1. Two dates, one problem

In 2009, Bolivia remade itself as a plurinational state, on the authority of a constituent assembly in which Indigenous Peoples took part as principals and not as petitioners. Since then, eight Indigenous autonomies have been constituted. They exercise no authority over the subsoil beneath their territories and are financed on substantially the same terms as any municipality.

In 2015, the Government of India and Naga negotiators signed a Framework Agreement recording that in a democracy sovereignty lies with the people. Eleven years on, the Naga people have not been asked to exercise it.

Both of these problems arise from the same constitutional question. The issue is where that authority originates and whether it can be called upon again. The plurinational constitutions recognise many peoples as subjects of the order and one people as its author. The Naga difficulty is the reverse — an authority never conferred, and so never closed, but with no settled constitutional mechanism through which the people can exercise it. Neither arrangement secures both dimensions.

2. Terms, comparison and scope

Sovereignty is the quality of ultimate political authority, which in a democracy resides in the people and is not transferable, though its exercise may be entrusted. Self-determination is a right of peoples, with an internal dimension concerning how a people governs itself within an existing state and an external dimension concerning international status. Autonomy denotes a sphere of authority recognised by a state; self-government denotes the standing capacity of a people to constitute and direct the institutions through which it governs; self-governance denotes the continuing practice of governing through those institutions, norms and relationships.  

Bolivia and Ecuador underwent constituent processes aimed at refounding the state. The Naga case is a long bilateral negotiation between a state and a political movement. These are not the same kind of process but what is compared is a relation, namely the relation between the source of a people’s authority and the material and institutional base on which that authority can be exercised. The relation appears in both settings, despite their very different political and institutional conditions.

The Nagas are a territorial majority in their homeland, while Indigenous Peoples hold varying demographic positions in Bolivia and Ecuador. These Andean nations are rentier
states, whereas the Indian state in the Northeast operates primarily as a security state.

The Nagas constitute a territorial majority in their homeland, whereas Indigenous Peoples occupy different demographic positions in the two Andean states.

The Nagas constitute a territorial majority in their homeland, whereas Indigenous Peoples occupy different demographic positions in the two Andean states. Bolivia and Ecuador are rentier states whose legitimacy rests on redistributing resource revenue; the Indian state in the Northeast has operated substantially as a security state through exceptional legislation, which produces different incentives and different instruments of control. The relationship between Indigenous movements and political parties differs in each. These are the limits of the comparison. If the same relationship appears in such different settings, it is more likely to reflect a structural pattern than a feature of one political environment.

This article is written from a Naga vantage point and for a Naga purpose, which is to learn from what Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador achieved and from what they were unable to hold. The Latin American material rests on the work of scholars and movements in the region. The Latin American literature on de facto autonomy is taken up below through a single case, Chiapas, as a particularly clear instance of autonomy exercised without formal legal recognition. The internal contestation of Indigenous self-government, including the scholarship of Indigenous women, is touched on only where it bears on what peoplehood requires.

On sources, two competing versions of the text of the Framework Agreement have been published in the media but the competency proposals that followed are not in the public domain; the discussion below is therefore limited to the broad constitutional and political arrangement they indicate and does not quote the provisions directly. The claim on which the argument turns is independent of those confidential materials. It is that no constituent act appears on the public record, a claim that would be displaced by the production of such an act.

3. Bolivia: an architecture built, then narrowed

Bolivia gave constitutional standing to 36 nations and their languages, created a Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal and special Indigenous constituencies, recognised Indigenous jurisdiction as equal to the ordinary courts, and recognised Indigenous autonomy as arising from the pre-existing authority of Indigenous nations rather than as a grant from the centre. This was won over decades, at a cost that included lives.

The boundary between what the constitution recognised and what remained with the state is consistent throughout.Identity, language, custom and jurisdiction were recognised; the subsoil, the resource rent and much of the fiscal power stayed with the state. Bolivian Indigenous autonomies hold certain taxation powers attached to municipal competencies, but the available tax base is negligible and dependence on central transfers remains very high. A distinction that is often overlooked also matters. Indigenous territories hold considerably stronger rights over renewable natural resources than over the non-renewable subsoil, which remains with the state.

Equality therefore survives as a constitutional principle while the scope of the jurisdiction is narrowed by ordinary law. What a constitution grants, an ordinary statute can substantially narrow without amendment.

Equality therefore survives as a constitutional principle while the scope of the jurisdiction is narrowed by ordinary law.

Two mechanisms then narrowed what recognition delivered. The first is at the point of entry. A territory or municipality seeking Indigenous autonomy had to draft a written statute, win a local referendum and pass constitutional review; Ley 1198 of 2019 later eased that route, allowing a statute to be approved in a recognised Indigenous territory through the people’s own norms and procedures, with legislative approval to follow. Conversion nonetheless remained slow, which locates the constraint in the organisational capacity needed to complete the process, not in procedure alone.

The second mechanism works after recognition has been won. The Jurisdictional Demarcation Law, passed the year after the constitution, drew the boundary of that formally equal jurisdiction narrowly, placing serious criminal matters outside it along with mining, hydrocarbons and other fields. Equality therefore survives as a constitutional principle while the scope of the jurisdiction is narrowed by ordinary law. What a constitution grants, an ordinary statute can substantially narrow without amendment. This is the process of hollowing out. The breaking points have been where recognition meets the material base — the road driven through the Isiboro Sécure territory in 2011 being the clearest instance. Where a state lives on resource rent, the redistribution that sustains its legitimacy is financed by extraction from the territories where self-government would have real force.

4. Ecuador: an architecture declared, and not built

The 2008 constitution of Ecuador established plurinationality and interculturality as principles of the state and recognised Indigenous jurisdiction and Indigenous territorial districts, but it did not produce an equivalent institutional architecture for Indigenous autonomy, and no Indigenous territorial district has been constituted. Where Bolivia built and narrowed, Ecuador declared and did not build.

The narrowing that did occur came through adjudication. In 2014, in La Cocha, the Constitutional Court held that Indigenous jurisdiction does not extend to cases involving death, narrowing by interpretation the jurisdiction that the constitution had recognised in principle. Then, a national referendum in 2023 mandated an end to drilling in Yasuní, but the result has not been fully implemented. By 2026, a major exercise of Indigenous political mobilisation had become defensive. Indigenous organisations helped defeat a referendum on a new constituent assembly, while Indigenous and environmental organisations faced restrictions on their civic activity, including the freezing of bank accounts.

5. What the two retreats share

Hollowing out by statute in one state, non-implementation and judicial restriction in the other — different routes producing a similar structural weakness. This points to something in the structure of conferred recognition rather than to the politics of one governing party. Three features are common. The material base stayed with the state in each. The difficulty of the route to autonomy was in each case read back into the people as evidence of incapacity. And because the plurinational project was constituted through constitutional law, its survival depends in significant part on courts and legislatures continuing to uphold it. Where judicial independence erodes or political institutions turn hostile, its constitutional protections become vulnerable. By 2026 the strain is visible in both, with Bolivia’s long protest wave taking place inside the constitutional order rather than directed towards a new one. What was not secured was a continuing institutional capacity for the peoples themselves to reopen the constitutional settlement. The constituent power that could author the order was exercised at the founding but not reserved to be exercised again.

6. A people that has not been asked

6.1. A regime nobody granted

The Naga homeland lies across what is now northeast India and northwest Myanmar. Before colonial rule, there was no centralised Naga state because political authority was organised at the village level. Each village was its own polity, governing through its own institutions, holding its land and settling disputes under its customary law, with authority resting on the agreement of those who lived under it. Land and its resources belonged to communities and still do. That political and territorial inheritance was not granted by a state.

