Indigenous Identity vs. Tribal Identity: A Global and Indian Debate

Every few years, a familiar question resurfaces in Indian policy circles: are Scheduled Tribes the same as “indigenous peoples”? It sounds like a matter of vocabulary, but the answer decides who gets land rights, who gets a seat at international forums, and whose historical claim to a territory gets legal weight. The word “indigenous” carries very different baggage in Geneva, Ottawa, and Delhi, and understanding why is key to understanding India’s tribal policy.

How international bodies define indigenous peoples 🔗

There is no single, universally accepted legal definition of “indigenous peoples.” The International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 169 is the most widely used reference point, and it works through a combination of objective and subjective criteria rather than a fixed checklist. A community is generally considered indigenous or tribal if it descends from populations that inhabited a region before conquest, colonisation, or the drawing of present-day state borders, and if it has retained some or all of its own social, economic, cultural, and political institutions, regardless of its current legal status.

Self-identification matters as much as history 🔗

Convention 169 also treats self-identification as an indigenous or tribal group as a fundamental criterion for deciding who the term applies to. This is a deliberate shift away from earlier colonial-era classifications, where outsiders labelled communities as “primitive” or “backward” without asking how those communities saw themselves. The 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) built on this approach, listing distinctiveness, historical continuity with pre-colonial societies, and experiences of marginalisation as common markers, while still avoiding a rigid definition.

Where India stands on the indigenous debate 🔗

India’s Constitution does not use the word “indigenous” at all. Instead, it uses Scheduled Tribes (STs), a legal and administrative category created under Article 342, which authorises the President to notify specific communities as STs. Today, 705 ethnic groups are officially recognised as Scheduled Tribes, making up roughly 8.6 percent of India’s population, though the exact list varies from state to state. A community counted as an ST in Jharkhand may not carry that status in a neighbouring state, which shows how administrative rather than purely ethnic the classification really is.

“All Indians are indigenous”: the government’s official line 🔗

India’s position at international forums has been consistent and, to many tribal rights groups, frustrating. In 1991, India’s representative at the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations argued that the population of India as a whole is indigenous to the subcontinent and that tribal communities are not meaningfully different from the rest of the population in this respect. That framing has held up in later years too. As IWGIA notes, India supported the 2007 UNDRIP only on the understanding that the declaration would not apply to it in the specific sense of singling out tribal groups, and it has never ratified ILO Convention 169.

This stance isn’t just diplomatic positioning. It reflects a genuine anthropological complication: India has absorbed wave after wave of migration and cultural mixing over thousands of years, unlike settler-colonial nations where a clear boundary separates original inhabitants from later colonisers. Officially, the Government of India rejects equating Scheduled Tribes with indigenous peoples even while it continues to follow the operational guidelines of international agencies like IFAD when their funding is involved, a contradiction that critics frequently point out.

The term ‘Adivasi’ and the politics of naming 🔗

Where “Scheduled Tribe” is a bureaucratic label, Adivasi is a political and cultural one. The word combines “adi” (of the earliest times) and “vasi” (inhabitant), and it was coined in the 1930s as part of a movement to build a shared identity among India’s many tribal communities. Importantly, “tribe,” “Scheduled Tribe,” and “Adivasi” are not interchangeable. As researchers working on tribal livelihoods have pointed out, the term “tribe” was itself a colonial import, applied by British administrators drawing on their experience elsewhere, while “ST” is used mainly for government paperwork rather than as a term communities use for themselves. Tribes in Northeast India, for instance, rarely describe themselves as Adivasi, a term more commonly used in central and eastern India.

A word that carries empowerment 🔗

Despite this complexity, Adivasi has become a rallying term. It has been used to describe tribal resistance, land rights protests, and cultural assertion, deliberately linking local struggles to the language of the global indigenous rights movement. Calling oneself Adivasi is, in many contexts, a political statement about being the original inhabitant of a territory and about historic dispossession, even when the Indian state avoids making that same claim in international settings. This gap between everyday political usage and official government terminology is itself part of the ongoing debate.

Comparing India’s situation with global indigenous movements 🔗

In countries like Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, the indigenous rights movement rests on a relatively clear historical narrative: a settler-colonial power arrived, displaced pre-existing populations, and imposed new political structures. That clarity shaped land treaties, reparative policies, and legal recognition frameworks that indigenous groups in those countries have used for decades. It’s worth noting that these were also the very countries that initially resisted the global consensus; only four states, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, voted against the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, before eventually reversing their positions.

India’s history doesn’t fit that same template. There is no single, identifiable moment of “colonisation” of tribal areas by a distinct outside group in the way European settlement is understood in the Americas or Oceania. Migration, assimilation, and cultural exchange between tribal and non-tribal communities have occurred continuously for millennia, and many communities now classified as Scheduled Tribes have had complex, overlapping relationships with caste-based Hindu society rather than existing in complete isolation from it.

Land rights and legal recognition, compared 🔗

Instead of treaty-based recognition, India relies on constitutional and legislative tools: the Fifth Schedule for tribal areas in central India, the Sixth Schedule for autonomous councils in the Northeast, the Forest Rights Act, 2006, and the PESA Act, 1996, which extends self-governance to Scheduled Areas. These frameworks offer real, if unevenly enforced, protections. However, they operate without the international legal weight that ILO 169 ratification or a formally recognised indigenous status would carry, which is why some Adivasi organisations continue to push India to align more closely with global indigenous rights standards rather than treating the debate as settled.

Why the terminology fight still matters 🔗

This isn’t an academic argument confined to seminar rooms. Whether a community is described as indigenous or merely “backward and scheduled” affects how strongly it can invoke international human rights mechanisms, how development projects are required to consult it before land acquisition, and how its historical claims to forest and mineral-rich territory are treated in court. The debate over “Adivasi” versus “Scheduled Tribe” versus “indigenous” is, at its core, a debate about who gets to define whose history and whose rights follow from that history.

What do you think? Does India’s argument that “all Indians are indigenous” hold up given the country’s long history of migration, or does it conveniently sidestep tribal land and resource claims? And should India move toward ratifying frameworks like ILO Convention 169, or does its existing constitutional system already do the job without needing the “indigenous” label?

References

1. https://www.ilo.org/media/458651/download
2. https://minorityrights.org/communities/adivasis-2/
3. https://iwgia.org/en/india.html
4. https://theshillongtimes.com/2024/05/15/do-indigenous-peoples-exist-in-india/
5. https://www.pradan.net/sampark/adivasi-tribe-or-st-the-debate-on-the-status-of-adivasi-livelihoods/
6. https://www.iwgia.org/images/publications//IA_3-08_India.pdf