Haryana High Court struck it down in 2023 as unconstitutional and violative of Part III of the Constitution; the challenge to that judgment remains pending before the Supreme Court. The deeper problem predates the ruling: the 93rd Amendment gave the state constitutional room to reach private education specifically and never extended that room to private employment. Domicile was the classification that failed here, not caste, but replacing domicile with caste would not by itself resolve the Article 19(1)(g) problem, because no amendment has yet done for employment what the 93rd did for education. That is what this demand still needs and hasn’t gotten: not just a statute, but a constitutional amendment opening the same room for private employment that the 93rd opened for private education, without which any statute meets the wall Haryana did.

Winning that room would still only secure a narrower claim than the one Ambedkar himself eventually made. Private sector reservation, at its most comprehensive, means reservation in private employment, reservation in private educational institutions, and an Equal Employment Opportunity Act as organizations like AIISCA and others have been demanding: legislation with a working complaint mechanism, an investigation process, ongoing monitoring, and real accountability, reaching recruitment, wages, promotion, workplace treatment, termination, occupational allocation, contract employment and professional advancement, not just the moment of hire. That last piece is the one twenty years of voluntary codes never touched, because a Voluntary Code of Conduct had no enforceable complaint mechanism and no statutory consequence for ignoring it. A statute would. But even this full slate, a foothold at every stage of the employment relationship, asks only for fair terms of entry into an economy whose ownership stays exactly where it already is. It is a claim to be treated fairly inside the room. It has never been a claim on who owns the room.

Ambedkar’s own economic writing sits alongside all of this as one part of a longer record, that expands the horizon of economic fight itself. In States and Minorities, the memorandum he prepared for the Constituent Assembly on behalf of the Scheduled Caste Federation, he proposed a state control over economy in which key industries would be owned and run directly by the state and basic industries owned by the state and run through its own corporations, with land held under state ownership and cultivated through cooperative farming, aimed at dismantling landlordism and the agrarian exploitation caste had built itself around. That program was never incorporated into the Constitution in the form Ambedkar proposed. Although a version of that was found in the Nehruvian socialist project, which was itself eventually given up in the face of global neoliberal onslaught. What it shows, regardless of anyone’s own view of state ownership as a remedy, is how early and how directly Ambedkar located the actual target in who owns the economy, not merely who holds a fair position inside it.

Ambedkar’s economic target, and the demand for reservation in the private sector, concern forms of structural injustice that are harder to see than the moments when that injustice erupts into visible violence. That shapes not only who gets to have this conversation and on what terms, but who is willing to listen to it. Oppressor-caste liberals attend to Dalit-Bahujan life most readily through the news cycle of atrocity, because atrocity is visceral and immediately legible, while the guilt of a grieving conscience often springs into action only when Dalit-Bahujan rage forces that attention. A Dalit-Bahujan body demands attention in a way a hiring statistic does not. A wage-discrimination dataset spanning fifteen years, a Coordination Committee that has gone nowhere, a bill pending in Parliament since 2024, none of these produces the same urgency because none offers an easy villain, a headline image or a clean moment of collective horror to perform. Grieving a corpse asks nothing ongoing of anyone. But there is a real villain here, even if it is harder to identify in any single moment: the state, which owes more than what it does and routinely shows where its priorities lie, alongside the structural violence produced through years of oppressor-caste apathy at best and antipathy at worst.

The historical record here is a caution, not a reason to wait. What survived Poona wasn’t Ambedkar’s original demand: it was a narrower settlement that still had to be fought for afterward, seat by seat, for decades, before it was more than ink. The same will be true of a private-sector statute and an Equal Employment Opportunity Act alongside it. Winning them will not finish anything on its own; a seat is captured as often as it’s built on. Beer’s sentence applies once more, now to the law: a statute’s purpose isn’t what its statement of objects and reasons says either. It’s what the Act does. Whether the complaint mechanism gets used, whether a violation carries any real cost, whether the oversight committee holds its next meeting or goes missing in action the way it already has. None of that follows from any bill becoming an act. It follows only if the pressure that forces the act into existence keeps being applied after it exists. Because a state, as established, only holds what it’s made to hold.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

Say what you will about the CJP protests against the NEET paper leak, everyone has already said that the immediate demands are not enough to change the education system. Education scholars are more likely to tell you about the 5-point charter submitted by the CJP to the Government of India. But one class of discourse generators is rattled by the protests themselves, or has been looking for an opportunity to vent its pre-existing frustrations or biases and has now found the perfect one . This is the oppressed castes’ general status and their tiresome, repeated, annoying rant against reservation.