British administration gradually brought Naga territories under separate colonial jurisdictions during the nineteenth century, and the transfer of power in 1947 divided the Naga homeland again between India and Burma, now Myanmar, without a settlement reached with the people who lived there. A wider Naga political consciousness grew from this experience rather than preceding it. Division imposed from outside made a common political voice a practical necessity. A plebiscite was held in 1951; armed conflict followed, then long negotiation, and a ceasefire has held since 1997.

6.2. Article 371A: a shelter, not a foundation

Article 371A of the Constitution of India, in force since 1963, provides that no Act of Parliament touching Naga religious or social practice, Naga customary law and procedure, the administration of justice under that law, or the ownership and transfer of land and its resources shall apply in Nagaland unless the state legislative assembly decides that it should. Since land and its resources are understood to belong to the communities, this protects the material base more firmly than almost anything available in Latin America.

The provision must nonetheless meet the same test applied to conferred authority elsewhere, and it does not pass it. Article 371A is part of the Indian constitutional order and operates through a state legislative assembly. What is distinctive in the Naga situation is not the provision but the customary regime of community ownership that the provision recognises — a regime that predates the Indian constitutional order and is not derived from it. Article 371A is therefore the state’s recognition of an existing Naga institution, not the source of that institution.

The consequences follow from that distinction. The protection is conditional because the constitutional exclusion operates through the decision of the state legislative assembly. It is a shelter rather than a foundation. And because the Naga political question has never been settled, there has been no constituent act through which the Naga people authorised a permanent transfer or surrender of that authority. A settlement of wider scope, negotiated without constituent authority, could concede what the people never empowered their negotiators to concede. That makes protection of the material base, rather than its creation, one of the first questions any constituent settlement would have to address.

6.3. The Framework Agreement and the question of source

The Framework Agreement of 3 August 2015 recognises the unique history and position of the Nagas; records that both parties are cognizant of the universal principle that in a democracy sovereignty lies with the people; and speaks of sharing the sovereign powers as defined in the competencies.

Its meaning is contested. The Government of India has not publicly characterised the arrangement as shared sovereignty in the same terms as the NSCN (IM) but has indicated it as an enhanced form of autonomy. The leadership of the NSCN (IM) reads the same text as recognising Naga sovereignty and a relationship of shared sovereignty between distinct entities. The question pursued here is prior to both readings and has not been joined by any of the parties.

A proposed settlement intended to establish a new political order, but which cannot be shown to the people whose constituent power it claims to exercise, is not an exercise of that power, whatever its content.

A proposed settlement that cannot be shown to the people is not an exercise of their power.

The detailed competencies since proposed take the Framework Agreement as their point of departure and proceed directly to subjects of governmental and administrative power and would have the agreement itself stand as a constitution. Competencies are therefore being prepared without any exercise of constituent authority. Where the source of the competencies is unnamed, they remain open to being read as flowing from the Constitution of India, at which point the sharing of sovereign powers between two peoples could become an arrangement of autonomy within an existing constitutional order rather than a new constitutional relationship between distinct constituent peoples.

The confidentiality of the documents bears on the same point. A proposed settlement intended to establish a new political order, but which cannot be shown to the people whose constituent power it claims to exercise, is not an exercise of that power, whatever its content. Constituent authority is not a quality a document can hold privately.

6.4. What counts as a constituent act

A claim that constituent authority has not been exercised requires a criterion made up of three elements, applied to the whole record rather than to the current negotiation alone. A constituent act is one in which a people deliberates, decides by its own procedures, and authorises the creation or fundamental reordering of its political institutions.

The memorandum submitted to the Simon Commission in 1929 was a petition, not a decision. The plebiscite of 1951 satisfies the first two elements in relation to political status but not the third, since it established no institutions and conferred no mandate to design them. The Sixteen-Point Agreement of 1960 was concluded by a body with no mandate to represent or negotiate, at a point when the Naga resistance movement had been largely suppressed and the organisation claiming a mandate from the plebiscite was in no position to contest it. The Shillong Accord of 1975 was repudiated on the ground that it had not authorised the terms agreed. The competencies now under discussion rest on mandated negotiators.

Across almost a century, the Naga political process has repeatedly produced instruments that did not clearly rest on the consent of the constituent power, which is a substantial part of why none has settled the question. In the current negotiation for settlement, that power has never been expressly invoked through a constituent procedure, and the competencies still lack a publicly named source.

6.5. Who would vote?

If a people is to adopt its own settlement and reopen it, its identity cannot remain implicit. The Naga people and their ancestral territory are substantially identifiable, and identifiability is not what the Government of India disputes. The difficulty is that this homeland no longer coincides with present administrative boundaries, and Naga communities are now situated across Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and, across the international boundary, Myanmar. The questions include: Who participates in the settlement, which Naga ancestral areas fall within its scope, and what constitutional form can give effect to a people whose homeland has been divided among existing states? The territorial question therefore belongs within the constituent process rather than being left as a matter to be resolved afterwards. The Myanmar side raises a separate interstate question and cannot be carried into a constitutional settlement confined to India.

In comparison, a plurinational constitution can reserve constituent authority to an electorate whose legal boundaries are already drawn, even where that electorate contains several recognised peoples. The Naga constituent community is identifiable, but its political territory and the present representation of its members do not coincide. The problem lies in the absence of a constitutional form through which an existing peoplehood, whose homeland and political representation have been divided among state boundaries, can act collectively. The definition of the constituent subject is therefore inseparable from the reservation of constituent authority to that subject.

6.6. What an unresolved question costs

The Naga position is not a solution to the problem identified above; it is a different way of remaining outside a settled constitutional order. There is no settled territorial jurisdiction, and talks have been stalled for years over a flag and a constitution. A negotiation running for decades can become a form of government in itself. Authority accumulates in the bodies conducting it, prolonged representation displaces participation, and rival bodies each claim to carry an authority whose source remains uncertain.

A political community that has spent 70 years without a settled constitutional relationship has also had no occasion to build the deliberative and administrative practice that exercising one would require. This creates a problem that is structurally comparable to the difficulty seen in Bolivia, but the causes are different. In Bolivia, institutional capacity was tested by a state-defined procedure for obtaining autonomy. In the Naga case, the absence of a settled constitutional relationship has limited the opportunity to develop institutions through which the people could exercise their constituent authority.

7. What a material base must include

7.1. Title and control

A material base of self-government cannot be reduced to legal title, subsoil ownership or resource revenue. Zapatista self-government in Chiapas has operated for decades without state recognition and without any conventional transfer of fiscal resources. Its experience shows that self-government can persist where formal title and state-derived revenue are absent, provided that communities retain effective control over territory and develop the organisational capacity to exercise that control.

This makes effective control a necessary part of the material base. What sustains self-government day to day is not legal title or resource revenue as such, but effective control over territory together with accumulated organisational capacity. On that reading, Chiapas is not an exception to the argument but an important illustration of it. The Zapatistas have exercised substantial control and built organisational capacity in the absence of formal title and resource rents.

The distinction is therefore between the legal and the practical dimensions of authority. Effective control is what makes a right usable; recognised rights are what make control legally defensible. Neither substitutes for the other in a settled relationship with a state. A durable settlement of self-government therefore requires both recognised authority and the effective capacity to exercise it.

