A borrowed label, a colonial law, and a fight over who gets to define the Hill Tracts

A word keeps surfacing in Bangladeshi politics that was never built for Bangladesh. “Adivasi” is an Indian legal term, imported wholesale and pressed onto the Chittagong Hill Tracts as though it belongs there. It doesn’t, and the mismatch isn’t incidental.
Trace the origin and the picture sharpens. The 1900 Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation wasn’t drafted to safeguard tribal culture. The British designed it to seal off difficult terrain and choke off anti-colonial resistance before it could spread into the hills. It was a mechanism of control, engineered under the logic of empire, not a charter of rights. Reviving that colonial relic now, repackaged as indigenous protection, is a different undertaking entirely, one aimed at carving a legal enclave out of a republic meant to answer to a single constitution.
Consider who actually settled the region. The Chakma migrated from Arakan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought in under Mughal and British land grants as a strategic buffer against Arakanese raids, not discovered as the land’s original people. The same holds for the twelve other recognized hill communities: Marma, Tripura, Mro, Bawm, Lushai, Khumi, Khyang, Pangkhua, Chak, Tanchangya, Rakhine, Usui. Each traces its roots to Myanmar or India’s northeast, arriving through migration, resettlement, or flight from conflict. None predate the Bengali-speaking population of the delta, whose presence in the region stretches back millennia. Measured against the actual international standard for indigeneity, continuous presence in a territory from before colonization, the claim simply doesn’t hold.
Bangladesh’s Constitution settled this question with precision. Articles 28(4) and 23A speak of “tribes, minor races, ethnic sects, and communities.” Not indigenous peoples. That phrasing was chosen deliberately, to foreclose the creation of a separate legal class of citizens defined by ethnicity rather than nationhood.
Then there’s “Jumma,” a term now invoked as though it names an ancient, unified nation. It doesn’t. Insurgent leaders coined it in the 1980s to fuse more than a dozen unrelated communities, distinct in language, religion, and political history, into a single bloc capable of commanding international sympathy. It functioned as a branding exercise, effective at generating leverage, hollow as a description of lived history.
The sharpest edge of this conflict is unfolding in the courts. After the Supreme Court upheld the 1900 Regulation in rulings handed down in 2016 and 2018, fresh petitions now seek to elevate that colonial instrument into something resembling a regional constitution, one that would place land and residency law in the CHT almost entirely beyond the reach of national authority. A counter-petition runs in the opposite direction: Bengali settlers, many placed in the region under government programs during the 1970s and ’80s, are asking the court to strike 37 of the Regulation’s 65 clauses so they can own land and reside freely where they have lived for generations. Two petitions, two irreconcilable visions of what equal treatment under the law should mean.
Behind much of the activism advancing the first vision, particularly the student campaigns centered at Dhaka University, sits more than cultural pride. These movements draw in foreign funding and international advocacy networks, transforming what is fundamentally a domestic constitutional argument into a lever for outside interests to pull.
None of this serves the people who actually live in the Hill Tracts. A dual legal order doesn’t shield minorities; it isolates them, cordons them off from the rest of the country’s civic and legal life, and hands external actors a durable foothold inside Bangladesh’s internal affairs.
The Constitution already supplies the answer, and it doesn’t require reinterpretation: one republic, one law, equal citizenship regardless of ethnicity. The Chittagong Hill Tracts are not a contested territory awaiting outside arbitration. They are Bangladesh, in full.