Fractured Shield: The Crises of Legality and Settler-Colonialism in the Chittagong Hill Tracts
Introduction
The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) region of Bangladesh has been the site of one of the Indian Subcontinent’s protracted and most complex political (and ethnic) struggles. For decades, the region’s indigenous (the Jumma or Pahari peoples) population has been compelled to face an uphill battle against state-backed efforts at demographic engineering through settlement programs and measures which lead to the displacement of the land’s natives. Events across recent years, such as the 2024 political transition and the intensification of already volatile ethnic tensions in 2025 (the immediate cause being the gang-rape of an indigenous schoolgirl), have only exacerbated the ongoing conflict, also underscoring the sever urgency of this crisis. Several major humanitarian organizations, such as Cultural Survival and Amnesty International, have not only stepped in to record these renewed surges in violence, but have also documented human rights abuses in the region and stitched-up event timelines starting from decades ago to the best of their efforts. As can be safely concluded, Bengali settlers have engaged in targeted assaults against the Jumma people with impunity, a campaign of extermination facilitated by local authorities and the country’s armed forces.
The legal framework of the CHT region serves a two-fold purpose. This is exemplified by the state utilizing constitutional ambiguity and the legal mechanism (under heavy influence of the civil and executive administration) as an engine to accelerate the rate of demographic change in the region and legitimize its attempts at settler-colonialism on one hand, and the indigenous desperately clinging to traditional customary laws and unfulfilled or unimplemented treaties (most notably the 1997 Peace Accord, instrumental in ending the first phase of the CHT insurgency) on the other. The conflict, ultimately, demonstrates just how judicial frameworks can operate as active participants in a settler-colonial project, leaving indigenous communities trapped between the efficiency of the state’s law machinery and the hollow promises made by various treaties and accords.
“Law” and the “Legitimacy” of Ethnic Erasure
To understand how the legal machinery facilitates settler-colonialism in the CHT, we must first examine the highest law of the land. The Constitution of Bangladesh (Article 23A, to be specific), categorizes the Jumma peoples as "ethnic sects", “minor races” and "tribes" rather than recognizing their distinctness as the region’s indigenous dwellers. As highlighted in a recent article by Intercontinental Cry, this process begun in 1971 itself, the year of Bangladesh’s liberation. The government refused to recognize the indigeneity of all indigenous tribes that lived within the territories of Bangladesh by declaring all citizens to be “Bengalis” in the constitution itself. Through this forced, assimilatory definition, the state effectively nullifies their rights to their own ancestral lands under international frameworks, like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169).
This constitutional exclusion is enforced by a judicial system structurally stacked against the Jumma peoples. Historically, the courts of the CHT lacked a very basic tenet of modern governance, i.e., separation of powers. They were governed by the Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation of 1900, under which the civil administration wielded immense judicial control over civil and criminal cases. Because these officers operate as extensions of a state that harbours deep ethnonationalist sentiments, the courts, ultimately, also reflect this bias. Furthermore, the legal apparatus in question is fundamentally inaccessible to indigenous communities due to factors such as sky-high costs, remote geography, and a language barrier (the court proceedings being conducted entirely in Bengali), which aid in crushing indigenous aspirations of securing justice.
Such a structure is helpful in legalizing dispossession, and it does that very well. For instance, the law is regularly weaponized to legitimize land grabbing by Bengali settlers. The state makes full use of its bureaucratic tools, such as declaring ancestral indigenous territories as khas (state-owned) land in order to legally expropriate property. Because indigenous landowning generally relies on unwritten land rights, they lack the formal documents demanded by the courts in order to prove ownership. Even when they do hold such documentation, indigenous advocates suspect and report that critical records have a history of being conveniently destroyed, such as during the burning of the Khagrachhari Deputy Commissioner's office.