7.2. Scale as a condition of control

Latin American scholarship has long argued that self-government needs a territorial and political scale able to sustain an economic base, and that autonomy confined to fragmented municipal units becomes municipal administration under another name. Bolivian Indigenous autonomy was encapsulated within municipalities before it was further constrained by the state’s retention of subsoil resources, and the two limitations compound one another. A unit too small to sustain an economy cannot exercise resource rights effectively even where it formally holds them. Scale is therefore a condition of effective control.

The claim for integration arises in part because the present arrangement distributes Naga areas across administrative units, few of which are viable as the territorial basis of self-government. If integration were achieved, it would also avoid the problem of winning a majority among neighbours who want no part of the arrangement, a difficulty seen in some Bolivian cases. It carries an obligation in return. Where proposed Naga territories overlap with territories inhabited by other peoples, integration would place those peoples in the position of a minority within an autonomy constituted primarily by the Naga people. The terms on which those neighbours are included would therefore have to be settled with them, rather than assumed as part of the Naga claim. Subsurface deposits straddle these boundaries and the homeland crosses an international border, so shared resources would need a regime agreed with neighbours and the State.

7.3. Ownership without the means of exercise

The Naga evidence states the proposition in reverse. Recognised community ownership has not settled who may licence extraction. Oil was produced at Changpang from 1981 until May 1994, when the operator withdrew amid demands for payment for Naga resources, leaving wells improperly decommissioned; the constitutional question remains open, with Nagaland invoking Article 371A and the Union invoking the Union List together with the Mines and Minerals (Regulation and Development) Act 1957. More than 60 years after Article 371A came into force, recognised ownership has still not produced effective control over the resource.

Ownership recognised without the institutions through which it can be exercised — including a clear linkage between customary and statutory jurisdiction, budgetary authority at the community level, and the technical and legal capacity to negotiate rather than merely refuse — leaves the right formally intact but practically exposed. Where those institutions do not exist, the state retains much of the practical machinery through which resource decisions are made. Building an effective system of community resource governance would therefore require authority and institutional capacity to exercise ownership.

An independent material base does not democratise-government by itself. Revenue accruing to an autonomous authority can concentrate power within a territory just as readily as it can remain under external control.

8. The condition no settlement supplies for itself

The constitutional settlement cannot supply for itself the political capacity needed to sustain it. The constitutional texts of Bolivia and Ecuador did not change between 2009 and 2026; the executives did, and recognition proved vulnerable once the institutions responsible for implementing it turned against it. More broadly, Indigenous self-government is difficult to sustain where the surrounding state ceases to respect democratic institutions and recasts claims to self-government as threats to territorial unity.Across Asia, claims to self-governance have often been treated as separatism and answered with force.

There is a trap in the observation. If self-government must await the state’s democratisation, the state holds a veto over it. Two considerations close the trap. Indigenous self-government is itself democratising. Plurinationality is, at its core, a claim about the character of democracy — that a political order can contain more than one legitimate source of authority and still hold together. Coexistence therefore requires more than the restraint of the state. It requires a shared political and moral horizon between peoples, built through their relationship rather than granted by one to the other.

A shared horizon is required between peoples, so that coexistence rests on something other than the balance of force. Peoplehood is therefore a precondition rather than a sentiment.

A shared horizon is required between peoples, so that coexistence rests on something other than the balance of force.

Self-determination is in this sense a practice carried on over time rather than a fixed institutional arrangement. A shared horizon is required between peoples, so that coexistence rests on something other than the balance of force. Peoplehood is therefore a precondition rather than a sentiment. Coherence sufficient to act together means the capacity to act through disagreement, not its absence, and a conception of peoplehood that treats dissent as a threat to unity produces a silenced subject rather than a constituent one, and the experience of Indigenous women in particular shows that rights are claimed within autonomy rather than against it.

The Bolivian record is telling here. The composite category through which Indigenous peoplehood entered the constitutional text held as long as the coalition behind it held, then broke along the division it had covered, between Andean peasant federations and lowland territorial organisations. By the time the order needed its authors again, they no longer existed in a form able to act. That closure was contingent and political rather than inherent in constitution-making, which places the remedy less in drafting than in the maintenance of political power.

Proposal

Since the diagnosis is that constitutional texts are insufficient without the power and capacity to sustain them, the proposals address who holds and can exercise something — authority, territory, revenue or institutional capacity — rather than what a document merely says about it. Reserved constituent power.

Sovereignty is inherent in the people and cannot be permanently transferred, even though its exercise may be entrusted to institutions.A constitution must therefore specify when and in what circumstances the founding power may be reconvened and must leave that power with the people rather than with the head of state, the institutions or the negotiators. Where the text draws no such boundary, whoever holds office will draw it.

A standard objection in constitutional theory is that once a constitution regulates how a  constituent power is exercised, what it regulates is no longer constituent power but a constituted power of amendment.No constitution creates constituent power, and none can abolish it; a reopening clause acknowledges a power the text cannot originate and specifies who may set it in motion. The alternative to specifying it is not preservation but silence, which leaves the question to whoever holds office when it arises. The objection also points to a useful distinction. If a regulated reopening procedure is merely an amendment power, then the Bolivian and Ecuadorian provisions should not be described as reservations of constituent power to Indigenous peoples. What is proposed here is narrower in scope than general constituent power but distinct from ordinary amendment, reaching only the terms of the relationship between a people and the state.

A power invocable at will would make government impossible; one never invocable is not reserved. Four specifications give it workable shape:

• Who may trigger it. The people whose authority is at stake, acting through their own institutions and procedures, and not only the national electorate. In a plurinational order each constituent people holds the trigger for the terms constituting its own relationship with the state.
• What it reaches. Not the constitution at large but the terms of the relationship; the distribution of authority between the people and the state, the territorial arrangement, the material base, and the reopening procedure itself. Ordinary legislation and ordinary amendment remain with the constituted powers.
• Under what circumstances. Material breach, where the state has failed to implement or has legislated to narrow what was agreed; fundamental change of circumstances, such as a major resource discovery or a fundamental change in the constitutional character of the state; and periodic review at intervals of a generation. Periodic review matters most in practice, because it makes reconsideration a normal constitutional possibility rather than an allegation of bad faith.
• By what procedure. Deliberation within the people according to its own norms, decision by the people concerned, negotiation with the state, ratification by both. Initiation would not be unilateral, but neither would it require the other party’s permission.

Any such clause should state expressly that it is not a right of secession and should be drafted so that it cannot be read as one. Its purpose is the renegotiation of terms within a continuing relationship.

Both plurinational constitutions do provide for reconvening the founding power. In Bolivia, total reform, or reform touching the fundamental bases, rights and guarantees, proceeds through a plenipotentiary constituent assembly activated by referendum, which may be set in motion by citizen initiative carrying at least twenty per cent of the electorate, by an absolute majority of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, or by the President, the resulting text requiring approval at a constitutional referendum. In Ecuador, a constituent assembly may be convoked only through popular consultation, requested by the President, by two-thirds of the National Assembly, or by twelve per cent of those on the electoral register, with any new constitution approved by referendum.

The trigger and the ratification mechanisms are organised through the national electorate as a single constitutional body. Neither constitution reserves the initiative to a constituent people as such. A plurinational constitution reserving the founding power only to the national body of voters has not institutionalised plurinationality in this respect. It recognises many peoples as subjects of the order and one people as its author. The criticism is internal to the plurinational project rather than directed against it. The question is whether recognising several peoples should extend beyond recognising them as subjects of rights and autonomy to reserving to each a constituent authority over the fundamental terms of its own relationship with the state.

9. What international law supports

India has not ratified ILO Convention No. 169; Bolivia ratified it in 1991 and Ecuador in 1998. Its consultation and benefit-sharing requirements therefore bind Bolivia and Ecuador as parties to the Convention, but not India. The relevant provision is in any event conditional in form, addressing cases in which the State retains ownership of mineral or sub-surface resources, and so presupposes rather than confers that ownership, which arises under domestic law.