This includes someone fabricating a fake post by actor Vijay Varma about his one non-reserved category friend suffering in some educational institution, which the pro-protest actor quickly said he had never posted. His acting in the anti-Mandal movement film Hurdang alongside Sunny Kaushal, however, may not have made his supposed stance difficult to believe had the post been genuine. Whether he posted it or not, and whether he believes the logic underneath that post, are different questions.

Mrunal Thakur, another actor, apparently posted a story on her Instagram account suggesting that the key moment that changed the game for everyone during these protests was NEET aspirant Harsh Dubey questioning the dominant narrative around the protests, arguing that the focus on the paper leak has overshadowed other longstanding issues in medical admissions. This was apparently a clip from a conversation with NDTV’s Shiv Aroor, where Dubey said questions around reservation policy and the difficulties faced by general category students also deserve public attention. Whether Mrunal Thakur will also come out and deny posting this is a matter of no one’s concern. Bollywood celebrities have shown their political illiteracy and general inhumanity more than once.

But this idea that neither the BJP nor the CJP wants to touch reservation, and that this is what led to the compromise, is one of those Savarna delusions burdened with so many argumentative flaws that a sane mind can hardly engage with it. To begin with, despite its classist and meritocratic articulation of the protests, the CJP does not appear to be opposed to reservation, partly reflected in its use of Ambedkarite symbolism, whether sincere or strategic. One also forgets that the BJP is a heterogeneous party with multiple caste groups and not simply Brahmins and other general category persons. There is no consensus on this question even within the Hindutva fold, something evident from the raita vs. trad debates that have long existed within their own ideological circles. To treat a single interview, one that merely regurgitates the most banal opinion circulating on the Savarna reactionary internet, as having played any pivotal role in shaping the protests is fantasy writing in its purest form.

But what is up with the casteist Savarnas? In a protest that brought together people from the non-protesting middle classes and celebrities, wherein status and privilege are also disproportionately held by oppressor castes, what has made the casteist Savarnas launch into their regular rant with great vigour? Are Savarnas simply waiting for any needle to move so they can carry their anti-reservation agenda? Are they simply incapable of shutting up for once?

Why, then, does every major public mobilisation touching education or even employment seem to invite an anti-reservation chorus from casteist Savarnas? The answer is not that reservation is secretly the central issue every time, like the Dubeys make it out to be. It is that reservation has become the preferred language through which sections of the Savarna public interpret almost every institutional crisis. Whenever a crisis emerges in education or public recruitment, reservation is summoned as the familiar explanation, even when it has little to do with the event itself. It is less a response to the facts before them than a political reflex.

This reflex performs an ideological function. It redirects public anger away from institutions and towards beneficiaries of affirmative action. A paper leak points towards failures of governance, regulation, corruption, examination agencies, and political accountability. None of these explanations preserve the moral authority of the existing Brahminical social order. Reservation, on the other hand, offers an already available narrative; and if Savarna public discourse has shown anything, it is that they love readily available labour, intellectual and otherwise. The next generation of casteists also lack imagination and will rely on the intellectual dis-labour of their Savarna forefathers.

These complaints are very vapid. They transform a structural failure into a grievance against redistributive and representational justice. Instead of asking why an examination system repeatedly fails millions of students, they ask who supposedly enjoys unfair advantages, even though the empirical facts reveal it is they who do. The institution escapes scrutiny because caste once again becomes framed as the problem only when it attempts to correct itself.

There is another reason why these moments are politically useful. Large protests produce so much uncertainty. They reopen public debate and create the possibility that questions long considered settled may be discussed again, especially now that social media has permitted everyone to have an opinion, for good and bad alike. For anti-reservation voices, this is an opportunity to attach their long-standing campaign to a movement that was never organised around their demands. They seek legitimacy through proximity of discourse. If enough people begin associating educational injustice with reservation rather than with state failure, the moment gets a new meaning.

This explains why Harsh Dubey’s interview came to acquire symbolic importance far beyond its actual place in the protests. It offered something many casteist Savarnas had been waiting for: an apparently articulate voice on national television through which they could restate arguments that have circulated for decades. Reservation disrupts the comforting belief that educational success reflects individual merit alone. Every conversation about admissions threatens to reopen the history of caste privilege that made merit appear natural in the first place. It is therefore unsurprising that even a movement against examination malpractice becomes, for some, another occasion to defend inherited advantages while presenting themselves as victims of an unjust system. The anti-reservation discourse surrounding the NEET protests tells us less about the movement than about the persistence of Savarna political common sense.

