De-notified tribal communities and administrative exclusion in India

Introduction When India's so-called “criminal tribes” were de-notified in 1952, the repeal of the Criminal Tribes Act was celebrated as a second independence; more than seven decades later, the communities now grouped as De-notified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes remain among the most heavily policed and least protected populations in the country. This article argues that decriminalization in 1952 was a change of nomenclature rather than of infrastructure. The offending statute was repealed, but the administrative machinery that had manufactured hereditary criminality the surveillance register, the police regulation, the history sheet and the elastic category of the “habitual offender” survived the repeal and migrated into ostensibly caste-neutral instruments, from the state Habitual Offenders Acts to the excise and forest laws and the internal manuals by which police and prisons operate. Methods This research is doctrinal and qualitative in nature. It draws upon on the reports of official commissions and committees, the concluding observations of a United Nations treaty body, reported judgments of the constitutional courts, the state's own crime and prison statistics and the field studies of established civil-society organizations, the article traces this migration of suspicion across arbitrary policing, custodial violence, the false case and discrimination inside prisons. Results The paper shows that because no arm of the Indian state records de-notified status as an administrative category, the disproportionate criminalization of these communities is rendered statistically invisible, which is itself the condition under which the apparatus continues to operate. Discussion The article analysis the Indian Supreme Court's 2024 decisions on police history-sheets and on caste-based discrimination inside prisons as the moment when Indian constitutional law finally located the problem in the manual rather than only in the statute. The article hence, argues that meaningful reform must now reach the police and prison manuals, the uniform definition of the habitual offender, the training of officers and the enumeration of these communities in the 2027 Census. Decriminalization, it concludes, remains unfinished business until liberation on paper is matched by liberation in practice.