UNDRIP recognises, in Article 26, the right to own, use, develop and control lands, territories and resources without expressly excluding sub-surface resources; requires, in Article 32(2), free, prior and informed consent before approval of projects affecting those territories, naming mineral resources expressly; and provides redress where resources have been taken without consent. The argument here draws on this stronger conception of control and consent rather than treating consultation as the outer limit of Indigenous participation.

One foreseeable objection concerns territorial integrity. The Declaration carries a savings clause for the territorial integrity and political unity of sovereign and independent states. That clause does not itself establish an unconditional rule that existing territorial arrangements prevail over all claims of self-determination. The closely related 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration states the territorial-integrity principle in a formulation that refers to states conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination and possessing a government representing the whole people without distinction. Territorial integrity appears there as a condition to be met, not a guarantee.

The Friendly Relations Declaration states the territorial-integrity principle in a formulation referring to States conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination and possessing a government representing the whole people.

The Friendly Relations Declaration states the territorial-integrity principle, referring to States in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination.

A second foreseeable objection concerns India’s position on self-determination. India has entered a declaration concerning Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that limits the right of self-determination, for purposes of India’s undertaking under the Covenant, to peoples under foreign domination. France, Germany, the Netherlands and Pakistan objected to that declaration. The declaration records India’s position in the treaty framework; it does not by itself determine what India and the Nagas may agree in a negotiated settlement. No such settlement has yet been concluded.

10. What self-government is, and what a settlement must secure

Self-government is the standing capacity of a people to establish, direct and remake the institutions through which it governs itself, resting on five conditions together  —  a people coherent enough to act together, in the sense given above; authority originating in the people rather than in a grant; a material base consisting of effective control over territory and its resources, at a scale able to sustain them, together with revenue held as of right; institutions answerable to the people and capable of being remade; and the practical capacity to design those institutions and govern through them.

Stated as requirements, and drawn from what the two experiences show, this is what a settlement would need to secure:

1. Name the origin of the authority it recognises, and recognise rather than create it;
2. Be adopted by the people themselves through a constituent assembly, referendum, plebiscite or comparable process, and not by negotiators alone;
3. Set out when and how the people may reconvene to revise it, with a trigger available to the people concerned and not only to a wider electorate;
4. Secure land, subsoil and resources as of right, at a viable scale, together with authority over their alienation and transfer, and the institutions and revenue through which that holding can be exercised;
5. Reduce nothing already protected, a settlement being measured against the position it replaces;
6. Entrench competencies so that they cannot be narrowed by statute or emptied by interpretation, with disputes referred to an independent forum rather than to the administration of one party;
7. Draw the form of government from the people’s own traditions rather than an external template;
8. Answer to its own members, standards such as the equal standing of women being reached through the people’s own institutions, supported by education and resources, rather than by external mandate alone;
9. Establish a standing forum in which the parties meet as parties, and a corresponding forum with neighbouring peoples or jurisdictions where territory or resources are shared;
10. Treat the capacity to design a governing architecture, and to govern through it, as a standing programme of work rather than as something acquired after signature.

The first nine are matters to be secured through mutual agreement and reciprocal obligation; the tenth is a capacity that no settlement can confer and that the people themselves must build and exercise. Capacity of this sort — administrative, fiscal, deliberative, and sufficient to carry internal disagreement — must be built by Indigenous governments and movements themselves, and there are two reasons for treating it as urgent. Where autonomy has functioned well in Latin America, organisational depth and governing practice generally preceded the legal form, with the legal framework recognising and consolidating capacities that had already developed. And states have learned to read missing capacity as a reason to withhold authority, turning a shortfall into an argument against further authority.

The pathways through which movements enter parties and state programmes, the conditions attached to participation, and the dismantling or displacement of institutions peoples had built for themselves all shape how much organisational capacity can accumulate. In the Naga case, the raw material has not been absent. Villages have governed continuously, although protracted militarisation, institutional disruption and weaknesses within the movements themselves have eroded that inheritance. What remains missing and unfinished is the deliberate work of revitalising and connecting those surviving institutions into a wider political, fiscal and administrative capacity capable of sustaining self-government at the scale required.

11. Conclusion

None of this requires an unprecedented constitutional imagination, with States building beyond the doctrinal minimum. Denmark’s Self-Government Act recognises the people of Greenland as a people under international law with the right of self-determination and establishes a defined legal route through which the relationship may develop further. The Latin American constituent processes also went a considerable distance, but stopped short when they recognised multiple peoples as subjects of the constitutional order but did not reserve to those peoples a continuing constituent authority, and substantial control over the material base remained with the state. The Naga process has kept the question open at the cost of never securing an answer and now risks settling how government will work without first settling where its authority comes from.

The question is who constitutes whom — and whether, once answered, that question may be asked again.

The post Who Constitutes Whom? Constituent Power, the Material Base, and the Limits of Plurinational Recognition: a Naga Reading of the Latin American Experience appeared first on Debates Indígenas.

For women, this alienation has gender-specific consequences. Traditionally, Indigenous women have enjoyed a relatively high status due to their role in production, ecological knowledge, and family economy, which are built on CPRs. Indigenous women of North-East India have thus participated in decision-making and are economically active agents as long as land is managed by the community. When these systems are disrupted through land alienation, development-induced displacement, legal assimilation with the dominant society, and market interventions, Indigenous women experience a disproportionate loss of status, agency, and access to justice.

Justice for Indigenous women must, therefore be located at the intersection of collective rights, livelihood security, gendered power relations, and self-determination. The loss of CPRs, the imposition of individualised legal regimes, and development-induced displacement have disproportionately undermined Indigenous women’s rights. A re-conceptualisation of the notion of justice is therefore necessary that prioritises sustenance-based rights, gender-sensitive reforms of customary laws, and meaningful recognition of Indigenous legal systems.

Collective Rights and the Question of Justice

The Indian debate on whether communities should be recognised as “tribal” or “Indigenous” is not merely semantic.  The term “tribe”, as used in the Indian constitution, refers to a community with shared culture and social organisation. It thus situates these communities within a welfare and development paradigm, while not acknowledging their historical prior occupancy. The term “Indigenous,” on the other hand, is grounded in international law and emphasises original habitation, self-determination, collective rights, and sovereignty over land, forests, and natural resources. This term refers to a rights-based political identity tied to historical continuity.

The Indian State, however, does not recognise any community as Indigenous; it classifies them all under the caterory of “tribal”. While “tribal” recognition limits justice to redistributive and compensatory measures, “Indigenous” recognition extends it to historical, territorial, and restorative justice. Indigenous Peoples perceive themselves as distinct “peoples” possessing collective rights rooted in their historical, cultural, spiritual, and territorial relationships. Their rights are not limited to individual entitlements but include collective rights over land, resources, and governance systems. These collective rights are essential for maintaining intergenerational continuity of culture, law, and livelihood.

However, the imposition of private or individual property regimes through colonial and postcolonial legal frameworks and capitalist notions of development has undermined the collective land rights of tribal and Indigenous communities. The legal system in India does not recognise CPR as the Indigenous Peoples’ sustenance. The denial of their right over CPR leads to land alienation and impoverishment. Such a framework is particularly ill-suited to Indigenous societies that have traditionally held and managed land and other resources collectively. Justice in this context means recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ collective rights and their authority over sustenance systems.

