Manifestations of Ethnicity in India: Autonomy Movements to Insurgency

India is home to hundreds of distinct communities, each carrying its own language, customs, faith, and historical memory. When these communities mobilise politically around their shared identity, the result is ethnic assertion – and in India this assertion has taken remarkably varied forms. Some groups have demanded a state of their own within the Union. Others have sought administrative autonomy short of statehood. A few have picked up arms to break away entirely. Understanding these manifestations of ethnicity is central to understanding the everyday tension between unity and diversity that defines Indian democracy.

What ethnicity means in the Indian context 🔗

Ethnicity is not a single, fixed thing. It refers to the mobilisation of people around shared cultural attributes – language, religion, tribe, caste, region, or a common historical experience – that make a group feel distinct from others. Unlike many Western definitions that centre on race or ancestry, ethnicity in India is layered. A single movement may draw on language and religion and tribe all at once.

What matters is the sense of “we-ness” that emerges when people recognise these shared markers and begin to act collectively. Even when a movement starts around one marker – say, language – other markers usually get pulled in over time. These ethnic assertions are also called self-determination movements, because at their core they question how much room the nation-state leaves for groups to govern their own affairs. The Indian Constitution anticipated some of this by building in affirmative action, language safeguards, and cultural recognition, but friction appears whenever the centre’s integration agenda collides with a community’s aspirations.

A spectrum, not a single category 🔗

It helps to picture ethnic mobilisation as a spectrum. At one end sit demands that work fully within the constitutional system – requests for a separate state or greater autonomy. In the middle lie movements that push hard but stop short of rejecting the Union. At the far end are secessionist movements that reject the legitimacy of the Indian state altogether and often turn to insurgency. The same community can move along this spectrum over decades, depending on how the state responds.

Demands for separate states and linguistic identity 🔗

The earliest and most successful form of ethnic assertion in independent India revolved around language. After independence, the country inherited messy colonial boundaries, and communities began demanding states drawn along linguistic lines. The turning point came in 1952, when Potti Sreeramulu died after a hunger strike demanding a Telugu-speaking state. Andhra State was created in 1953, and the floodgates opened.

The government appointed the States Reorganisation Commission in 1953, chaired by Justice Fazl Ali with H.N. Kunzru and K.M. Panikkar as members. The Commission accepted language as an important basis for organising states but firmly rejected the principle of “one language, one state,” stressing national unity and administrative practicality. The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 reorganised the country into 14 states and 6 Union Territories.

This was ethnicity working within the system. Crucially, it did not stop in 1956. The Punjabi Suba movement led to Punjab being split into Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh in 1966. Decades later, the demand for Telangana – driven by a sense of regional and cultural neglect within Andhra Pradesh – culminated in a new state in 2014. The Gorkhaland movement in West Bengal continues to seek a separate state for the Gorkha community while remaining committed to the Indian Union. These are reminders that the appetite for recognition through statehood has never fully subsided.

Why linguistic reorganisation mostly worked 🔗

Many scholars argue that creating linguistic states actually strengthened Indian unity rather than weakening it. By giving language communities their own administrative space, the state defused grievances that might otherwise have fed separatism. There is a counter-view, voiced more recently by some political figures, that linguistic states marginalised smaller language groups and encouraged regional sub-nationalism. The debate captures the recurring Indian dilemma: accommodation can satisfy a grievance, but it can also inspire the next group to make the same demand.

Autonomy short of statehood 🔗

Not every community wants – or can realistically get – a full state. For many tribal groups, especially in the Northeast, the more pressing concern is protecting their land, customs, and resources from outsiders. The Constitution addresses this through provisions for self-governance within existing states.

The most important of these is the Sixth Schedule, which applies to tribal areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram under Article 244(2). It empowers the Governor to set up Autonomous District Councils and Regional Councils with real legislative, executive, and judicial powers. These councils can make laws on land, forests, agriculture, inheritance, marriage, and social customs, and they receive grants from the Consolidated Fund of India for development work.

The Sixth Schedule grew out of the recommendations of the Bardoloi Committee, which recognised that ordinary administration would not suit communities that had governed themselves long before British rule. During colonial times, many of these regions were treated as “Excluded” or “Partially Excluded” Areas, largely insulated from provincial administration. B.R. Ambedkar and others in the Constituent Assembly worried that rapid integration without safeguards could trigger cultural loss and political unrest – so a form of protected self-governance was written into the Constitution. (Tribal areas elsewhere in India are covered by the Fifth Schedule, which offers comparatively weaker protections.)

The limits of autonomy 🔗

Autonomy has not been a cure-all. The councils often create overlapping power centres – district councils, state governments, and Governors all operating in silos, sometimes producing policy paralysis. Several councils complain that the revenue they collect barely covers day-to-day administration, leaving little for development. When autonomy fails to deliver dignity or development, frustrated communities may escalate their demands – which is exactly where insurgency enters the picture.

