Citizens and Denizens: Ethnicity, Homelands, and the Crisis of Displacement in Northeast India

Abstract

The US Committee for Refugees in its 2000 report estimated that there were 157,000 displaced persons in northeast India. A large number of ‘tribal’ people entitled to protective discrimination under the Indian Constitution live in those states. The rights of ‘non‐tribals’ to land ownership and exchange, business and trade licenses and access to elected office are restricted. A number of these tribal enclaves now are full‐fledged states. One of the unintended effects of this regime of protective discrimination is that the notion of exclusive homelands for ethnically defined groups has become normalized in the region. In a context of massive social transformation that attracts significant numbers of people to the region, this has generated an extremely divisive politics of insiders and outsiders that have led to these displacements.

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