Section 1
Legal status: sovereign territory, unadministered
North Sentinel Island is part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands Union Territory. It lies approximately 50 kilometres west of South Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal, covering around 60 km². Under Indian constitutional law, the island is fully sovereign Indian territory — it appears on Indian maps, falls under the jurisdiction of the Andaman and Nicobar Administration, and is subject to Indian legislation. There is no territorial dispute. What makes North Sentinel unusual is not the status of sovereignty but the complete absence of normal administration. India legally owns the island but makes no attempt to govern it in any conventional sense.
Section 2
The Andamanese Tribal Protection Regulation and the exclusion zone
The primary legal instrument is the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956 (Regulation 1 of 1956). This regulation designates the Sentinelese — alongside four other Andamanese tribal groups — as a protected population and prohibits entry into their territory without explicit written government permission. In practice this regulation effectively criminalises contact with the Sentinelese by default. Indian authorities enforce a 5-nautical-mile coastal exclusion zone around North Sentinel Island, patrolled by the Indian Coast Guard. Entry without permission is an offence under Indian law. This legal architecture transforms the default of governance from administrative presence to enforced absence.
Section 3
From contact attempts to deliberate isolation: how policy evolved
India's approach has evolved through three phases. During the colonial period and into the 1970s, the government made limited contact attempts — most unsuccessful, some violent. Between 1991 and 1997, Indian anthropologists led by T.N. Pandit conducted a series of non-hostile visits, presenting gifts of coconuts and iron tools. These encounters appeared relatively peaceful and were celebrated internally as diplomatic breakthroughs. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, however, policy shifted decisively. An overflight to check on the Sentinelese' welfare was met with arrows — widely interpreted as evidence they were alive and wanted to remain undisturbed. The Indian government drew the conclusion that continued contact attempts, however friendly, were unwanted and potentially dangerous to the Sentinelese due to lack of immunity to common diseases. The Anthropological Survey of India formally suspended contact visits. Non-contact became the official policy.
Section 4
De facto Sentinelese sovereignty: what it looks like in practice
Within the exclusion zone, the Sentinelese exercise total effective control. India has placed no administrators, police, military personnel, or officials on the island. There is no Indian-built infrastructure — no roads, airstrips, ports, or communications equipment — anywhere on North Sentinel. The Sentinelese determine who enters their territory (no one), how their community is governed (through customs and structures unknown to outsiders), and what happens on the island. In the language of international relations theory, this is a textbook gap between de jure sovereignty (legal ownership by India) and de facto sovereignty (actual governing control by the Sentinelese themselves). India holds the legal title. The Sentinelese hold the political reality.
Section 5
The 2018 John Allen Chau incident
On 17 November 2018, John Allen Chau, a 26-year-old American missionary, paid fishermen to ferry him to the island in an effort to convert the Sentinelese to Christianity. He was killed by arrows on his third approach. Indian authorities confirmed the death, noted that Chau's entry was illegal under Indian law, and announced they would not seek to recover his body — both out of respect for Sentinelese territory and because any recovery team would face lethal danger. No charges were brought against the Sentinelese. The fishermen who transported Chau were arrested and charged with facilitating illegal entry. The incident crystallised the central legal paradox: a killing technically occurred within Indian criminal jurisdiction, but India chose not to exercise that jurisdiction, treating Sentinelese self-defence as a matter beyond the reach of its legal system.
Section 6
What this reveals about the outer limits of state power
The standard definition of a modern state, following Max Weber, requires a monopoly on legitimate violence within a defined territory. India holds no such monopoly on North Sentinel Island — the Sentinelese exercise lethal force there with complete impunity and India does not contest it. North Sentinel reveals that sovereignty is not a binary condition: states can hold legal title to territory while exercising zero practical authority. The Indian government has made a deliberate policy choice to accept this gap, framing non-contact not as a failure of governance but as the protective expression of it. India is not unable to project power into the exclusion zone. It is choosing not to. That reframing — non-governance as policy rather than as weakness — is the politically consequential move.
Section 7
International rights frameworks and the Sentinelese
India has not ratified ILO Convention 169, the primary international instrument protecting indigenous peoples' rights to land and self-governance. However, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted in 2007 and endorsed by India, affirms the right of indigenous peoples to maintain distinct institutions and determine their own development priorities. The Sentinelese case is frequently cited in indigenous rights scholarship as an example of a state voluntarily honouring a people's choice of complete self-determination. Critics occasionally argue that the no-contact policy abandons the Sentinelese to any internal crisis, natural disaster, or disease event that their isolation cannot address. Defenders counter that the Sentinelese have expressed consistent, lethal opposition to contact and that any imposed intervention would itself constitute a serious rights violation. The debate sits at the intersection of state duty to protect citizens, indigenous self-determination, and the ethics of contact with people who have not consented to it.
Section 8
Why the Sentinelese case matters beyond India
Similar structures exist elsewhere: indigenous reserves in Canada and the United States where federal jurisdiction is formally present but practically limited, autonomous tribal districts in India's own northeastern states, and legally protected customary authority zones in Pacific island nations. What distinguishes North Sentinel is the completeness of the separation and the longevity of the resistance. The island poses a foundational question in political theory: is governance about legal authority, or about physical presence? India's answer, practised consistently since the late 1990s, is that sovereignty can be maintained through a patrol boat and a regulation — without a single official ever setting foot on the governed territory. That is a genuinely unusual answer to one of the oldest questions in political philosophy, and it makes North Sentinel Island one of the most politically instructive square kilometres on Earth.
