In Meghalaya in 1997, the Khasi Hills Autonomous District Council, which has constitutional jurisdiction over Khasi 'customary law', passed the Khasi Social Custom of Lineage Bill. The Khasis have a matrilineal kinship system and the bill sought to codify the system of inheritance through the female line. But it became highly controversial. A number of organisations, including the influential Khasi Students Union and the Syngkhong Rympei Thymmai (literally, 'association of new hearths') opposed the measure arguing that instead of codifying an 'outdated system' of matrilineal succession, Khasis should 'modernise' their kinship system. They proposed a change that would allow only children of two Khasi parents to be regarded as Khasi.
Why did legally establishing who is and who is not a Khasi become so important? Because the Khasis are designated a scheduled tribe (ST) and the lion's share of public employment, business and trade licenses, and even the right to seek elected office is reserved for STs. Nearly 85 percent of public sector employment in Meghalaya, where a majority of them lives, and 55 of the 60 seats in the state legislative assembly are reserved for STs. While the historical disadvantages that the tribal peoples suffered account for this elaborate protective discrimination regime, the status of non-tribals in the northeast Indian state of Meghalaya, as well as in the neighbouring states of Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Nagaland, where such a protective discrimination regime exists, is best described as that of 'denizens'. In all these states, the rights to land ownership and exchange, business and trade licenses and access to elected office are restricted.
The term 'denizen' goes back to the power of 'denization' that British monarchs once had to grant aliens some of the privileges of natural born subjects. At a later stage, the parliament sought to control the royal power of denization by passing laws that disallowed denizens from being members of the Privy Council and the houses of parliament and from occupying civil or military offices of trust, or from obtaining grants of land from the crown. While the restrictions on the rights of the non-tribal population have a very different history and rationale, the particular limits, eg on rights of property ownership, access to public employment and elected office are not dissimilar to those applicable to denizens.
The category 'tribal' and its definition would be considered problematic in many academic circles. In India, however, it remains part of the policy discourse because the protective regime necessitates the official recognition of certain groups as 'tribal'. Article 342 of the Indian constitution provides for the president of India by public notification, to specify the "tribes or tribal communities or parts of or groups within tribes or tribal communities which shall for the purposes of the Constitution be deemed to be Scheduled Tribes". The use of 'tribal' here simply means a group included in that list – hence scheduled tribe or ST. According to one scholar who has examined how the Indian government has arrived at the list, tribes were "defined partly by habitat and geographic isolation, but even more on the basis of social, religious, linguistic and cultural distinctiveness – their 'tribal characteristics'. Just where the line between 'tribals' and 'non-tribals' should be drawn has not always been free from doubt" (Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984).