Secession and insurgency 🔗

At the sharpest end of the spectrum lie movements that reject the Indian state entirely and take up arms. These secessionist insurgencies directly challenge the country’s territorial integrity.

The Naga movement was among the first. The Naga National Council, led by A.Z. Phizo, declared independence even before India became independent in 1947, arguing that the Nagas were never historically part of India and deserved the right to self-determination. What followed was decades of insurgency, met with both military operations under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and repeated attempts at political settlement. The Northeast saw other separatist organisations emerge among the Manipuris, Mizos, and Assamese.

Kashmir represents the most prominent and complex case, where ethnic, religious, and political identities intertwine. A distinct Kashmiri identity, combined with religious sentiment and grievances against what many residents perceive as occupation, has fuelled long-running insurgency and unrest. In Punjab during the 1980s, the Khalistan movement sought a separate Sikh homeland, drawing on religious identity to mount a violent challenge to the state before being contained.

When ideology meets ethnicity 🔗

Not every insurgency is purely ethnic. The Maoist or Naxalite insurgency in central India is primarily ideological, but it carries strong ethnic undertones in tribal belts. The movement taps into tribal grievances – displacement, exploitation of mineral and forest resources, and cultural marginalisation – to build support. This shows how economic and ethnic discontent can reinforce each other, especially where development has bypassed or actively harmed indigenous communities.

Development, the Mahalanobis model, and the ethnic challenge 🔗

India’s early approach to ethnic diversity was shaped heavily by its model of development. The Feldman-Mahalanobis model, devised by statistician P.C. Mahalanobis, became the intellectual backbone of the Second Five Year Plan and the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956. It prioritised heavy industry and capital goods, on the logic that building capacity in capital goods would, over the long run, expand the economy and raise consumption for everyone.

The underlying assumption was that rapid, centrally planned economic growth would dissolve narrower loyalties. As the country modernised and prosperity spread, the thinking went, people would increasingly identify as Indians rather than as members of a tribe, region, or linguistic group. In this sense, the development model was meant to subordinate ethnic challenges to the larger project of nation-building.

It did not work out so neatly. The model assumed the country was large and resource-rich enough to be self-sustaining, but in practice it generated unexpected costs, inflation, and foreign-exchange pressures. More importantly, centralised industrial planning did little for the agricultural and tribal hinterlands where many ethnic communities lived. Development funds reached the Northeast, but bureaucratic hurdles and corruption blunted their impact. Far from fading away, smaller nationalities across the country contested a model that seemed to concentrate power and resources at the centre while leaving their distinct identities unrecognised.

Interestingly, Mahalanobis himself favoured a regional and linguistic understanding of Indian identity over a single pan-Indian one – a view that recognised internal diversity even as the planning machinery he helped build pushed toward uniformity. The gap between that recognition and the centralising thrust of the development model is part of why ethnic assertion kept resurfacing.

How the state has responded 🔗

Over the decades, India has used a mix of strategies. It has created new states and granted special status to absorb demands. It has signed peace accords – the Mizo Accord of 1986, for instance, ended the Mizoram insurgency and brought former militants into mainstream politics. It has extended constitutional autonomy through the Sixth Schedule. And in conflict zones, it has deployed the army and paramilitary forces, often under AFSPA, which remains deeply controversial because of human rights concerns.

Each tool carries a trade-off. Granting statehood to one group can encourage others to demand the same. Heavy-handed security responses can deepen alienation. And politicians sometimes exploit ethnic sentiment for electoral gain, keeping grievances alive rather than resolving them. The push toward more inclusive policies – genuine devolution, fair resource-sharing, and recognition of cultural distinctiveness – reflects a slow learning that accommodation tends to work better than suppression.

What do you think? Has India’s strategy of accommodating ethnic demands through new states and autonomy strengthened national unity, or has it simply encouraged each new group to demand more? And if a development model that ignores regional identities tends to fuel ethnic unrest, what would a genuinely inclusive model of development look like for India today?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/States-Reorganisation-Act
2. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/linguistic-reorganisation-of-states
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_Reorganisation_Act,_1956
4. https://www.drishtiias.com/important-institutions/drishti-specials-important-institutions-national-institutions/autonomous-district-councils
5. https://inclusiveias.com/upsc-polity-administration-of-tribal-areas-sixth-schedule/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldman%E2%80%93Mahalanobis_model
7. https://www.academia.edu/24748570/Insurgency_Autonomy_Movement_and_Misgovernance_in_North_East_India
8. https://science.thewire.in/society/history/mahalanobis-profiloscope-racial-biometrics-bjp-caa-npr-nrc-national-identity/