Discrimination

North-east India is a region where the politics of protective discrimination for scheduled tribes today raises some of the most difficult issues of justice, fairness and costs on system legitimacy. The time may have come to consider ways of breaking away from the ethnic discourse of the existing protective discrimination regime that, in effect, involves the state forever categorising groups of people in ethnic terms and making descendants of immigrants into perpetual outsiders.

After 30 years of the adoption of the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, incidence of racism, racial discrimination, religious intolerance and ethnic violence are on the increase at a national, regional and global level. It is in this context that the holding of Third World Conference against Racism has to be seen and the prospects it offers analysed.