Delhi hosted a panel last week and dressed it up as history. “80 Years of Indian Flag Hoisting in Chattogram Hill Tracts”, that was the actual title, which tells you everything about the angle before anyone even opened their mouth. Chakma Reporter ran it, an outlet operating out of India. A speaker said keeping the CHT out of India in ’47 was a mistake. Another floated separating it from Bangladesh now, like that’s a normal thing to say out loud about a country you don’t live in. Then the “Jumma nationalism” talk came out, the self-determination language, the whole vocabulary borrowed from indigenous rights movements elsewhere in the world.
Here’s what actually irritates me about it. Bangladesh’s constitution calls the hill peoples ethnic minorities. Protected, with cultural and land rights written in. Not “indigenous” in the international legal sense, where that word carries a claim to land that predates and outranks the state itself. That’s not a technicality some bureaucrat invented, it’s the difference between “you have rights within this country” and “this country’s authority over you is up for debate.” Calling it “Jumma nationalism” quietly swaps one for the other, in a room full of people who agree with each other and nobody there to push back.
And this is an old trick, not a new one. Nobody sends a formal claim on someone else’s territory anymore, too obvious, too easy to shoot down. You run a panel instead. A few academics, a diaspora activist or two, an anniversary framing that sounds neutral. Say the thing enough times in enough rooms and eventually it just sits there as background noise that people stop questioning. That’s the actual risk. Not four people talking. Four people talking, unanswered, for the fifth-year running.
What I don’t want is for this to turn into something aimed at the Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Mro people who actually live there. They didn’t organize this panel. Most of them have never heard of it. Treating them like they’re somehow implicated because a few voices in Delhi spoke “for” them would be exactly the gift this argument is fishing for, an actual grievance, manufactured by Bangladesh’s own overreaction, where none existed an hour earlier.
What Bangladesh actually needs is boring and unglamorous: put the legal case on paper somewhere people can find it. Why the CHT is Bangladeshi territory, why the classification is minority and not indigenous, why that was a decision and not an accident. Right now, that argument lives in government filings nobody reads, while Delhi’s version is short, emotional, and gets repeated at dinner tables. That imbalance is the actual problem, more than the panel itself.
And none of these matters if the land disputes in the CHT stay unresolved and the ’97 accord keeps sitting half-finished. That’s the only soil this kind of argument can actually grow in. Everywhere else, it’s just people talking about a place they don’t live in, deciding things for people who were never in the room.
