The Chakmas(, ) in Arunachal Pradesh, India are primarily found in three districts: Changlang, Namsai and Papum Pare.
According to the 2011 census, there were 47,073 chakmas in Arunachal Pradesh equivalent to 3.4% of the total states' population. See 'Chakma'. Since Chakma are not recorded as an ethnicity in all states where they live (such as Arunachal Pradesh) language is the best method to estimate their population in India.
History North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), now Arunachal Pradesh, like the Chittagong Hill Tracts from whence Chakma was traditionally administered as an excluded area with minimum interference. The British policy in this area was one of non-interference. Taking over the administration of this turbulent and wild country was not rewarding enough. Following independence, Nehru made little changes to NEFA's administrative policy, opting instead for a philosophy of Minimum Interference based on anthropologist and Nehru's adviser on tribal affairs Dr. Verrier Elwin's "A Philosophy for NEFA." Nehru had said, The policy of Minimum Interference was designed to strike a balance between the two extreme positions of isolation of the tribal people of NEFA on the one hand and total unscientific assimilation of these tribal people with outside world on the other. NEFA was more of an administrative unit designation rather than a proper name for an important and integral portion of India with its own identity. The Chinese aggression drew the attention of the rest of the subcontinent in the region in 1962 and stunned the country's policymakers and prompting a significant shift in the India's administrative policy toward this area. Nehru's policy of “minimum interference” drew flak from the opposition parties. This policy was criticised as “Museum of Specimen Approach‟ and was blamed for non-integration of the area and non-assimilation of the tribal people with rest of the country, to fatal consequences. Nehru's government was cornered by the opposition and the NEFA was transferred from the Ministry of External Affairs to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the IFAS officers were merged with the IAS and the IPS, and the isolationist policy was reversed. People's political participation at all levels was widely believed to be the greatest method to integrate the region with the country.
Partition of India Chakmas are the victim of the partition of India in 1947. The partition of India was determined by religious composition and population of different regions. The sparsely populated Chittagong Hill Tracts were a special case. Located on the eastern limits of Bengal, it provided the Muslim-majority Chittagong with a hinterland. Despite the Tracts' 98.5% Buddhist majority in 1947 the territory was given to Pakistan.
Settlement The Chakmas now living in Arunachal Pradesh trace their arrival to displacement caused by the Kaptai Dam, built on the Karnaphuli River in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The dam's reservoir submerged a large share of the CHT's cultivable land from the early 1960s, displacing an estimated 100,000 people, most of them Chakma; many received no compensation, and the displacement coincided with the 1963 revocation of the CHT's protected status under Pakistani law. A smaller number of Hajongs, a Hindu community from the same region, left around the same time citing religious persecution.Roughly 14,000–15,000 of the displaced Chakmas and Hajongs crossed into India via Tripura and Mizoram and were moved through a series of relief camps, the last of which was at Ledo in Assam. Between 1964 and 1969, the Government of India, acting through the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) administration, resettled them under a centrally sponsored rehabilitation plan in the Tirap, Lohit, and Subansiri frontier divisions of NEFA — present-day Changlang, Namsai, and Papum Pare districts of Arunachal Pradesh — following consultations between central officials and local tribal leaders. Some accounts also cite the 1962 Sino-Indian War as a factor in the decision to settle a population considered loyal to India along the sensitive frontier.By 1979, official figures put the settled population at roughly 3,900 families, or about 21,500 people. NEFA became a Union Territory in 1972, renamed Arunachal Pradesh, and attained full statehood in 1987. For the first two decades of their settlement, Chakmas held ration cards, trade licenses, and voting rights, and some served in paramilitary units, even though few had yet been formally granted citizenship.
Citizenship status Most Chakmas born in Arunachal Pradesh before 1 July 1987 are entitled to Indian citizenship by birth under Section 3 of the Citizenship Act, 1955 — a threshold an estimated 60,000 of the community's roughly 65,000–70,000 members are believed to meet — but the great majority have not had this entitlement formally processed by the state government.
NHRC v. State of Arunachal Pradesh (1996)
Rising hostility toward the community in the mid-1990s (see #Political relations and the All Arunachal Pradesh Students' Union) led the National Human Rights Commission to petition the Supreme Court of India under Article 32 in 1995. On 9 January 1996, a bench headed by Chief Justice A. M. Ahmadi held that the state had a constitutional duty under Article 21 to protect the life and liberty of the Chakmas — a protection the Court held extends to non-citizens — and directed the state government to prevent forcible eviction and process pending citizenship applications. The ruling is frequently cited in Indian constitutional law as authority for the proposition that Article 21 protections are not contingent on citizenship.
