Critically examine the ethnic conflicts in North-East India. (2018, 15 Marks)
The North-East holds about 4.58 crore people in more than two hundred ethnic groups, joined to the rest of India by the narrow Siliguri corridor. Its conflicts are often read as one problem; they are really three, and the state’s response has been uneven across them.
Three families of conflict
| Family | Illustrations | Driver |
|---|---|---|
| Indigeneity and migration | Assam Movement (1979–85), ULFA; NRC final list (2019) excluding about 19.06 lakh | Fear of demographic swamping |
| Autonomy and homeland | Greater Nagalim across four states; Bodoland; Karbi Anglong | Recognition, land, self-rule |
| Inter-ethnic, within a state | Meitei–Kuki-Zo in Manipur since May 2023 (over 200 dead, about 60,000 displaced); Mizo–Bru clashes, which drove the Brus into Tripura in 1997 | Land, ST status, rival homelands |
How the state has responded
- Territorial accommodation: smaller states, Sixth Schedule councils and accords. These include the Bodoland Territorial Region (2020), the Karbi Anglong Agreement (2021) and the Bru–Reang agreement of 16 January 2020, which settled some 34,000 displaced Brus in Tripura after 23 years in camps.
- Coercion: the AFSPA regime and counter-insurgency.
- Development: DoNER, Act East and connectivity spending, assuming grievance is at root material.
Critical examination
- Accommodation breeds new claimants. Each new unit contains its own minorities, so the Kuki-Zo, Karbi and eastern Naga tribes read earlier concessions as precedents. Nagalim cannot be granted without dismembering Manipur, Assam and Arunachal, whose assemblies have all refused.
- Impunity erodes legitimacy. The Jeevan Reddy Committee (2005) called AFSPA “a symbol of oppression”, and Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v. Union of India (2016) examined 1,528 alleged extra-judicial killings. After the Oting killings of fourteen civilians (December 2021), proceedings against soldiers were closed in September 2024 for want of Union sanction.
- The illusion of federal autonomy. Sanjib Baruah describes “cosmetic federalism“: many states and councils, but centralised money and priorities. He also describes “durable disorder“, in which ceasefire economies give armed groups a stake in never settling.
- Development is not enough. Rising literacy has sharpened ethnic demands rather than softened them, and development spending cannot answer symbolic claims such as the Naga flag and constitution.
- A frontier lens: scrapping the Free Movement Regime with Myanmar in 2024 treats kin across the border as a security threat, which Mizoram and Naga bodies oppose.
The balance sheet
The record is not simply failure. The Union Home Ministry reported in March 2026 that insurgency incidents fell 64% between 2014 and 2025, and civilian deaths 86%. Since 2024 Manipur has accounted for about 77% of the region’s violent incidents. AFSPA has been withdrawn from Tripura (2015) and Meghalaya (2018) and cut to four districts in Assam. The Mizoram settlement, durable since 1986, shows accommodation working where the claimant is compact and its leadership united.
Conclusion
The North-East’s ethnic conflicts are political contests over land, recognition and belonging, not primordial feuds. The state has contained most of them. It has resolved them only where it conceded autonomy in time and gave up impunity. Manipur and the Naga question will test whether it can do both again.