Territorial Autonomy and the Management of Conflicts in India

Kham Khan Suan Hausing

University of Hyderabad

Federal systems around the world envisage variegated forms of territorial autonomy to accommodate their territorially mobilized groups. India is not an exception to this. As an inheritor to disparate territories with longstanding semi-sovereign and sovereign political experiences, territorial autonomy has been central to India’s federal institutional designs. The recognition and accommodation of distinctive political aspirations and demands of territorial groups for ‘self-rule’ within the overarching framework of ‘shared-rule’ has not only held together its deeply diverse societies but has also promoted democracy and state consolidation in the long run.

However, given that India was confronted with a range of autonomy demands ranging from outright secession (Dravidistan and Naga independentist movements in the 1950s, Khalistan movement in Punjab in the 1970s) to internal ‘self-rule’, the makers of India’s constitution were wary of ‘excessive federalism’ as they feared that it might unleash centrifugal forces. The rise of Muslim communalism and the partition of the sub-continent on the basis of religion in 1947 ensured that religion is never invoked in the territorial reorganization of post-independent India’s federal polity.

This fear also explains why the longstanding commitment to creating linguistic provinces/states during the freedom struggle to deepen and broaden Indian nationalism took a backseat in the 1940s. Two reports in 1948, namely the reports of the JVP Committee (consisting of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vithalbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya) and of the Dar Commission (a linguistic Commission constituted by the Constituent Assembly) gave primacy to the security and territorial integrity of India over language as a basis of state organization. This effectively means that language could be considered only so long as it fosters administrative convenience and the above two considerations.

When renewed linguistic nationalism impelled reorganizing Indian states in the 1950s and 1960s, the founding leaders constituted a three-member State Reorganization Commission in 1953. The Commission used creative constitutional imagination when it reported in 1955 to envision a diverse range of autonomy to cater to the specific needs and political aspirations of territorially mobilized groups in ways that reconcile the overarching concerns of India’s security and territorial integrity with territorial ‘self-rule’.

Two broad types of territorial autonomy envisaged by India’s federal polity are decentralized autonomy and devolutionary autonomy. Decentralized autonomy encompasses a variety of autonomy which is in place both at the subnational and local levels. While the cases of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) under Article 370 of the Constitution from 1950-2019, Nagaland since 1963 (Article 371A) and Mizoram since 1986 (Article 371G) are exemplars of decentralized autonomy at the subnational level, the eleven Autonomous District Councils (ADCs) under the Sixth Schedule of India’s Constitution – in the Northeastern states of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura – are exemplars of decentralized autonomy at the local level.

Devolutionary autonomy encompasses autonomy arrangements in the form of regional councils or district councils established outside the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution like the Telangana Regional Committee (1959-1973), six district councils in the hill areas of Manipur (1973-1987 and since 2010) and six autonomous councils for the Plains tribes of Assam since 1995. The devolution of powers under this form of autonomy is inscribed in laws or statutes made either by the national Parliament or the subnational units; they are contingent on the vagaries of the political will of the subnational units.

Decentralized autonomy envisions a distribution of powers which is negotiated and embedded in the Constitution. The terms of decentralized autonomy can be effected either by obtaining concurrence of the relevant subnational assembly or through constitutional amendment(s). Because the various species of decentralized autonomy stem invariably from various sources, such as prolonged and sustained popular self-determination demands or their absence, and from timely or delayed negotiation, they entail varying degrees of autonomy.

I have demonstrated elsewhere how timely negotiation of a prolonged and sustained self-determination demand ensures that the Naga people have secured a robust autonomy in relation to identity-preserving powers, inter alia, ‘land and resources’, religious laws and customary practices. Under this rubric, the Nagaland Assembly can make inapplicable any law made by the Indian Parliament on these matters under Article 371A. Although the demands of various territorial tribal groups at the local level in various states of Northeast India mentioned above were negotiated in a timely manner by the Indian state, the absence of prolonged and sustained popular self-determination demands in most cases means that tribal autonomous district councils do not have the plenary (legislative) power on transfer of land, an identity-preserving power. As a result, they are invested with limited powers on the actual use of land and property, religious and customary practices under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. The fact that the Bodo people, a Plains tribal group in Assam, comparatively engaged in a more prolonged and sustained demand for ‘self-rule’, especially around language and developmental matters, means that they have the most expansive powers granted under the Sixth Schedule.  

