The three petitions presented here span from July 1947 to September 1949, and together they cover much of the range of positions tribal communities took toward the constitutional process. These are a partial sample, not a complete picture of how tribal groups engaged with the Constituent Assembly. But read alongside each other, they raise a set of questions that the constitution’s framers never fully resolved: how much self-governance would the new state extend to communities at its edges, and who would be held to the promises made during the transition to independence.
The earliest and most restrained of the three comes from Elison D. Shira, who wrote in July 1947 on behalf of the plains Garos. His petition asks that the boundaries of the Garo Hills district be redrawn to include plains Garo communities then distributed across Goalpara, Kamrup, Khasi Hills, and Mymensing. The plains Garos, he explained, had been separated from their kin in the hills by colonial boundary-making, incorporated into permanently settled districts, made tenants under Zamindari law, and educated in Assamese and Bengali rather than their own language. The abolition of Zamindari, he argued, made this a natural moment to correct what administrative demarcation had created. The petition is brief. It names no enemies. It simply asks for the map to be fixed.
Sardar Pram Singh Dandpat Chauhan’s memorandum, submitted in July 1949 on behalf of the Adibasis of Orissa’s merged princely states, operates in a completely different register. When those states merged into Orissa in January 1948, Premier Harekruson Mahatab had promised that the government would work toward the progress of backward areas. Chauhan calls that promise, with some precision, “a mere humbug.”
What followed merger, Chauhan documented in detail, was the systematic dismantling of Adibasi customary life. The Bringa method of hilltop cultivation, practised for generations, was prohibited while land taxes on those same hills continued to be collected. Hunting rights were abolished. The use of Handia, a rice wine central to Adibasi religious ceremonies, was banned, and people were imprisoned for it. Hill communities were pressured to relocate to the plains. Land promised to landless Adibasis was settled with others.
Then there was Deoghar. In July 1948, after Adibasi leaders were arrested and a peaceful gathering convened to demand their release, a district magistrate ordered armed forces to open fire. Five people were killed, fifteen wounded, among them women and children. When the matter was raised in the Orissa States Assembly, the Executive Councillor responded by calling the Adibasis Communists, while conceding he could not name a single Communist among them. No compensation was paid.
Chauhan’s memorandum demands that thirteen former Orissa states, together with the districts of Koraput, Sambhalpur, and Ganjam Agency, covering 43,124 square miles, be constituted as Scheduled Areas with regional autonomy on the model of Assam’s tribal provisions. He attaches census tables and maps. The Tribal Areas Advisory Sub-Committee had not visited these states before merger, he notes, which is why they were left out of the scheduled area framework to begin with. The petition is meticulous, and it needs to be: the Orissa government is not a negligent authority to be reminded of its duties, but an active adversary to be placed on record.
The third document is the most unusual in form. M. Kithan’s letter of 22 September 1949, written as President of the Naga National Council, was not addressed to the Constituent Assembly at all. It was sent to the Governor of Assam, and it entered the Assembly’s files only because a copy was forwarded to the Ministry of External Affairs.
Kithan’s letter rejects the Sixth Schedule outright. The late Governor of Assam, Sir Akbar Hydari, had made specific promises to the Naga National Council; those promises had not been honoured. The Prime Minister of Assam had given written assurances of full implementation; those too had come to nothing. Meanwhile, a representative from Assam in the Assembly had argued that even local autonomy was excessive for tribal people, and had suggested removing Dimapur from the Naga Hills district. Dimapur was the only railway head accessible to the Nagas. Kithan attributed the proposal to businessmen seeking to capture the Naga Hills market.
He called the Assam government’s direction an “Assamistan,” a government for Assamese-speaking people only. He asked whether the rumoured expulsion of foreign missionaries meant the government intended to convert Nagas to Hinduism, or simply to halt their education. The letter closes without conciliation: “The Nagas have anticipated a square deal from the Government but they have failed us.”
All three petitions are, at their core, about territory: who draws the lines, and what those lines determine. For the plains Garos, colonial demarcation had severed a community from its kin and its language. For the Orissa Adibasis, the exclusion of merged states from the Scheduled Areas framework had left them without constitutional protection at the moment they needed it most. For the Nagas, the threat to Dimapur was understood immediately for what it was: not an administrative adjustment but a move to cut off their economic access entirely.
The Orissa and Naga documents share something the plains Garo petition does not: a specific betrayal to point to. Both invoke promises made during the transition period that were not kept. The plains Garos, writing before independence, had not yet accumulated that history.
None of the three received what they asked for in the form they asked for it. The Constitution that emerged offered the Sixth Schedule, the Scheduled Areas provisions, and a framework of protections that Kithan had already dismissed as insufficient before the ink was dry. As more petitions from tribal communities are added to constitutionofindia.net, the full shape of that gap between what was asked and what was given will come into clearer focus.