A persistent feature of regional politics is that political dissent or public expression of grievances can only be afforded by those who hold some sort of power or ‘connections’. This is again complicated by the widespread culture of political impunity, embedded and ritualised in every power relation, and practiced on the back of support lent by leading political parties. Poverty shortens an individual's time horizon and maximizes the effectiveness of short-run material inducements and incentives, material or symbolic, which become formidable weapons in building coalitions and/or social engineering (Lemarchand and Legg, 1972: 158). Thus, when social, economic, and political problems are combined with the galvanising power of ethnicity, the result can only be a form of popular politics, which, with its infectious rhetoric, is powerful enough to influence the prevailing status-quo.

Ethnic identity is socially constructed, subjective, and loaded with connotations of ethnocentrism which can be detrimental for modern state building. If subjective criteria determine ethnic group formation and politics, democracy provides a wider base of socio-political collectivity that goes beyond kinship, religion, language etc. This, in turn, enables popular consensus building amongst a spectrum of people wider than that of a kinship group. Despite this basic distinction in the eastern Himalaya, democracy (understood as an adult franchise, formation of political parties, and freedom of political thought and action) and ethnic politics co-exists without any apparent contradiction in a region where it has been introduced fairly recently as a replacement for monarchical, feudal, or colonial systems. When democratic ideals are introduced in societies with distinct socio-political structures, democracy may be unable to challenge pre-existing political norms and traditions and may not necessarily lead to de-centralisation of power and empowerment of the local demos.

In the eastern Himalaya, poverty and socio-political backwardness are a legacy of the subordination of, and discrimination against, a particular ethnic group by a prior ruling strata of the society – whether that was the colonisers in Darjeeling or the Rana Prime Ministers in Nepal. It is the subservient position that ethnic groups find themselves in as a consequence of this legacy – including, for example, the elaborate networks of traditional forms of patronage – which is being challenged most forcefully by ethnic politics.