[Yomli Mayi]

Itanagar shuts down. Shops close. Roads empty. Government offices sit largely vacant. Vehicles stay parked. Somewhere in a government building, a delegation is waiting to be heard – again.

This is not a rare occurrence in Arunachal Pradesh. It happens multiple times a year, across the capital region and districts, called by student unions, tribal organisations, and civil society groups over grievances that range from ILP violations to highway corruption to illegal settlers. The faces change. The issues change. The bandh stays. The question that needs to be asked is not whether these organisations have the right to protest – they do. The question is why, in 2026, shutting down an entire city remains the most reliable way for citizens to get their government to respond. And what that says about how this state is actually being governed.

What the Supreme Court has said

The Supreme Court of India has already settled this question – bandhs are illegal.

In 1997, the Kerala High Court ruled in the Bharat Kumar K Palicha vs State of Kerala that calling a bandh is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling. The reasoning was straightforward: a bandh forces citizens to stay home, close their shops, and suspend their lives. That directly violates Article 19, the right to free movement, and Article 21, the right to life and personal liberty. You cannot claim a democratic right to protest by stripping other citizens of their constitutional rights.

In 2007, the Supreme Court went further. In the AIADMK vs Chief Secretary, Government of Tamil Nadu, it held that any political party or organisation that calls a bandh is acting unconstitutionally and can be held financially liable for losses caused. The court also drew a clear legal line: a bandh is not the same as a strike or a hartal. A strike means workers stop working. A hartal means businesses voluntarily shut down. A bandh means everything stops by force or fear. So, the legal position is not ambiguous. Bandhs are illegal. The problem is that none of this is ever enforced in Arunachal Pradesh. Organisations call bandhs, the government negotiates, bandhs get withdrawn, and the cycle repeats. The Supreme Court’s rulings exist on paper.

How often does this actually happen?

Frequently enough that it has stopped being news. The whole state sees anywhere between 8 to 15 bandh calls in a year, counting district-level and localised shutdowns. That is, conservatively, one bandh roughly every five weeks. At that rate, it is not a protest tool anymore – it is a scheduled feature of life in the capital. In August 2024, the ANSU called a 36-hour capital bandh, demanding policy amendments and the revocation of FIRs filed against its members. In December 2025, indigenous youth organisations shut down the ICR for 12 hours over demands to demolish alleged illegal religious structures and deport undocumented immigrants. In April 2026, the AAPYO called another 12-hour capital bandh – this time targeting contractors accused of shoddy work on national highway projects and demanding that the  Ministry of Road Transport regional office be shifted from Tezpur to Itanagar. Three different organisations. Three different issues. The same tool, used repeatedly, because it keeps getting results. And today the ST Bachao Andolan grout has called a 36-hour bandh in one of the most genuine issues, that is ILP and its regulation.

What is notable is the range of groups involved – student unions, tribal organisations, indigenous youth bodies, civil society coalitions. This is not one community or one ideological bloc defaulting to bandhs. It is nearly every organised group in the state, across issues, treating the shutdown as the standard escalation moves. That tells you something important: the problem is not the temperament of any organisation. It is a system where the bandh has become the most reliable way to get the government’s attention.

Why bandhs?

Because it is the only thing that actually works. That is not an opinion – it is what the record shows.

In April 2026, the AAPYO did not wake up one morning and decide to shut down Itanagar for fun. They had already sat across the table from the chief minister and raised their concerns about highway construction failures in East Siang district. They left that meeting with nothing – no investigation ordered; no contractor held accountable, no deadline given. So, they called a bandh. In the ANSU case, the union went through multiple rounds of talks with Nyishi legislators and state government officials. Meetings happened. Minutes were written. Nothing changed. Then they called a bandh. In today’s call, the ST Bachao teams have been continuously engaging with the government to ensure that ILP is strictly regulated. They went on the ground to check ILPs, which actually is administration work, but they failed to do. ST Bachao team has also caught a police official being bribed for ILP at one of the check gate entrances. After all these chaos and frequent failure by the government’s side, the team had to call for bandh.  This is not a pattern of impatient organisations jumping to disruption. It is what happens after formal channels have already failed.

The government does eventually respond – but almost always after a bandh, not before one. Chief Minister Pema Khandu’s administration has engaged with agitating organisations on several occasions, and bandh calls have been withdrawn after assurances were given. But assurances without follow-through teach organisations exactly the wrong lesson: that the government will talk when pressured and stall when not. So, the next time a grievance goes unaddressed, the calculation is simple: skip the petition, call the bandh. It forces a visible, immediate response from the administration.

For tribal communities and civil society organisations that have tried everything else and been ignored, it is not the first option – it is the last one that actually delivers.

The uncomfortable truth is that in Arunachal, bandhs have become the primary mechanism through which the public forces the government to do its job – on ILP enforcement, infrastructure accountability, illegal settlements, and stalled recruitments. That is not civil society being aggressive. That is civil society filling a gap that the government has left open. When formal governance works, people use it. When it does not, they use what works.

The current

Arunachal, despite being home to one of the most diverse concentrations of indigenous tribal communities in India, remains constitutionally under-protected when compared to its Northeastern neighbours. Article 371H of the Constitution does provide a provision for the state, but it offers no substantive protection for tribal customary laws, traditional land rights, or indigenous cultural practices. This stands in stark contrast to the far stronger safeguards available to states like Nagaland under Article 371A, which protects Naga customary law and land rights, and Mizoram under Article 371G, which similarly shields Mizo customary practices. Meghalaya, too, benefits from the robust framework of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, which establishes autonomous district councils with legislative, executive, and judicial powers over tribal affairs.

