Tribal Rights and the Constituent Assembly Debates in India

When India’s Constituent Assembly convened between 1946 and 1949 to draft the Constitution of a newly independent nation, it carried the weight of a historic promise – to break decisively from colonial rule and build an egalitarian republic. For tribal communities, who make up roughly 8.6 percent of India’s population, this moment was loaded with hope. Decades of displacement, land alienation, and colonial “othering” had left them economically dispossessed and politically invisible. Yet, a close reading of the Assembly’s debates reveals a troubling continuity: the language, assumptions, and administrative logic of the colonial period did not simply vanish at independence. They were, in many ways, quietly written into the new constitutional order.

The tribal question in a new republic
A colonial vocabulary in a postcolonial document
The Fifth and Sixth Schedules: protection or perpetuation?
Jaipal Singh Munda: the dissenting voice within the Assembly
What the debates did and didn’t deliver
Colonial continuity and its consequences

The tribal question in a new republic

The Constituent Assembly did not ignore tribal communities. Special subcommittees were formed to examine the conditions of tribal and excluded areas, and their recommendations were eventually folded into the constitutional framework. The Assembly constituted two such subcommittees – the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas (other than Assam) Sub-Committee, headed by A.V. Thakkar, and the North-East Frontier (Assam) Tribal and Excluded Areas Sub-Committee, led by Gopinath Bordoloi. These bodies toured tribal regions, heard testimonies, and submitted their joint reports by September 1947. Their recommendations were incorporated into the draft constitution of February 1948 – but, significantly, were not discussed on the floor of the Assembly until September 1949.

That delay was itself telling. The two years of silence around tribal affairs in the main Assembly debates reflected just how marginal these communities remained within the larger nationalist imagination. A close reading of the subcommittees’ reports and of the Assembly debates leaves the impression that tribal people, especially those from excluded and partially excluded areas, were almost oblivious to their future administration and constitutional position – their views and wishes are largely absent from the official record. This was not because tribal groups were passive. Dozens of tribal associations wrote to the Assembly, submitted memorandums, and fought to include themselves in the Constitution on their own terms. But the institutional architecture of constitution-making was firmly in the hands of a small, educated elite – one that often framed the tribal question through a paternalistic lens.

A colonial vocabulary in a postcolonial document

One of the most revealing aspects of the Constituent Assembly debates on tribes is the language members used to describe them. Terms like “backward,” “primitive,” and “uncivilised” recurred throughout, echoing the very colonial ethnographic categories that had defined and diminished tribal communities for over a century. Assembly members described tribal people as “some of the most backward people in the country,” noting that the British Government had tried to keep them secluded – yet framing this primarily as a problem of education and social development rather than one of structural dispossession and sovereign rights.

This framing had direct constitutional consequences. The Constitution explicitly provided reservation only in favour of two classes – the depressed classes who are Hindus, and tribal people – on account of their “backwardness in education and in other respects.” While affirmative action was necessary and important, defining tribal identity primarily through “backwardness” reinforced a hierarchy in which mainstream Indian society was the norm and tribal communities were positioned as deficient versions of it, requiring improvement rather than recognition of their autonomous cultural and political existence.

The colonial administrative vocabulary was also preserved in the constitutional schedules themselves. The Fifth and Sixth Schedules were modelled closely on the proposals for partially excluded and excluded areas under the Government of India Act, 1935. In colonial statecraft, “scheduling” referred to placing certain areas under special administrative regimes where ordinary laws did not apply – a system designed as much for control as for protection. As Indian nationalists chose to retain many of the judicial, legal, and administrative systems put in place by the British, colonialism did not truly end with the transfer of power.

The Fifth and Sixth Schedules: protection or perpetuation?

The Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Indian Constitution are often held up as landmark provisions for tribal welfare. These schedules contain provisions for the governance of tribal areas, enable the devolution of power, safeguard their traditions and practices, and most importantly guarantee protection of their land rights. Under the Fifth Schedule, Tribes Advisory Councils were set up to advise state governors on tribal welfare. Under the more robust Sixth Schedule, which applied to Assam and the Northeast, Autonomous District Councils were established with legislative and judicial powers over land, customary law, and local administration.

Yet even this distinction carried the imprint of colonial assumptions. B.R. Ambedkar justified the differentiation between the two schedules by arguing that tribes in areas other than Assam were “more or less Hinduised” and “more or less assimilated” into mainstream civilisation, while Northeastern tribes still retained their own customs. This logic, however well-intentioned, placed cultural assimilation with Hindu or mainstream Indian society as a benchmark for governance – a colonial residue in new constitutional clothing.

The Excluded and Partially Excluded Districts Acts of 1874 and 1882, enacted under the British, had established the precedent of differentiated governance by shielding certain tribal areas from mainstream laws and administration. The Fifth Schedule, in essence, replicated a modified version of this system within the Indian Union. While the constitutional versions added democratic elements like elected councils and formal recognition of cultural rights, the underlying structure – keeping tribal areas administratively separate under state oversight – remained largely intact. The inherent limitations of this differentiated governance system, a direct inheritance from the colonial era, continued to pose challenges.