DalitThinkerToday is a Chartered Accountant by profession from Sangli, Maharashtra, who occasionally dabbles in thinking about politics when people in her oppressor-caste-majority office frustrate her. This is her pseudonym.

The demolition of homes belonging to Adivasi tea-tribe families in Hatikhuli Bagicha near Kaziranga marks the latest escalation in a dispute over land acquired for a proposed five-star luxury hotel and cultural centre backed by the Assam Tourism Development Corporation (ATDC). According to campaigners, the demolitions have displaced families who had long lived and cultivated the area, bringing into effect a project that has faced sustained opposition from local residents, land rights groups and environmental activists.

The dispute centres on land at Ingleng Pathar and Hatikhuli, adjacent to Kaziranga National Park. Local organisations maintain that many families have cultivated the land for generations, continued to pay land revenue, and possess raiyati records or periodic pattas despite the land being classified as government land. In June, the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha (ACMS) demanded a high-level inquiry into the land allotment, alleging that the land had been reclassified and transferred to a hospitality company without consulting the communities dependent on it. The union also stated that residents had resisted eviction attempts for four to five years while seeking formal recognition of their land rights.

The controversy deepened after the Assam government signed an agreement with Hyatt Hotels in September 2023 to develop a luxury hotel near Kaziranga’s central range. The proposed project affects land cultivated by more than forty farming families, most of them from tea-tribe communities. Protesters have argued that the project would displace long-settled residents while further expanding hospitality infrastructure in an ecologically sensitive landscape used by wildlife moving between Kaziranga and the Karbi Anglong hills during the annual floods. Environmental groups have similarly raised concerns about the impact of construction on wildlife corridors and habitat connectivity.

Public opposition intensified through demonstrations in June and July, following which indigenous rights activist Pranab Doley and several others were arrested on charges including unlawful assembly, criminal conspiracy and rioting. Police alleged that protesters entered the project site and obstructed construction, while Doley and land rights organisations described the arrests as an attempt to criminalise resistance to displacement. Soon after, a group of UN experts expressed concern over the detention of five indigenous rights activists, warning that the arrests could have a chilling effect on civic space and undermine the ability of indigenous communities to defend their rights. They called for the release of any activists detained solely for the peaceful exercise of their rights and urged the suspension of land acquisition and development until affected communities had been meaningfully consulted and their free, prior and informed consent obtained.

The developments at Kaziranga reflect a pattern that extends well beyond Assam. From the Ken-Betwa river-linking project in central India to the Great Nicobar Island Development Project, large-scale projects justified in the name of development have repeatedly advanced despite concerns over ecological integrity and the destruction of longstanding human habitats. Whether the issue is the displacement of Adivasi cultivators, the future of the Nicobarese community and the survival of the Shompen, or the loss of forest commons, the concerns of affected communities are repeatedly set aside in favour of state-backed commercial and strategic priorities.

The demand to remove Christian Adivasis from the Scheduled Tribe list has moved from the margins of Hindutva advocacy toward the centre of national politics. On May 24, around 50,000 tribal persons gathered at Delhi’s Red Fort for a rally organised by the RSS-linked Janjati Suraksha Manch (JSM), where speakers called for the de-listing of Christian Adivasis from the Scheduled Tribe category. The presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah transformed the event from an organisational mobilisation into a signal of political endorsement.

What was presented as a defence of tribal culture carries wider political implications. The campaign serves two connected functions. It assists the incorporation of tribal populations into a Hindutva political framework by constructing Christianity as a threat to tribal identity. At the same time, it weakens forms of Adivasi politics that have historically centred on land, forests, resources, self-governance and autonomy. The controversy over de-listing therefore reaches far beyond reservations. It concerns who gets to define Adivasi identity and what kinds of political claims can be made in its name.

This is not a new conflict. For decades, organisations associated with the Sangh Parivar have attempted to reshape the political vocabulary through which tribal communities are understood. The preference for the term “Vanvasi” over “Adivasi” is part of that project. Naming is never a neutral exercise. The term “Adivasi” became associated with political movements that understood tribal communities as possessing distinct histories, social formations and relationships to territory that cannot be reduced to the categories of the postcolonial Indian state. It also came to be linked with struggles over land, autonomy, self-representation and cultural rights. “Vanvasi,” by contrast, has been promoted by RSS-affiliated organisations as part of an effort to situate tribal communities within a broader Hindu civilisational framework. The dispute over terminology concerns who has the authority to define tribal identity and whether tribal politics will be articulated through its own historical experiences and political demands or incorporated into a larger majoritarian narrative.

