On July 17, 2025, in a case involving a woman from the Gond community in Chhattisgarh, who was denied rights over her ancestral property on the plea that their tradition did not permit inheritance by women, the Supreme Court gave a path-breaking judgement upholding tribal women’s equal right to their ancestral land. The judgement was based on the principle of “justice, equity and good conscience” and Article 14 of the constitution and takes the issue beyond customary and personal laws to human equality. Thus, though it concerns a tribal woman, it extends to every religious, tribal and caste group. Such an overarching principle is required for gender justice to reach every community because neither the personal laws nor the tribal customary laws are just from a gender and class perspective. However, the degree of inequality differs by community. For instance, a study done by North Eastern Social Research Centre (NESRC), of 14 tribes (two per state) in the seven northeastern states (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura), along with other studies, as well as experiences show that tribal women enjoy a better social status than their caste counterparts do, but they are not equal to men.They hold some power in the family and in production, as long as land is community managed, but it is still men who control the society. Even in matrilineal tribes, descent and inheritance are through the woman but their societies are patriarchal. One has to, therefore, apply the principle enunciated in the Supreme Court judgement to the tribal customary laws, too, in order to reform them in favour of equal rights of men and women. It must also be recognised that one cannot apply the top court’s judgement in its totality to the tribes of the Northeast, because of the difference in the role of land and the customary law between the middle-Indian (Odisha, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan) and northeastern tribes. The middle Indian tribes have built their identity around the land, forests and water bodies of their present habitat. Their myths of origin make the tribes indigenous to it. Secondly, ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ in the form of individual-based formal laws superimposed on their community-based land laws, and projects that alienate their land, reached them already from the 19th century. As a result, individual land has been turned into their main form of ownership over several decades. In Chhattisgarh, for example, community-based shifting cultivation was banned in 1936 and the tribes have been pushed into individual ownership since then – much of which has been alienated. While the struggles of the middle-Indian tribes around jal, jungle, jameen still continue, it is only in recent years that the Urdu word jasbat (identity) has been added to their struggles, taking it beyond physical sustenance, to social identity. Their customary law is subordinate to their land, forests and identity, and is meant to ensure their protection and equitable distribution.The situation is substantially different in the Northeast. The Khasi of Meghalaya are probably the only tribe in the region to have both, the sacred groves and a myth of origin, linked to their present habitat. Most other tribes in the region originated in the Sino-Tibetan or Khmer regions of Southeast Asia, and migrated to their present habitat. As a result, the village gate, the customary law and the village forest forests and sacred groves – not the clan land – became the centre of their identity. Moreover, till 1947, most hill tribes managed their resources autonomously, under their village and clan ownership-based customary laws. Superimposition of the ‘modern’ individual-based formal law is somewhat recent and is done through projects like commercial plantations and ‘national development’ of dams, transportation, military projects in the name of national security that depend on individually-owned land in their community-centric management system. A condition for subsidies and loans in these externally-imposed rubber, coffee, tea, oil palm and other commercial plantations is individually owned land in the name of the head of the family, understood as man. When the state acquires land for development projects, it pays compensation to the man, even in matrilineal tribes like the Garo, Khasi and Jaintia of Meghalaya. Studies show that a result of commercial plantations is monopolisation of land by a few powerful tribal individuals who alienate land to themselves from the community or from poorer individuals of their tribe. Studies and experiences also indicate that the imposition of such modernisation without preparing the community for it results in stronger patriarchy and class formation in their egalitarian societies which traditionally attributed to a relatively high social status to women without making them equal to men.The principle enunciated by the Supreme Court judgement has to be the basis of the changes but a social process is required to help the communities to reform their customary laws. Any imposition from outside is bound to meet with resistance as witnessed in events like the opposition to women’s reservation in elections for the urban local bodies in Nagaland. The legislative assembly of Arunachal Pradesh passed a resolution in January 2004 that the state should be brought under the tribal customary laws. Women’s organisations agreed to it with the proviso that before forwarding the resolution to the Union government, the customary laws be amended to give equal rights to women. The resolution is still stuck at this stage, due to an opposition from a large number of men.All of the above instances are to say that social equality cannot be achieved through legal changes alone. If that were possible, dowry, child labour, bonded labour and child marriage should have disappeared several decades ago because the law bans them. Legal changes are required but to realise them, the social reality has to be understood and reformed through advocacy in favour of equality. In the Northeast, the customary law is intrinsic to tribal identity and it cannot be ignored. It has to be reformed, not codified because codification turns a living law that had traditionally changed according to changes in their society, into a dead law that cannot be amended without legislative action. For instance, the Mizo customary law was documented in 1957 but its documentation was interpreted as codification. Women’s organisations had to struggle for several decades to introduce some clauses in favour of gender equality because its codification had turned it into a dead law that could be changed only through a long legislative process by the male leaders of the community. Moreover, the customary laws should be reformed to favour both gender and class equality to counter the processes that have intensified inequalities. Individualism that has entered the traditionally egalitarian tribal societies during the last few decades can be countered through a social process of gender and class equality combined with legal changes in their customary law. Facilitating such processes is a challenge for civil society groups committed to social transformation and gender rights. Walter Fernandes is a senior fellow at North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati. He can be contacted at walter.nesrc@gmail.com.