But occasionally situations arise which defy compartmentalization. Take the case of the Chakmas of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. More than 25,000 were displaced in 1964 from their native Chittagong Hill Tracts, a tribal-dominated district, by a dam on the Karnaphuli river. (It is of course a different matter that migration encouraged by the Bangladesh government in the 1970s and 1980s has reduced the indigenous population to a bare majority, while the Muslim Bengali settlers have risen in numbers from a few thousand to half the entire population in the Chittagong Hill Tracts!)

Those displaced were not given compensation and left for India in anger and disgust. Here, a protective central government took them under their wing and settled them in what is now the Changlang district of the state of Arunachal Pradesh, near the border with China. These were internal displaces who became environmental refugees or developmental refugees and finally were accepted by the federal government but not by the local hosts, the Arunachalis, or their state government.

In fact, the Arunachal Pradesh government has been trying to evict this community, which has over the years, swelled to a population of nearly 70,000. The Chakmas in the state are denied basic facilities such as education, healthcare and rations from ration shops, rights accessible by all Indians. They are still not Indians, in the full sense, despite various court rulings in their favour. They lack opportunities and the desire to return to their original land which still exists but under the name and powers of a different nation: Bangladesh.

The Supreme Court has had to intervene repeatedly as has the National Human Rights Commission, a statutory watchdog group on civil liberties without any powers of conviction or punishment, to assert the rights of the Chakmas.

Indeed, the case of the Chakmas was used to demonstrate the innovative power of the Supreme Court as well as the Constitution’s ability and the responsibility of the State to protect all people who resided in India and were not just citizens of the country. The Chakma issue reflected the affirmation of equality in the eyes of the low (if not the state!) despite difference of creed, caste, gender and even nationality.12

But the story of the Chakmas does not end here: in 1978, more than 25,000 Chakmas were driven out of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in a military crackdown. They took shelter in the adjoining, underdeveloped Indian state of Tripura. The Chakmas returned only after India exerted pressure on both the leaders of the Chakmas and on Bangladesh. A decade later, not less than 60,000 refugees fled to temporary camps in Tripura after a fresh bout of military pacification. The Bangladeshi excesses, which were not acknowledged by Dhaka until many years later and which were never highlighted by the media until the late 1990s, were especially surprising after Bangladesh’s own suffering at the hands of a brutal Pakistani regime in 1970-71, at the time of its birth as a nation.