ABSTRACT
Sikkim, formerly a Buddhist Kingdom, acceded as the 22nd constituent state of the Indian Union in 1975. Upon “accession”, the insertion of Article 371(F) of the Indian constitution, sought to preserve Sikkim’s “Old laws” (customary and codified) as a bridge for transition from monarchy to democracy. The specified constitutional framework upholds and enforces Sikkim’s “Old laws” in India’s practical democratic imperatives in the form of an autonomy question. The autonomy question mandates ethnic perception on the discourse of rights for its historically specific cultural communities. For Sikkim, an important landmark of “Old Law” perseverance resides in the Dzumsa’s practice of self-governance under Article 371(F). Dzumsa, a self-governing institution in Sikkim evokes lifeworlds of cultural communities realised through self-government and autonomy as subject and citizen—subject of rule and vote-bearing citizen of modernizing democratic power. As a result, the discourse of rights in Sikkim underlines inimitable self-government experiences of Sikkim’s cultural communities as a governable category of subject-citizen in India.