In fact, the special constitutional status enjoyed by erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim majority state in post-independent India, under Article 370 from 1950 till 2019 was the outcome of a timely negotiation between Hari Singh, the king of the princely state, and the Indian state. Under this special status, the state had a separate Constitution, the only one of its kind under India’s federal polity. An extensive range of powers (except communication, currency, defense and external affairs) was decentralized to J&K. Article 370 provided that the powers and autonomy decentralized to the state could be effected only with the concurrence of J&K’s Assembly. This explains why this exceptional constitutional status was once considered a ‘jewel’ in the ‘crown’ of Indian secularism.

However, the Center—cutting across parties in power—has used pliant subnational governments to extend several provisions of the Constitution over time. The report of the State Autonomy Committee constituted by the National Conference government in 1999 has shown that the Center extended 260 out of the 395 original articles of the Indian constitution between 1953 and 1986 by enacting 42 constitutional amendments. The Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—a party committed to establishing a homogenous Hindu rashtra (nation-state)—used a pliant Governor in August 2019 under the shadow of constitutional emergency in J&K to dissolve its special constitutional status and downgrade the state into two union territories, namely J&K and Ladakh. This is not however to discount the facilitating role of the centralist federal structure and actors cutting across parties, including the Congress, in effecting a symmetrical shift in Indian federalism. The differential constitutional status enjoyed by selected subnational units are equalized with others as a result.

The ease with which BJP under Modi could dissolve J&K’s special constitutional status also demonstrates how ideological shifts at the Center can have important bearings on the nature and degree of autonomy enjoyed by subnational units in Indian federalism in as much as they recalibrate Center-State relations in the mold of what Gurharpal Singh, in a different context, calls ‘hegemonic containment and control’. Singh explicates how this undergirds New Delhi’s relations with its peripheral territories including J&K, Punjab and the Northeastern states.

The fact that varieties of autonomy operate within a centralist federal framework in India make them susceptible to symmetrical impulses, wherein powers either decentralized or devolved across multilevel federal polity tend to re-concentrate back to the center/federal or subnational governments. While the recent dissolution of Article 370 in J&K is an exemplar of the re-concentration of power at the Center, the working of the six district councils of the hill areas of Manipur under devolutionary autonomy demonstrates the reluctance to devolve or reconcentrate powers at the subnational level. Since their inception in 1973, these councils were invested with limited powers and conspicuously lack legislative powers pertaining to identity-preserving powers like land and resources unlike their counterparts in Nagaland. Subnational governments across the party divide were also reluctant to devolve powers. Powers like sanitation, public works, and forest (other than reserved forest), for example, were never devolved.

A common thread which binds various strands of territorial autonomy is the provision of weak power-sharing. The Bodoland Territorial Council is a classic example where less than one-third of the Bodo population monopolizes 75 percent of the executive positions. If the normative foundation of territorial autonomy stems from the recognition of minority rights to ‘self-rule’, minority groups within and across India’s multilevel federal polity must be accommodated by dominant territorial groups. That the logic of self-rule impels ‘shared-rule’ within and across multilevel polities must be acknowledged and promoted by all as an enduring value if territorial autonomy is to survive as the most defensible institutional strategy to hold together deeply divided societies in India and beyond.

Kham Khan Suan Hausing is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad. He is also an honorary Senior Fellow at the Centre for Multilevel Federalism at the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi

This blog post is a result of a workshop of the network of scholars of territorial autonomy initiated by the Åland Islands Peace Institute. The network first met and discussed ‘The Many Faces of Territorial Autonomy’ at a workshop in Berlin, convened in cooperation with the Finland Institute in Berlin. The blog symposium is hosted by the IACL Research Group on Constitutionalism and Societal Pluralism: Diversity Governance Compared.

Suggested Citation: Kham Khan Suan Hausing, ‘Territorial autonomy and the management of conflicts in India’ IACL-AIDC Blog (5 October 2023) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/territorial-autonomy/2023/9/28/territorial-autonomy-and-the-management-of-conflicts-in-india