By Danny K. Rajee
I have spent more years in the archives of Shillong. I know the smell of the old colonial records, the particular frustration of a folder gone missing, the quiet satisfaction of finding a Constituent Assembly note you had given up on. I have watched Meghalaya grow into itself, make its mistakes, and argue loudly about who it is and what it owes its people. But I will say plainly: in all those years, nothing has troubled me quite as much as the question of what is happening to the Sixth Schedule — and whether anyone in power is paying honest attention.
How the Sixth Schedule Came to Be
The Sixth Schedule was not the product of tidy constitutional philosophy. It came from fear — a reasonable, historically grounded fear. The Garos, the Khasis, the Jaintias: these were peoples who had lived on their hills, governed their own affairs, and buried their dead according to their own customs for as long as memory runs. When the prospect of a unified Indian republic took shape, many of them looked at the plain majority and felt, not unreasonably, that their way of life would be absorbed without trace inside a generation.
Gopinath Bordoloi understood this. As Premier of Assam and Chairman of the North-East India Sub-Committee, he fought for something more than voting rights for the hill peoples. Voting rights in a majoritarian system, he recognised, were not protection — they were the illusion of protection. What was needed was a protected democratic space, a constitutional enclosure in which smaller communities could govern themselves without being outbid by sheer numbers. The Autonomous District Councils that emerged from this thinking were given genuine powers: over land, forests, customary law, education, justice. The restriction that non-tribals could neither vote nor contest in council elections was deliberate. It was not bigotry. It was architecture.
In Meghalaya, three councils — the Khasi Hills, the Jaintia Hills, and the Garo Hills — became the institutional expression of this vision. I have spent years reading what Bordoloi and his colleagues wrote about these protections. They were not sentimental about it. They were practical. They knew what demographic pressure could do to a minority community within a democracy, and they built accordingly.
On the Question of Non-Tribal Voting Rights
There is an argument I keep encountering, in drawing rooms in Laitumkhrah and in parliamentary debates alike, that excluding non-tribals from council elections is undemocratic. I understand why people make this argument. Universal franchise is a genuine achievement, and it deserves to be defended. But it is not an absolute principle that admits no qualification. International frameworks on indigenous rights — the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples being the most significant — are explicit that indigenous communities possess a right to self-governance, and that this right cannot be reduced to the right to participate in a majority vote that they will always lose.
The demography matters here, and it is not abstract. The 2011 census figures for Shillong and its surrounds showed the tribal share of population in several urban areas declining to the point where, in an open franchise, tribal candidates would face a near-impossible arithmetic. If you open the councils to non-tribal voters and candidates, you do not reform the Sixth Schedule — you end it. The protection and the restriction are not separable. You cannot keep one and discard the other.
What Our Governments Have Actually Done
I want to be fair here, which means I have to be harsh across the board. Every government that has held power in Meghalaya since 1972 — Congress,PDF, MUA, UDP, NPP, the coalitions and the counter-coalitions — has contributed to what I can only call the managed decline of the Sixth Schedule. This is not a partisan point. It is a historical one.
The councils have been starved of funds and stripped of operational independence so gradually and so consistently that most people under forty in this state have never seen them function as they were intended to. They have become, in the public imagination, vehicles for political patronage rather than the governing institutions Bordoloi envisioned. Land — which is the irreducible core of any indigenous rights framework — has haemorrhage from tribal ownership for decades. The Meghalaya Transfer of Land (Regulation) Act of 1971 prohibits the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals. In practice, this prohibition has been treated as a nuisance to be managed rather than a law to be enforced. Entire localities in Shillong that I knew as overwhelmingly Khasi neighbourhoods have been transformed through arrangements the law was designed to prevent.
Language has suffered in parallel. Khasi, Garo, Pnar: they are local languages, acknowledged and theoretically protected. But acknowledgement without investment is a formality. When a language cannot give a young person a career, families make calculations. The children grow up in English. The grandparents speak a tongue the grandchildren understand imperfectly. This is not a catastrophe in the melodramatic sense. It is erosion — quiet, incremental, and very difficult to reverse.
A Word About Extinction
I am careful with strong words. But demographic extinction is not only a physical phenomenon. It is the dissolution of a community’s political agency, its cultural continuity, its relationship to ancestral land. A people can persist biologically while losing everything that made them a distinct people. That is the threat I see advancing in Meghalaya, not with dramatic suddenness but with the steadiness of water over stone.
The young Khasi or Garo today inherits dysfunctional councils, a state government that treats the Schedule as bureaucratic furniture, and a national government that directs its attention northeastward mainly when there is an election or a security concern. The Sixth Schedule was meant to give these young people a political home, a set of institutions through which they could exercise real power over their own lives. What they have instead is a framework whose form is intact while its substance has been quietly hollowed.
What Needs to Happen
The answer is not complicated, even if the politics of it are. The restrictions on non-tribal participation in the Autonomous District Councils must be maintained without compromise. The councils themselves must be genuinely funded and operationally independent of state government interference. The land protection laws must be enforced with a seriousness that no government here has yet summoned. The Inner Line Permit debate — which has dragged on with remarkable persistence and equally remarkable inconsequence — must be resolved. The question of who qualifies as a tribal, which has become a subject of dangerous manipulation in some quarters, must be settled through transparent, community-led processes.
None of this is new. These arguments have been made before, in more distinguished venues than this one, by people with more authority than I possess. The problem is not diagnosis. The problem is will. And will, in my experience, does not arrive on its own. It arrives when the people who stand to lose most make it politically costly for governments to do nothing.
Bordoloi, by various accounts, believed that if the hill peoples were not given genuine autonomy, the republic would have failed its own promise. Looking at the record of the past five decades, one has to conclude that the failure he feared has arrived — not all at once, but steadily, governmentally, through ten thousand small decisions to look the other way. The question now is not reversal; you cannot reverse history. The question is whether we still have enough of what Bordoloi built to work with, and whether anyone in a position of power is prepared to actually use it.
The tribal peoples of Meghalaya did not ask for constitutional protection out of arrogance or separatism. They asked because they understood, from experience rather than theory, that without structural protection the majority overwhelms the minority, that without land a community has no future, and that without political voice a people become strangers in the place where their great-grandparents are buried. The Sixth Schedule was India’s answer to that understanding. Successive governments have treated it as an inconvenience. It is long past time for that to change.