Gender Implications, Customary Law and Formal Law

Indigenous communities in Northeast India have traditionally governed themselves through customary laws that prioritised equitable distribution, sustainable management of resources, and intergenerational equity. Women enjoyed a relatively high (although not equal) status because of their role in managing the family economy. However, the imposition of individual property has converted community land into state property and recognised ownership largely through individual pattas (legal individual ownership land document), usually vested in “male heads of households”. As CPRs are alienated, Indigenous women increasingly lose access to the economic and social spaces that sustained their status.

This legal shift transfers power from the community to a male elite and marginalises women from decision-making. The State and market institutions further intensify this process by granting loans, subsidies, and benefits only to individual landowners, reinforcing male control and accelerating class formation within the communities. As a result, women lose their economic roles, social autonomy, and authority, leading many to even internalise ideologies of female subordination. The encounter between customary and formal law is thus not a neutral transition but an unequal process that deepens gender injustice. 

While externally imposed models of development often deepen gendered inequalities, meaningful gender justice is more likely to emerge when customary institutions themselves are reformed in ways that protect women’s rights.

Gender justice is more likely to emerge when customary institutions themselves are reformed in ways that protect women’s rights.

Indications show that modernisation without safeguards or preparation strengthens male domination by introducing individual land ownership and intensifying male control over resources. It also results in class formation in their traditionally egalitarian societies. For example, among the matrilineal Garo of Meghalaya, financial schemes for State-supported rubber plantations required individual land titles in the name of male heads of households. This affected community ownership since a few powerful individuals monopolised land and it weakened women’s role.

There are also instances that benefit women and arise from  customary systems themselves. The reforms proposed by the Paite Tribal Council to recognise daughters’ inheritance rights demonstrate the possibility of aligning tradition with gender justice. Taken together, these experiences underscore that while externally imposed models of development often deepen gendered inequalities, meaningful gender justice is more likely to emerge when customary institutions themselves are reformed in ways that protect women’s rights.

Development, Displacement, and the Feminisation of Injustice

Development-induced displacement constitutes one of the gravest barriers to justice for Indigenous Peoples in general and Indigenous women and girls in particular. Dams, mining, and industrial expansion have primarily targeted the CPRs that form the backbone of Indigenous livelihoods. Large-scale acquisition of tribal land for development projects has resulted in widespread impoverishment.

In this regard, a significantly higher proportion of Indigenous displaced persons become landless compared to non-indigenous groups. Furthermore, territorial encroachment has devastating social consequences for Indigenous Peoples, such as marginalisation, destitution, and loss of identity and culture. In India, while around 25 percent of displaced cultivators become landless after displacement, this figure exceeds 50 percent among Indigenous and Dalit displaced persons.

Displacement thus goes beyond reproducing pre-existing inequalities; it actively feminises injustice by dismantling the material, social, and cultural bases that sustain Indigenous women’s dignity and rights.

Displacement feminises injustice by dismantling the material, social, and cultural bases that sustain Indigenous women’s dignity and rights.  

While displacement impoverishes entire communities, its consequences are markedly gendered. Displacement erodes not only women’s material security but also their social status. The loss of CPRs deprives women of their status as economic contributors and social actors, thus reducing many to unpaid domestic roles and intensifying their dependence on men. Alongside this, women internalise the ideology of subordination and, as livelihoods collapse, they are often pushed into low-paid, insecure work.

For their part, girls are often withdrawn from school to contribute to household survival, perpetuating cycles of poverty and female exclusion. Justice mechanisms rarely account for these impacts because they focus narrowly on individual compensation rather than collective and social loss. Development-induced displacement thus goes beyond reproducing pre-existing inequalities; it actively feminises injustice by dismantling the material, social, and cultural bases that sustain Indigenous women’s dignity and rights.

Towards Justice for Indigenous Women

Ensuring access to justice for Indigenous women and girls in Northeast India requires a fundamental reorientation of legal and policy frameworks. First, Indigeneity must be defined in terms of sustenance rather than chronology. The protection of Indigenous rights  depends on recognising CPRs as the foundation of Indigenous culture. Second, customary laws must be accorded due recognition and interpreted to address gender inequity. While the uncritical revival of tradition risks reinforcing the patriarchy, reform grounded in Indigenous values of equity, sustainability, and community welfare can strengthen women’s rights.

Third, access to justice must be expanded beyond courts to include culturally appropriate dispute resolution mechanisms, legal literacy, and participatory governance structures that ensure women’s representation. Modernisation of their customary law would be a step in this direction. Finally, justice for Indigenous women must acknowledge their agency. Despite structural constraints, Indigenous women remain central to ecological knowledge, resource management, and community resilience. Recognising and strengthening this agency is essential not only for gender justice but also for sustainable development and democratic governance in the region.

What this means is that access to justice for Indigenous women in Northeast India is inseparable from struggles over land, livelihood, self-determination, and identity. The erosion of community-based sustenance systems, combined with the imposition of individualised legal regimes, has produced intersecting forms of injustice that affect women disproportionately. Addressing this injustice requires recognising collective rights, restoring control over CPR, and reforming both formal and customary laws through a gender-sensitive lens. Only by centring sustenance, dignity, and agency can justice become meaningful for Indigenous women in the Northeast and in the rest of India.

The post Access to Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls in Northeast India appeared first on Debates Indígenas.

Suno jawano, pyare sathiyon;
Suno – Bharat ke itihas ke dekho re!
Suno – janvirodhi neetiyon ko chhodo re!
Suno – jansangharshon se naata jodo re!

Listen O soldiers, listen dear friends,
Listen – look at the history of India,
Listen – abandon the anti-people policies,
Listen – make ties with the struggles of the people!

The Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution recognizes and safeguards the rights of Indigenous Peoples/Adivasis, who are described therein as Scheduled Tribes, over their land and resources. This emerged from the governance model adopted by the British regime in the mid-19^th century as it faced numerous uprisings of Indigenous Peoples against dispossession and displacement, when their regions were grudgingly legislated as special legal zones, recognizing Adivasi customary laws and traditional practices.

After independence, India’s policymakers continued to ground the country’s development, in the colonial logic of extraction and industrialization by claiming eminent domain on Adivasi lands. This understanding of development broadly encompasses state actions such as dam building, road construction and establishment of public health and education services, for the ‘greater common good’, giving the government the power to take over lands and resources it claims are ultimately vested in the Indian State. Consequently, development as envisioned by the Indian State sanctions exclusion of its Indigenous Peoples, who have largely experienced such development as ‘developmental violence’.

Development as Developmental Violence

This form of violence manifests primarily in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, it takes the form of enforced displacement: although Adivasis constitute only 8.6% of India’s population, they account for nearly half (approximately 47%) of the estimated 70 million people displaced by industrial and mining projects between 1947 and 2010. Major multipurpose irrigation and electricity generation projects, such as the Damodar Valley project (modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority project in the United States), the Nagarjunasagar dam, and the Narmada Valley project, were all constructed on Adivasi lands, resulting in the submergence of villages.

On the other hand, this violence takes the form of expansive repression. Adivasis who resist the loss of their lands and resources are subjected to everyday repression and brutal forms of violence, including mass killings by police firing, such as the Koel Karo massacre. In addition, the reframing of Adivasi territories as areas posing an ‘internal security threat’ has enabled a militarized administration that primarily serves the corporate–State nexus and facilitates the operations of extractive companies.

Adivasis have consistently foregrounded justice-based peace, which includes social, economic and political justice: accountability of personnel instrumental in developmental violence, as well as just distribution of the resources Adivasis are deprived of.

Adivasis have consistently foregrounded justice-based peace, which includes social, economic and political justice.

