A separate classification for denotified tribes | Explained

Community leaders advocate for a separate classification of Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi-Nomadic Tribes in India's upcoming Census.

The story so far:

On January 30, the Union government assured community leaders from Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi-Nomadic Tribes (DNTs) that the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India had agreed to enumerate these communities in the upcoming second phase of the Census due in 2027. However, with no clarity on how this enumeration will be conducted, leaders of these communities are organising to push for their demand for a “separate column” for DNTs in the Census form. This demand has found support from academics and scholars, who have noted that the demand for a Census count of DNTs has been reiterated time and again by successive Commissions that have been set up to examine their condition in society.

The communities referred to as denotified, nomadic, and semi-nomadic tribes were, at one point, classified as “criminal” by colonial administrators, who had concluded that there were certain communities “addicted” to committing crimes. This was codified in the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), first introduced in 1871, the same year that synchronous Censuses began in India.

The CTA, 1871, was introduced for the “registration, surveillance and control of certain criminal tribes and eunuchs”, describing “criminal tribes” as a “tribe, gang, or class of persons” that are “addicted” to committing non-bailable offences. While introducing the legislation, then Member of Law and Order, T.V. Stephens had said that, “the special feature of India is the caste system... Keeping this in mind, the meaning of professional criminal is clear. It means a tribe whose ancestors were criminals from times immemorial, who are themselves destined by the usages of caste to commit crime and whose descendants will be offenders against law...”

It was only in 1952, that the Government of India officially repealed the CTA, which had by that time been amended a couple of times. The repeal of the Act had led to the denotification of communities classified as “criminal” under the CTA, leading to these groups becoming known as the DNTs.

However, in the same year, India saw the introduction of various habitual offender laws throughout the States, which, while doing away with the hereditary definition of people being compelled to commit crimes, classified certain people as “habitual offenders”, leading to the continued targeting of these communities — this time not as “criminal” but as “habitual offenders”.