The de-listing campaign emerges from this history. It seeks to make religious affiliation increasingly central to the way tribal identity is understood and recognised. Its supporters argue that conversion to Christianity severs individuals from tribal traditions and therefore undermines the basis on which constitutional protections were granted. Yet once religious affiliation becomes the basis for determining who is a legitimate member of the political community, the implications extend well beyond Christianity.

Across central and eastern India, the strongest currents within Adivasi politics have historically developed around struggles over land, displacement, mining, forests and self-governance. Whether in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha or Maharashtra, tribal movements have repeatedly confronted state institutions, extractive industries and dominant social groups over control of territory and resources. Opposition to mining projects and industrial land acquisition, struggles over the implementation of the Forest Rights Act and PESA, demands for a separate Sarna religious code, and movements against displacement have all shaped contemporary Adivasi politics. These mobilisations have generally been organised around questions of land, governance, cultural recognition and collective rights. The Fifth Schedule, PESA, forest rights legislation and movements against displacement emerged from these material struggles. They did not emerge from divisions between Christian and non-Christian Adivasis.

That is precisely what makes the current campaign politically consequential. It redirects attention away from conflicts over land, extraction and governance and toward conflicts within Adivasi communities themselves. Christian Adivasis become a separate political category whose claims can be isolated from those of the wider community. Such divisions weaken collective mobilisation against displacement, mining expansion, land alienation and other forms of dispossession. They also benefit those who have long sought a more fragmented and manageable Adivasi politics, whether in the service of electoral consolidation or the continued extraction of resources from tribal regions.

These concerns have been repeatedly voiced by Adivasi organisations across Jharkhand. More than one hundred tribal leaders, academics, activists and community organisations called for a boycott of the Delhi conclave before it took place. Their objections reflected a broader pattern. Campaigns around de-listing receive substantial organisational energy and political support, while struggles over land alienation, mining expansion, displacement and forest rights rarely attract comparable urgency from the same actors. That contrast raises an obvious question: why are religious differences within Adivasi communities relevant at all while ongoing conflicts over land, forests and resources are not?

The campaign also seeks to alter the constitutional terms through which tribal identity is recognised. Scheduled Tribe recognition was never designed as a reward for adherence to a particular religion. Article 342 contains no religious qualification, and Adivasi status does not disappear because an individual changes faith.

The constitutional histories of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are different, but neither category was originally conceived as contingent on religious affiliation. Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims continue to challenge their exclusion from Scheduled Caste status on the grounds that caste oppression survives conversion. Rather than correcting that injustice, the demand to de-list Christian Adivasis seeks to extend a similar logic of religious exclusion into a constitutional category where it has historically had no place. Recent judicial and political developments have made such efforts appear increasingly plausible, contributing to a broader perception that protections available to historically oppressed communities are open to reinterpretation through the language of religious belonging.

The de-listing campaign also reveals the conditions under which Hindutva is prepared to recognise tribal distinctiveness. Organisations associated with the Sangh Parivar have long sought to incorporate Adivasi communities into a broader Hindu civilisational framework while simultaneously acknowledging them as culturally distinct. The demand to remove Christian Adivasis from the Scheduled Tribe list narrows the space for that distinctiveness. Tribal identity remains legitimate so long as it can be accommodated within a majoritarian political project; conversion is treated as a point at which recognition becomes conditional.

Christianity has undoubtedly transformed many tribal societies over the past century, as have education, migration, urbanisation and countless other social processes. Those transformations do not erase histories of marginalisation, nor do they justify making religious affiliation the basis of constitutional recognition.

At stake in the controversy is more than the status of Christian Adivasis alone. The demand seeks to normalise the idea that constitutional protections can be conditioned by religious affiliation and that communities historically recognised because of marginalisation can be reorganised through the language of religious belonging. The immediate target may be Christian Adivasis, but the wider effect is the weakening of political traditions organised around land, resources, self-governance and collective rights. In regions where Adivasi communities continue to confront displacement, mining expansion and the erosion of democratic control over local resources, such fragmentation serves interests far more powerful than the communities being asked to embrace it.

Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.

Bangalore:

According to a survey conducted by the Karnataka Government’s Women and Child Welfare and Social Welfare Departments those killed in the Bangalore’s worst liquor tragedy recently were-SCs. STs. and Muslims. Of the total dead of 277, SCs were 159, 33 STs, 17 O.B.Cs, 37 Christians and 13 Muslims.