Jaipal Singh Munda: the dissenting voice within the Assembly

Not everyone in the Assembly accepted the dominant framing of tribes as communities to be “uplifted.” The most powerful counter-voice came from Jaipal Singh Munda, an Oxford-educated Adivasi leader from the Munda community of Chotanagpur, who had also captained India’s field hockey team to an Olympic gold medal. Elected to the Constituent Assembly from Bihar as an independent candidate in 1946, he used the platform to make arguments that were fundamentally different in character from those of most other members.

On December 19, 1946, responding to Jawaharlal Nehru’s Objectives Resolution, Munda rose to speak on behalf of millions of tribal people who had been variously labelled as “backward tribes,” “primitive tribes,” and “criminal tribes.” He did not appeal for sympathy. He demanded recognition. He argued that what his people needed was not for the advanced community to carry them indefinitely, but that the means be provided for Adivasis to stand on their own legs, regain what they had lost, and be full citizens of India.

Munda rejected the “social uplift” approach championed by Gandhian members like A.V. Thakkar, in favour of articulating a powerful claim to land and prescriptive rights based on Adivasi people being the original inhabitants of India. He also consistently called out the inadequate representation of tribal communities within the Assembly itself, pointing out the absence of Adivasi women and arguing that tribal representation was wildly disproportionate relative to their actual population in the country.

Munda’s objections extended to the very terminology being used. He argued vociferously against the use of the term “Scheduled Tribes,” noting it would include only so-called backward tribes rather than recognising all tribes on the basis of their status as the sons of the soil. He also flagged, presciently, that the two tribal subcommittees’ reports had never been properly debated on the floor of the Assembly – a procedural omission that revealed how tribal concerns were processed administratively rather than politically.

What the debates did and didn’t deliver

The constitutional provisions that emerged from the debates did provide some meaningful protections. Seat reservations for Scheduled Tribes were mandated in state and central legislatures. The Constitution provided for a Minister in State ministries to be in charge of tribal welfare, and for a Commission to report on how scheduled areas were administered. These measures acknowledged, at minimum, that tribal communities required special attention within a democratic framework. The Sixth Schedule, in particular, gave tribal areas in the Northeast larger powers through district councils and autonomous regional councils.

Yet the gap between intention and outcome was significant. Even after independence, during the initial years, tribal communities continued to remain isolated and excluded from the mainstream of development. Colonial forest laws – which had dispossessed tribal communities of ancestral lands for generations – remained in force. It would take until 2006 for the government to pass the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, which attempted to address the denial of land and resource rights that had persisted across both colonial and post-colonial periods.

The design of the Fifth Schedule also placed considerable power in the hands of governors and state governments rather than in tribal communities themselves. The introduction of Autonomous District Councils under the Sixth Schedule weakened the position and relevance of the traditional governance structures – ruled by chiefs and headmen – within tribal society. The District Councils, being a modern administrative setup, came to be controlled by a new generation of leadership confined to a small group of elites. The aspirations of the broader tribal population were thus filtered through institutions that were alien to their own traditions of governance.

Colonial continuity and its consequences

The Constituent Assembly debates on tribal affairs illustrate a fundamental tension at the heart of Indian constitution-making. The Assembly genuinely sought to address the historical injustices faced by tribal communities. It created formal protections, reserved political representation, and acknowledged the distinctiveness of tribal areas. But it did so largely within a framework of assumptions inherited from colonial rule – that tribes were “backward,” that they required external guidance and state protection rather than self-determination, and that integration into a centralised national framework was the endpoint of their development.

The colonial lineages of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules are well acknowledged, but the post-colonial processes through which they were ultimately incorporated into the Constitution have not always been explained with full historical clarity. What is clear is that the absence of genuine tribal agency in the drafting process – combined with the dominance of elite nationalist perspectives – meant that the resulting provisions were as much about managing tribal communities as about empowering them.

The legacy of colonial rule, coupled with persistent implementation challenges and socio-economic disparities, continued to hinder the progress of tribal communities well into the post-independence period. Issues like land alienation, displacement by development projects, inadequate implementation of Schedule provisions, and chronic underrepresentation in higher decision-making bodies have persisted across decades – pointing to a structural problem that constitutional text alone could not resolve.

The tribal people of India entered independent India not as architects of the new order, but as subjects of it – to be protected, developed, and gradually integrated. The distance between this paternalistic vision and Jaipal Singh Munda’s demand that Adivasis be treated as equal citizens with prescriptive rights to their land is, in many ways, the distance between what the Constitution promised and what tribal communities have continued to fight for ever since.

What do you think? If the Constituent Assembly had included greater tribal representation in its drafting committees, how differently might the Fifth and Sixth Schedules have been framed? And to what extent do the constitutional provisions for tribal communities reflect a genuine commitment to justice – or a continuation of the same paternalistic logic that defined colonial tribal policy?

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Table of Contents

The tribal question in a new republic 🔗

A colonial vocabulary in a postcolonial document 🔗

The Fifth and Sixth Schedules: protection or perpetuation? 🔗

Jaipal Singh Munda: the dissenting voice within the Assembly 🔗

What the debates did and didn’t deliver 🔗

Colonial continuity and its consequences 🔗