Protective Discrimination and Crisis of Citizenship in North-East India

North-east India is a region where the politics of protective discrimination for scheduled tribes today raises some of the most difficult issues of justice, fairness and costs on system legitimacy. The time may have come to consider ways of breaking away from the ethnic discourse of the existing protective discrimination regime that, in effect, involves the state forever categorising groups of people in ethnic terms and making descendants of immigrants into perpetual outsiders.