Arunachal is notably absent from the Sixth Schedule, and despite the state government’s own written demands to the Centre – in 1998, 2006, and again through a resolution passed in 2021 – this constitutional gap remains unaddressed at the national level.

In the absence of these protections, the ILP system stands as the sole legal safeguard protecting Arunachal’s tribal lands, indigenous identity, and demographic integrity. Yet the ILP system today is neither fully enforced nor fully modernised. Over 5,000 violations were detected across districts in 2025 alone, and the state government has still not completed the full digitisation of the ILP tracking mechanism – a long-overdue reform that continues to be delayed.

It is against this backdrop that the public movement demanding stricter ILP enforcement must be understood and taken seriously. When the Constitution fails to provide adequate protection, and when the only existing legal shield is riddled with enforcement gaps, communities are left with no recourse but to take the streets. This movement is not mere agitation; it is a legitimate, democratic assertion of indigenous rights. The state government must listen, act decisively in tribal interests, and press the Centre with renewed urgency for stronger constitutional protections – because ILP alone, however vital, cannot bear the entire burden of protecting our tribal interests.

Consequences

The consequences of the bandh culture in Arunachal are neither uniformly negative nor straightforwardly positive. They demand honest accounting on both sides.

On the positive side, bandhs have repeatedly forced government action on issues that were otherwise being ignored. The uncomfortable truth is that in our state, many administrative responses – on ILP enforcement, infrastructure corruption, illegal settlements, delayed recruitments, etc, came not from proactive governance but from public pressure, and often specifically after a bandh. The AAPYO’s demand for accountability in highway construction is one such example – contractor blacklisting, site inspections, and departmental inquiries that followed were direct results of organised civil pressure, not internal government initiatives.

Several bandhs have produced concrete administrative outcomes: District magistrates issuing formal directives on ILP compliance, the state government writing to the Centre on constitutional protections, police crackdowns on illegal settlers following mass protests, and the Home Department being pushed to expedite ILP digitalisation – a process that had been pending for years. Chief Minister Pema Khandu’s public statements urging strict ILP enforcement came in a political climate shaped, in no small part, by sustained civil society agitation.

Government recruitments that were stalled for years in departments like education and health have been unblocked following targeted bandhs and sit-in protests. In more than one case, files that had not moved for months were cleared within days after a district bandh. Student unions and tribal organisations, whatever their limitations, function as pressure valves in a system where elected representatives frequently fail to hold the executive accountable. In the absence of a strong opposition in the legislature and with most MLAs aligned with the ruling party, civil society agitation – including bandhs – has become, in practice, the primary mechanism through which the public forces the government’s hand.

On the negative side, the costs are real and fall hardest on people who have no cushion to absorb them. The daily wage labourer, a construction worker, a porter, a domestic helper, simply does not earn that day. No work, no pay. Rent, school fees, and evening meals do not get postponed because a bandh was called. The women who carry vegetables from their villages to the morning markets often walking hours before sunrise, arrive to find everything shut. Nobody compensates for them. The student who misses a board examination because roads are blocked does not get a second chance easily. The pregnant woman who cannot reach a hospital, the accident victim stuck behind a blockade, in a state where the nearest functional health facility can be hours away even on a normal day, a bandh is not an inconvenience; it can be fatal.

The autorickshaw driver, the taxi operator, the Trekker vehicle owner, they earn nothing that day either, and unlike organised workers, they have no union, no insurance, and no savings to fall back on. At the government level, every bandh means lost revenue from markets, fuel stations, and small businesses, stalled scheme implementation, and extra police deployment, all at public expense. Beyond a single day’s loss, repeated bandhs quietly signal to investors and businesses that the state is unstable ground.

Building the architecture of dialogue

The answer to the bandh problem is not police enforcement – though the law must be applied fairly. The answer lies in building the institutions and practices that make bandhs unnecessary.

A tribal-centric government must be the first pillar. This means not merely issuing policy statements sympathetic to indigenous rights, but structuring governance decisions, land allocation, infrastructure contracts, employment priorities – in ways that centre the welfare of tribal communities. The demand for Sixth Schedule inclusion needs an urgent engagement at the national level, with Arunachal’s elected representatives advocating consistently for constitutional amendments that match the state’s unique vulnerabilities.

Grassroots Democracy must be the second pillar. Panchayati raj institutions in the state have historically been weak. Strengthening the panchayat and city municipal system – ensuring that village/city councils have real fiscal resources, genuine decision-making authority, and direct communication channels with the state administration – would allow communities to resolve grievances locally before they escalate to the streets. A community that feels heard at the ground level rarely needs to shut down the capital.

A people-centric approach to governance must replace the culture of delayed acknowledgement. Every petition submitted by a recognised organisation should receive a formal, time-bound response. Grievance redressal mechanisms must be transparent, accessible, and functional – not paper windows that generate files without producing results. The government’s recent initiative to use technology for ILP monitoring is a model that could be extended to grievance tracking as well.

Finally, and most urgently, a strong public-government relationship must be cultivated. This requires leaders who are visible in their constituencies not only during elections but between them. It requires civil servants who see their role as service rather than administration. It requires genuine accountability for government contractors – like those involved in the repeatedly delayed national highway projects – so that organisations do not feel compelled to call bandhs simply to demand what accountability should already ensure.

The people of Arunachal are not, by temperament, a people of confrontation. The frequency of bandh calls reflects not aggression but exhaustion – the exhaustion of communities that have tried other means and been ignored. When the government becomes truly responsive, bandhs will become a rarity. Until then, it will remain a scheduled inconvenience – a cost borne by ordinary people for extraordinary governance failures.

The shutters that close during a bandh are not just shop fronts. They are mirrors. What they reflect is a government that must learn, urgently and sincerely, to listen to its before it is forced to hear. (The writer is an independent observer, and the views expressed are personal)