Beyond the judiciary, the Bangladeshi state mobilizes its armed wings (the best example being the Army) under the guise of maintaining law & order and, ostensibly, the protection of “national security”. As documented in various reports by newspapers such as, the Dhaka Tribune, The Federal and The Tribune, “anti-terror” laws, such as Section 144 of Bangladesh’s Penal Code of 1860 are frequently invoked to militarize the region, and the State effectively gives the forces stationed a free hand to act less as a security force and more as its personal henchmen, allowing the blatant and unjustified use of force. Such laws and deployments also allow state forces to arbitrarily detain Jumma youth on mere suspicion after criminalizing indigenous protests, all while actively protecting the settlers who occupy their ancestral land.
The 1900 Regulation: An Unlikely Friend
Due to the state’s legal system operating in a manner as described above, the indigenous peoples of the CHT are compelled to seek alternative sources of justice, such as customary courts and historical treaties & regulations. Talking about historical regulations, ironically, a colonial-era statute (the Chittagong Hill Tracts Regulation of 1900) serves as one of the strongest lines of defence for the Jumma peoples, which was originally designed to acknowledge traditional, native self-government and restrict immigration and settlement by outsiders and the region’s “mainstream” ethnicities. As shown by indigenous rights organizations such as Land is Life through their groundwork and the reports & articles based on it, this specific regulation is the cornerstone of their legal mechanism of self-defence. However, the Bangladeshi Government has left no stone unturned in order to dilute the provisions of the 1900 regulation and dismantle it piece by piece, which facilitates its ethnonationalist agenda of “Bengali-fying” the entire region. For instance, the Bangladesh Army has even resorted to the occupation of tourist sites in the region, creating what can termed as a “Military-Touristic Complex”.
At the local level, indigenous communities rely heavily on their own informal justice systems as for the purposes of preservation of their identity and dispute resolution. These customary courts are administered, in a hierarchical manner, by village Karbaris, local mouza Headmen, and regional Circle Chiefs. While this system tends to be highly accessible, with a deep sense of faith put into it by the people it governs, its operation is affected by a crucial jurisdictional flaw, the flaw being that these leaders have no formal enforcement power to halt state-backed land dispossession campaigns and bring Bengali settlers who commit heinous crimes against the natives of the region to justice. When faced with the state’s machinery, backed by martial oppression and the law’s lack of willingness, these courts are virtually rendered ineffective.
Unfulfilled Promises, Unimplemented Treaties
One of the starkest examples of legal breakdown and the denial of justice in the Hill Tracts region is the limbo the 1997 Peace Accord is stuck in. Drafted with an aim to put an end to a decades-long indigenous insurgency, the Accord was visualized to be a comprehensive legal promise of protection and peace for the people. It guaranteed the establishment of a specially-administered autonomous area, greater participation in the national government, rehabilitation of the displaced, regional demilitarisation and the creation of a land dispute resolution mechanism for the restoration of usurped & stolen ancestral lands.
Today, however, it exists largely as a hollow text. As repeatedly shown through practical experience, the Accord’s core provisions remain unimplemented. The aforementioned “Land Commission” has effectively been rendered non-functional thanks to intervention by the state’s bureaucracy, while the region remains heavily militarized (which is one of the reasons for the insurgency being revived and undergoing a second phase since 2022). As a result, the Peace Accord has turned from a mandate of protection into a tool of brutal and inconsiderate pacification. The accord has conveniently provided the international community with the façade of peace and a resolved conflict, while back home, it lays down traps for the Jumma natives of the region, waiting for protective measures that the state has zero intention of enforcing.
Conclusion
The Hill Tracts today suffer from the phenomenon of being governed by a contradictory and virtually powerless legal framework, the consequences of which have been dire, which can be understood by observing how the indigenous are pushed to the edge of survival by the very institutions meant to guard them. For this conflict to ever reach an actual resolution, The Bangladeshi state must bridge the enormous gap between the promises of the 1997 Peace Accord and its actual enforcement. This demands the constitutional recognition of the distinctness and indigeneity of the Jumma peoples. Until the law stops denying their existence through text, it will continue to deny them rights in the real world.