CCRCAP v. State of Arunachal Pradesh (2015) and subsequent enforcement Implementation of the 1996 judgment stalled for two decades. Separately, a 2000 Delhi High Court ruling (W.P. No. 886 of 2000) held that roughly 90 per cent of the Chakmas and Hajongs were citizens by birth under Section 3 of the Citizenship Act, 1955, and directed the Election Commission of India to register eligible voters; by the mid-2000s only a small fraction of the community had actually been enrolled. A 2013 Gauhati High Court ruling further held that the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873 — the basis of Arunachal Pradesh's Inner Line Permit system — did not apply to Chakmas and Hajongs who had been permanently settled by the Union government.
The Committee for Citizenship Rights of the Chakmas of Arunachal Pradesh (CCRCAP) subsequently petitioned the Supreme Court seeking enforcement of the 1996 order. On 17 September 2015, a bench comprising Justices Anil R. Dave and Adarsh Kumar Goel again directed the Union and state governments to "finalise the conferment of citizenship rights on eligible Chakmas and Hajongs" within three months, and reiterated that the community could not be required to hold Inner Line Permits, since they were already permanently settled in the state. The Arunachal Pradesh government's review petition against the 2015 order was subsequently dismissed by the Supreme Court.
Despite these rulings, community organisations say not a single new citizenship application was processed by the state in the following years. In January 2022, following a complaint by the Chakma Development Foundation of India (CDFI), the NHRC again directed the Ministry of Home Affairs and the state government to protect the community's rights and report on compliance with the 1996 and 2015 orders.
Opposition and the Inner Line Permit question The AAPSU and allied tribal organisations have consistently opposed granting citizenship, land rights or Scheduled Tribe status to the Chakmas and Hajongs, arguing that their numbers have grown substantially since 1964 and that formal recognition would alter the demographic balance and threaten the identity of Arunachal Pradesh's indigenous communities, who are protected under the state's Inner Line Permit regime and Article 371(H) of the Constitution. In September 2017, the AAPSU called a twelve-hour state-wide shutdown against a Union government move to grant the community "limited citizenship" without land rights or Scheduled Tribe status, during which protesters set fire to several vehicles.
In December 2021, the Arunachal Pradesh government, under pressure from an AAPSU ultimatum, moved to conduct a separate administrative census of the Chakma and Hajong population in Changlang district. Community bodies, including the CCRCAP and the CDFI, denounced the exercise as an act of "racial profiling" that violated the 1996 Supreme Court order's bar on coercive action against the community pending resolution of citizenship applications, and organised protests in Diyun and at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi.
Non-implementation and later litigation
Citizenship applications remained largely unprocessed in the years that followed. A 1997 Rajya Sabha committee report recommended expedited citizenship grants, and a 2000 Delhi High Court ruling found that approximately 90% of the community qualified as citizens by birth, directing the Election Commission of India to register eligible voters — after which only a few thousand of the community were in fact enrolled. A 2013 Gauhati High Court ruling held that the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873 (the basis of the state's Inner Line Permit regime) did not apply to the Chakmas once permitted to settle in the state.
The Committee for Citizenship Rights of the Chakmas of Arunachal Pradesh (CCRCAP), founded in 1991, filed a further petition seeking enforcement of the 1996 order. On 17 September 2015, the Supreme Court again directed the Union and state governments to process all pending citizenship applications within three months. As of the mid-2020s, this direction had also not been fully implemented, with the Chakma Development Foundation of India stating in a 2021 NHRC complaint that no application had been processed since the 2015 order.
Interaction with the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 created a fast-track path to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants — including Buddhists, covering most Chakmas, and Hindus, covering the Hajongs — from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan who entered India before 31 December 2014, but Arunachal Pradesh is excluded from the Act's application as an Inner Line Permit state. Union ministers have offered differing public positions on the resulting overlap: Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju has stated Chakmas could obtain citizenship under the CAA but only if resettled outside Arunachal Pradesh, a position Chakma organisations dispute on the grounds that most were settled by the Indian state itself rather than being migrants requiring naturalisation.
Political relations and the All Arunachal Pradesh Students' Union
Organised opposition to the Chakma and Hajong presence in Arunachal Pradesh has been led since the early 1980s primarily by the All Arunachal Pradesh Students' Union (AAPSU), the state's largest student body, which has functioned as a significant political pressure group in the state. AAPSU's stated position is that settlement of a large non-tribal population threatens the demographic balance and land rights of the state's indigenous communities, which are constitutionally protected under the Inner Line Permit regime; the union has argued the Chakmas and Hajongs, if eligible for citizenship, should be resettled outside the state rather than integrated within it.