The long Adivasi resistance to this developmental violence has taken many forms, from revolts to armed struggles to mass movements demanding constitutionally guaranteed autonomy, land rights, and rights over natural resources, as enshrined in UNDRIP Articles 3, 4, 7, 10, 18,19, 41 and 42, which India has ratified. Adivasis have consistently foregrounded justice-based peace, which includes social, economic and political justice: accountability of personnel instrumental in developmental violence, as well as just distribution of the resources Adivasis are deprived of while the country’s elite enjoys the fruits of ‘development’.

As Gajendra Mandavi, an Adivasi youth activist and ex-General Secretary of Bastar’s erstwhile Moolwasi Bachao Manch [Save the Indigenous Peoples’ Movement], observed in 2022: ‘Newly recruited and arrived CRPF and DRG personnel ask us for our identity cards and Aadhaar cards while strutting down the roads. We’re living here for generations, we should ask them where they have come from, for their identity and Aadhaar cards. Instead they’re asking us, and if we don’t provide details, we are beaten and abused…If we saw public transport plying the roads being constructed, we’d concur it’s development, but there’s nothing like that here.’ Similarly, women blocking a road carrying up to 500 lorries a day for mining purposes in the Amdai Hills in north Bastar in early 2025 said: ‘we’re sitting here for the road we want…only we know how much problem this has created for us. Our little children have to cross this road to go to school, but the mines people don’t bother about them, even racing past this area…’

The Naxalite Insurgency as an Excuse for State Violence Against the Adivasis

The Indian State is attempting to create consent for its version of development by focusing the discourse of ‘internal security threat’ on the Naxalite insurgency based in Adivasi regions, in particular in the Bastar Division of the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, which has made the area difficult to access for mining corporations.

The eco-sensitive, biodiverse forested hills and river systems of Bastar – an area of ~39,000 km² – are home to several Adivasi tribes, as well as abundant reserves of minerals. In 2022–2023, just one district of Bastar, Dantewada, contributed 50% of Chhattisgarh’s mineral revenue of USD153 million. In contrast, Bastar’s human development indicators and living standards remain among India’s lowest.

Since January 2024, there has been an exponential increase in extrajudicial killings, in order to reach a government-declared ‘deadline’ of eradicating Naxalism. Over 560 people have been killed, the majority being Naxalite insurgents, as well as ordinary villagers including children.

Over 560 people have been killed, the majority being Naxalite insurgents, as well as ordinary villagers including children.

India presents the Naxalite movement as the cause of this impoverishment and its extermination essential for development in Adivasi regions. Given the real intention is to facilitate corporate interests, the State has, since a few years, been consolidating a permanent ‘counter-insurgency grid’ of militarized police camps for surveillance, restricting movement and freedom of association and assembly, weaponizing welfare and public services, with a pervasive fear of arbitrary detention and incarceration.

Since January 2024, there has been an exponential increase in extrajudicial killings, in order to reach a government-declared ‘deadline’ of eradicating Naxalism by 31 March, 2026. At the time of writing, over 560 people have been killed, the majority being Naxalite insurgents, who are also Adivasis, as well as ordinary villagers including children. Between 2021 and 2024, villagers also reported five drone attacks and women reported drone surveillance while bathing.

Adivasi Youth Reimagining Peacebuilding Against Developmental Violence

In 2021, an innovative peacebuilding method emerged following police firing on a sit-in protest in Silger village in south Bastar against the setting up of a security camp on Adivasi lands without their knowledge or consent. Four people were killed. The protest grew into a movement led by Adivasi youth. Many of these young men and women had as children witnessed members of their family or village being killed or raped by the state-sponsored Salwa Judum militia in 2005–2011, and experienced the endless cycles of repression that followed. At Silger, they drew on communitarian Indigenous praxis to build Moolwasi Bachao Manch (MBM) as a platform organizing decentralized grassroots Adivasi mass movements against the militarization and corporatization of their ancestral lands. Similarly others such as Maad Bachao Andolan [Save Mount Maad Struggle] in north Bastar also emerged.

In 2023, Raghu Midiyami, ex-President MBM Bastar Division, described how their advocacy was rooted in Indigenous stewardship, sustainable livelihoods and democratic participation, and sought to safeguard Indigenous land and forest rights through demanding an end to the state’s developmental violence: ‘we have organised our structure from village to panchayat to block to district committees [who] coordinate with each other for common actions. Our focus is to raise our issues and voices against all forms of injustice happening to our people, such as fake encounters, drone attacks, laying of wide roads, felling innumerable valuable trees, setting up camps illegally and sexual violence on our women and girls. … Whenever a camp is planned or set up, the people of that area inform us and then we take stock of our strength and presence there and plan for a protest.’

The authorities repeatedly humiliated, intimidated, detained and arrested youth leaders to dismantle the movements, but they only grew.

The authorities repeatedly humiliated, intimidated, detained and arrested youth leaders to dismantle the movements, but they only grew.

The State, however, cast such Adivasi rights-based mobilization and peacebuilding as a threat to its corporate agenda, in blatant violation of UNDRIP Articles 3, 4, 10, 18 and 19, and also in violation of the Adivasis’ rights to freedom of association and expression as per the ICCPR and UDHR, reiterated in a Special Rapporteurs’ joint statement in September 2025. The authorities repeatedly humiliated, intimidated, detained and arrested youth leaders to dismantle the movements, but they only grew.

Finally, on 30 October 2024, the Chhattisgarh Government quietly declared MBM an ‘unlawful organization’ under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 (CSPSA), deeming that its justice-based peacebuilding constituted ‘instigation of the general public’ against the state’s ‘vision of development’. MBM pursued every available legal remedy, including representation to the government, petitioning the Chhattisgarh High Court and appealing to the Supreme Court of India, without getting any relief. While the ban lapsed on 30 October 2025, it remains in force de facto: ~40 Adivasi youth linked to MBM have been undergoing imprisonment for varying periods. WHRD Suneeta Pottam, Raghu Midiyami, Gajendra Mandavi and many others are still in prison.

Why Spotlight Bastar in Solidarity Building with Indigenous Peoples?

In this context, as the Indian State attempts to weaken the Naxalites through indiscriminate killings and forced surrenders, it is also dismantling the mass justice-based peacebuilding movements, incarcerating and discrediting its youth leaders. This simultaneous approach is speeding up the State’s violent redesign of Bastar to clear the region for mining interests. Officially, the state’s military policy has been declared as ‘clear, build, hold’.

MBM’s experience of engagement with state representatives for its advocacy work and its unlawful proscription exemplifies the relationship of the Indian State with its Indigenous communities. Whenever the Adivasis have demanded participatory parity and their constitutionally guaranteed autonomy and right to customary self-governance, including respecting their right to Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC), the State that privileges private capital over its own citizens, has betrayed their faith and its own obligations to human rights.

In Bastar, the Constitution remains in a state of suspension due to the complicity of the legislature, judiciary and the executive in the developmental violence in the region.

In Bastar, the Constitution remains in a state of suspension due to the complicity of the legislature, judiciary and the executive in the developmental violence in the region.

The key legislations that operationalize the Fifth Schedule constitutional protections in Adivasi regions, mandating the authority of Gram Sabhas (village assemblies) in local decision-making, securing individual and collective rights over forest lands and resources, including FPIC in planning of mining, industrial, infrastructure or militarization project on Adivasi lands, have never been implemented in letter or spirit. Rather, in Bastar, since the Salwa Judum, the Constitution remains in a state of suspension due to the complicity of the legislature, judiciary and the executive in the developmental violence in the region.

MBM consistently stood in solidarity with international Indigenous and other struggles through, for example, observing International Indigenous Peoples’ Day and International Women’s Day. Their public statements also appealed for global solidarity for Bastar. While those calls have been silenced right now, the continued existential threat to Adivasi communities from state militarization in Bastar and neighbouring regions necessitates they must echo alongside other Indigenous movements across Latin America, Asia and Africa.

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This essay asserts the limits of state-centred peace and invites a rehumanising approach to self-determination. The authors weave together the Indigenous experience and how it may contribute to the global peace discourse. With this in mind, self-determination must be understood more broadly as a continuous political praxis grounded in collective identity, responsibility, and dignity. Lessons from the Naga struggle call for recovering an Indigenous worldview and praxis of self-determination to unlock the path toward humanisation and JustPeace.

The Westphalian Constraint on Self-Determination

The concept of sovereignty that emerged from the Westphalian order reorganised political authority around territorially bounded states. While this framework stabilised interstate relations, it simultaneously marginalised political communities whose sovereignty traditions pre-existed and exceeded the Westphalian order. Ironically, self-determination, a right associated with all peoples, was reduced to state-determination.

In the decolonisation era, self-determination was proclaimed ‘presumptively universal in scope … to benefit all segments of humanity,’ yet, in practice, it was selectively applied. Colonial territories became independent states, but Indigenous Peoples encapsulated within those states were rarely recognised as peoples with right to self-determination.

For Indigenous Peoples, including the Nagas, decolonisation goes beyond state independence and means restoring political agency, historical voice, and moral authorship.

For Indigenous Peoples, including the Nagas, decolonisation goes beyond state independence and means restoring political agency, historical voice, and moral authorship.

From an Indigenous perspective, decolonisation remains profoundly incomplete. Postcolonial states inherited colonial territorial logic, legal hierarchies, and governance models that prioritised national homogeneity over Indigenous plurality. As a result, many Indigenous Peoples experienced decolonisation not as liberation, but as a continuation of political domination under new authority.

Decolonisation without Indigenous political recognition is merely a change of administrators rather than transforming political relationships. For Indigenous Peoples, including the Nagas, decolonisation goes beyond state independence and means restoring political agency, historical voice, and moral authorship. This understanding is reflected in broader Asian Indigenous movements that articulate self-governance not simply as legal recognition, but as a democratic and ethical practice rooted in community and collective agency.

Self-Determination as Lived History

For Nagas, self-determination has been embedded in lived political experience, customary governance, and collective memory. Prior to incorporation into the Indian state, Naga people exercised political autonomy through village republics, inter-village alliances, and customary institutions grounded in moral accountability. Its political consciousness is also influenced by historical events compounded by moral injury and political denial that wounds collective dignity. Despite its history, the Naga political identity has persisted as a narrative of continuity that consistently defended its political existence.

Truly, Naga nationalism is a question of justice and not ethnic sentiments. Its moral-political assertion refuses to accept that a people can be administratively absorbed without ethical consent that has spanned generations. This assertion has been carried across generations. Self-determination in the Naga case remains a sustained political memory—a form of historical responsibility to ancestors, community, and future generations.

State institutions, under the banner of development and peace, have intruded deeply into Naga society, while strategic cultural assimilation continues through education, administration, and economic integration.

State institutions, under the banner of development and peace, have intruded deeply into Naga society, while strategic cultural assimilation continues through education, administration, and economic integration.

The state-led Indo–Naga peace process exemplifies conflict management rather than conflict transformation. While this strategy has reduced armed confrontation, it has produced fragmentation, weakened social cohesion, expanded corruption and impunity, eroded traditional institutions, and deepened public disillusionment toward conventional state-led peace processes.

State institutions, under the banner of development and peace, have intruded deeply into Naga society, while strategic cultural assimilation continues through education, administration, and economic integration. Protracted negotiations without resolution have normalised injustice, causing negative societal affects. Sadly, the peace process has weakened Naga cooperation and eventually produces compliance rather than consent.

Rehumanising Self-Determination

To move beyond this impasse, self-determination must be rehumanised and its ethical and cultural dimensions emancipated. Indigenous Peoples remind us that self-determination is not a destination, but a struggle for the recovery of dignity, wisdom, and solidarity. In this context, Indigenous activist Kenneth Deer asserts that no one owns the definition of self-determination and explains it as relational, shared, and negotiated. Ultimately, rehumanising self-determination requires restoring its meaning, confidence, and moral agency within political communities.

In a similar vein, Gam Shimray, Secretary-General of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), argues that “recovering meaning also means rebuilding this relational foundation — reviving the practices and environments that allow meaning-making to flourish again.” Without this relational recovery, political claims remain hollow. Self-determination cannot survive as a purely juridical concept; it must live within social relationships, cultural practices, and shared responsibility.

Ultimately, decolonisation is a rehumanising process that dignifies political relationships so that peoples are no longer treated as objects of governance but as co-creators of history. Thus, when self-determination is rehumanised, it becomes a requisite for ethical governance, peace and healing. Self-determination, therefore, remains a continuous political praxis. It is a right that people always have, not a right that derives from a single historical event.

Rethinking Sovereignty from the Naga Experience

The Naga experience compels us to rethink sovereignty itself. The dominant political discourse continues to equate sovereignty with exclusive territorial control exercised by states. Within this framework, sovereignty is treated primarily as a legal attribute of the state rather than as a people’s moral and political reality. Indigenous Peoples unsettle this assumption because sovereignty has never been understood merely as control over territory, but as political responsibility: a responsibility for collective identity, community continuity, moral order, and accountability to future generations, a relational ethic emphasised across Indigenous governance discourses.

Sovereignty, in this sense, is defined by the capacity to sustain a people as a moral and political community and not by dominating the space. It is exercised not only through formal institutions, but through memory, customary practice, and intergenerational responsibility. From this perspective, philosopher Hans Köchler observes that “it is not the state that is ‘eternal’ which enjoys ‘inalienable rights,’ but the people as a collective social and cultural reality.” When international law and political discourse centre on states rather than peoples, they produce a democratic deficit in which political legitimacy is derived from territorial inheritance rather than from the consent and continuity of political communities.

The Naga struggle demonstrates that sovereignty imposed without political consent cannot achieve moral legitimacy. Collective political will and imagination can creatively address the Naga question.  From this perspective, sovereignty must be reimagined as layered and relational. Such an understanding situates the state within a wider moral and political ecology.

Indigenous Self-Determination and the Future of Democratic Imagination

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms that self-determination includes self-government and effective participation in decisions affecting human beings. Yet, in practice, these standards remain persistently subordinated to state sovereignty claims. Recognition without implementation has become a central technique of contemporary colonial governance.

These contradictions raise a deeper question: whether modern political systems are capable of recognising political plurality without fear, and diversity without domination. The Naga experience exemplifies this contradiction as it is often framed through a security lens. Yet its persistence reveals a deeper democratic failure: the inability of postcolonial democracy to recognise peoples as political equals rather than as administrative populations.

The Naga struggle is a mirror that reflects the unresolved tension between modern state sovereignty and Indigenous political existence.

The Naga struggle is a mirror that reflects the unresolved tension between modern state sovereignty and Indigenous political existence.

The Nagas resonate with Indigenous experiences across the world, who consistently challenge the assumption that state sovereignty by design extinguishes prior political existence. In Latin America, North America, the Pacific, and Asia, Indigenous movements have insisted that encapsulation into modern states cannot dissolve their status as political communities. If democracy is to remain essential and relevant, it must adapt to accommodate layered sovereignties, overlapping identities, and differentiated political belonging. Unity imposed without recognition produces neither stability nor justice, but compliance without legitimacy.

From this perspective, the Naga struggle is a mirror that reflects the unresolved tension between modern state sovereignty and Indigenous political existence. It exposes the limits of a democratic imagination that has not yet learned to recognise peoples as co-creators of political order. In this sense, the Naga struggle is not only about Naga destiny. It raises the questions about the future credibility of postcolonial democracy itself.

Self-Determination as Humanisation

If self-determination is ultimately a question of human dignity and not territorial management, then its meaning cannot be exhausted by constitutional formulas or administrative arrangements. It must be understood as a moral and political claim to exist as a people whose history, identity, and future cannot be suppressed and erased by institutional convenience. Indigenous advocates argue that until political recognition aligns with human dignity, peace remains administratively managed, a condition found in the Naga context as well as among Indigenous Peoples in Asia.

The Naga experience illustrates this with particular clarity. What is at stake is not only a political settlement, but the recognition of a people as legitimate co-creators of political order rather than residual populations managed within inherited territorial frameworks. In this regard, rehumanising self-determination means rehumanising sovereignty itself. When sovereignty is reduced to territorial possession, it becomes an instrument of exclusion. However, when reimagined as accountable to history, to community, and to future generations, sovereignty becomes a foundation for ethical governance. A democratic order that cannot recognise Indigenous political existence ultimately weakens its own claim to democratic credibility.

Self-determination, when rehumanised, ceases to be a problem to be solved. It becomes a relationship to be honoured which transforms coexistence from forced accommodation into ethical partnership. Ultimately, self-determination is a moral force, a social movement, a political imagination, and a human aspiration. It is the foundation upon which all other rights rest. When self-determination is integral in the search for dignity and when peoples are placed at the centre of the humanisation process, then spaces for renewal, reconciliation and healing open. 

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It is for this reason that land acquisition for coal mining continues unabated. From 01 January to 18 December 2024, a total of 16,838.34 acres were acquired under the Coal Bearing Areas (Acquisition and Development) Act, 1957, for subsidiaries of the state-owned Coal India Limited. In that same year, another 17,371 acres were vested in the company. The amount of land acquired for private commercial coal mining over the same period is not known.

It was only in 2014 that India changed its policy on coal mining to introduce auction-based allotment and to allow private sector participation, albeit only for captive usage in its own end-use plants. In 2020, in the midst of COVID-19, the policy was further changed, and India opened the door to commercial coal mining by private players. In the first-ever auction of commercial mining on 18 June 2020, some 20 coal mines were allocated to private companies. As of December 2024, a total of 113 coal mines had been auctioned under the commercial mining regime. Further, the Ministry of Coal has now also launched an 11^th round of auctions, putting 27 coal mines up for grabs on 05 December 2024.

Impact on Indigenous Peoples and Forested Lands

Most of India’s coal lies beneath forested lands inhabited by Indigenous Peoples. These lands are being leased and acquired without proper respect for free, prior and informed consent, as mandated by the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006 and the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) 1996. Section 4 of PESA and Section 3(2) of the FRA make it mandatory to seek the consent of affected communities through the Gram Sabha or Panchayat for extractive projects. In practice, however, consent is too often sought only once the auctions are complete, thus reducing it to a procedural step focused on compensation and resettlement — a fait accompli that has sparked protests and serious human rights violations across the country.

I. Hasdeo Arand Forest, Chhattisgarh

This forest, located in the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, spans an area of 170,000 hectares and is home to the Gond, Lohar, and Oraon communities. These Indigenous Peoples have been opposing coal mining due to the loss of their livelihoods, forced displacement, and environmental destruction. The area, which comprises 23 coal blocks, was designated a “no-go” zone for mining in 2009 due to its ecological significance. In 2015, 20 Gram Sabhas (village assemblies) passed resolutions against the auction of coal mines but they were ignored.

A year later, the state government cancelled the community forest rights granted to Ghatbarra village, alleging that the villagers were “obstructing” mining operations, something for which there is no provision within the law. Despite initial protections, operations began in the Parsa East and Kente Basan (PEKB) blocks. In 2020 and 2021, the Parsa block received forest clearance permits and, in 2022, the state government gave its final approval. The project is operated by the state-owned Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (RVUNL), in partnership with the private company Adani Mining, owned by Gautam Adani, one of the richest men in India and the world.

On 26 July 2022, the Chhattisgarh state assembly passed a unanimous resolution against mining in Hasdeo. However, in 2023, tree felling resumed for the expansion of PEKB. The protests were suppressed: on 22 December 2023, several Indigenous activists were detained and, in October 2024, a new demonstration ended in violent clashes with more than 400 police personnel deployed.

II. Deocha-Pachami-Dewanganj-Harinsingha coal-mining project, West Bengal

Located in the state of West Bengal, on the border with Bangladesh, this project is poised to become India’s largest (and the world’s second-largest) coal deposit, with estimated reserves of 2,100 million tonnes spread over 12.3 square kilometres. In the Birbhum district, the project is expected to displace some 21,000 individuals, predominantly from the Santhal tribal community. In February 2022, over 1,000 people gathered to protest against the forced land acquisition. The government responded with a compensation and rehabilitation package. In March, women blocked work at the project site by placing a charka (a stick with hay, a traditional symbol of resistance) to denounce the lack of dialogue and compensation.

III. Bijahan Coal Mining Project, Odisha

In the state of Odisha, on the Bay of Bengal, the Bijahan project, promoted by Mahanadi Mines & Minerals Pvt. Ltd., an Adani Group subsidiary, plans to clear 608 hectares of forest in order to extract 327 million tonnes of coal. It will cost an estimated US$310 million and will affect around 450 families from four villages, most of whom are Indigenous. In the Bhograkachhar community, only four households have been granted forest rights titles and, in Jharpalam, applications for titles remain unanswered. The situation is particularly distressing for those who face a second displacement, having first been displaced in the 1950s due to the Hirakud Multipurpose Hydro Electric Project. In January 2025, the villagers boycotted the Gram Sabha meeting called to approve the project.

IV. Gondalpara Opencast Coal Mining Project, Jharkhand

In the Hazaribagh district, this opencast coal mining project, initiated by Adani Enterprises, has been opposed by the affected Indigenous Peoples. The project is expected to affect between 500 and 1,950 households, including many from Indigenous communities. In August 2024, local villagers expressed their opposition to the project and, indeed, any industrial development in the area, citing threats to their fertile land and forests. In response, the government decided to establish a new police station in the area to protect Adani’s interests from local protests.

Coal’s Injustice: Indigenous Rights and India’s Energy Future

The struggles in Hasdeo Arand, Deocha-Pachami, Bijahan, and Gondalpara are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a systemic disregard for Indigenous rights amidst rising energy demands. The cancellation of recognised forest rights, dismissal of Gram Sabha resolutions, and use of state machinery to suppress protests highlights the deep power imbalance and erosion of democratic processes.

This approach not only perpetuates human rights violations but also endangers irreplaceable ecological and cultural heritage, as vast forested areas vital to biodiversity and Indigenous identity are sacrificed. These cases illustrate how coal mining destroys homes, livelihoods, ancestral lands, forests, and ways of life. Compensation in no way restores what has been lost and the communities continue to bear the cost of the nation’s economic ambitions.

Indigenous Peoples have been fighting back but this has often historically been a losing battle. India must find alternative energy sources in order to protect the Indigenous Peoples’ rich diversity, ensuring that the pursuit of national progress does not continue to burden them and decimate their unique way of life disproportionately.

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