Ethnic Conflicts and Insurgencies as Impediments to Regional Cooperation

South Asia’s borders were drawn by imperial convenience, partition arithmetic and treaty lines that nobody checked against the map of who actually lives where. The consequence is structural: almost every ethnic group of political consequence in the region has a co-ethnic population on the other side of a frontier. That single fact is what turns a domestic grievance into a bilateral quarrel without anybody deciding that it should.

Why an ethnic conflict in this region is never only domestic

• The mechanism is demographic, not ideological. An aggrieved group with kin across a border acquires, automatically, a sanctuary, a sympathetic constituency, a lobby inside a neighbour’s electoral politics and a refugee route — none of which any government has to authorise.
  • Sanctuary turns a policing problem into a diplomatic one; co-ethnic sympathy constrains the neighbour, as Tamil Nadu did over Sri Lanka and Mizoram does over Myanmar.
• Fewer than one person in twenty-five lives in a state whose boundaries match an ethnic boundary; of roughly 190 sovereign states only about fifteen are ethnically homogeneous, and half of those are entangled in cross-border ethnic disputes anyway.
• South Asia is the extreme case of that general condition because its frontiers are young, its states are new, and its ethnic geographies are old.
  • Bengalis straddle India and Bangladesh; Punjabis and Sindhis India and Pakistan; Baloch Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan; Pashtuns Pakistan and Afghanistan; Tamils India and Sri Lanka; Nagas, Kuki-Chin-Mizo peoples and Meiteis India and Myanmar; Madhesis Nepal and India; Chakmas Bangladesh and India.
• Buzan and Wæver’s regional security complex supplies the vocabulary for why this does not stay contained.
  • A security complex is a set of states whose security problems are so interlinked that none can be analysed apart from the others; South Asia is the textbook conflict-formation complex, patterned by the India–Pakistan rivalry.
  • Ethnic overlap is the transmission belt through which a purely internal disorder registers as an external threat somewhere else.
  • They also treat Afghanistan and Myanmar as insulators — states sitting between complexes rather than inside one — which is precisely why insurgencies in both bleed in two directions at once.

Every ethnic question in South Asia has kin across a frontier, which is why a domestic grievance becomes a bilateral dispute without anyone deciding that it should.

What ethnicity is: three accounts and what the region’s evidence shows

The word comes from the Greek ethnos, a people. As a working definition, ethnicity is a sense of common identity that a group asserts in order to differentiate itself from others — fluid, contextual, relational, and expressed through symbols rather than fixed by biology. What is contested is where that sense comes from.

The primordialist account

• Ethnic attachment is given, deep and pre-political, rooted in blood, language, custom, region and religion rather than in calculation.
• Clifford Geertz described these as the assumed “givens” of social existence, felt to carry an overwhelming coerciveness of their own, quite apart from any interest they serve.

“The assumed ‘givens’ of social existence.”

Clifford Geertz, on primordial attachments

• Edward Shils supplied the underlying idea of a primordial tie binding kin and community with an intensity that civil ties cannot match.
• Anthony D. Smith stands between primordialism and construction with his account of the ethnie: a collective name, a myth of common descent, shared historical memories, a distinctive culture, an association with a homeland, and a sense of solidarity.
• The weakness is explanatory, not descriptive. Primordialism explains why ethnic feeling is intense; it cannot explain timing — why Sinhala and Tamil politicians cooperated in the 1930s and 1940s and could not in the 1950s, when the primordial facts were identical.

The instrumentalist account

• Paul Brass is the decisive voice: ethnicity is what elites make of cultural difference when they are competing for state resources, and ethnic identity is the outcome of that competition rather than its cause.
  • Elites select which cultural markers to politicise from a menu of available differences, and the selection follows the incentives of the political system.
  • His long argument with Francis Robinson over Muslim separatism in the United Provinces is the classic instance: elite manipulation against the objective distinctiveness of the community being mobilised.
• Robert Bates gave the economic version: ethnic groups are coalitions formed to compete for the goods a modernising state distributes — jobs, licences, admissions, contracts — and their boundaries track the size of coalition that maximises each member’s share.
• The test case for instrumentalism in South Asia is the census. Where representation, reservation and revenue-sharing follow head counts, the enumeration itself becomes a political contest, which is exactly what happened over language in Pakistan, over the state list in Nepal and over the citizenship rolls in Assam.
• Its weakness is that elites cannot mobilise on nothing. No Indian politician can raise a Sinhala grievance in Odisha; the material has to be there, which is what the constructivists explain better.

The constructivist account

• Fredrik Barth made the decisive move by shifting attention from content to boundary.

“It is the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.”

Fredrik Barth

• Groups persist through interaction, not isolation: the boundary is maintained by rules about who may marry, eat and trade with whom, even as the cultural content inside it changes completely.
• The practical implication is severe — assimilationist policy attacks the content and leaves the boundary intact, which is why forced homogenisation reliably strengthens the identity it targets.
• Benedict Anderson supplied the account of how a large group comes to feel like a group at all.

“An imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”

— Benedict Anderson

• Print capitalism, and later broadcast and social media, let strangers picture themselves as one people; census, map and museum were the colonial instruments that fixed those categories.
• Eric Hobsbawm’s invented tradition explains the antiquity claim: rituals and genealogies of great apparent age are routinely recent constructions serving present purposes, which is what the Mahavamsa-derived vision of the island as the sacred vessel of Buddhism became in twentieth-century Sinhala politics.

Which account the South Asian record supports

Question	Primordialist	Instrumentalist	Constructivist
Origin of identity	Given, ancient, pre-political	Manufactured by elites competing for state resources	Made and remade through boundary maintenance and imagination
Key names	Geertz, Shils, partly Smith	Brass, Bates	Barth, Anderson, Hobsbawm
Explains intensity?	Yes — the core strength	Poorly; treats passion as instrumental	Moderately, through symbols and myth
Explains timing?	No — the fatal weakness	Yes — mobilisation follows incentives	Yes — boundaries harden when threatened
South Asian case that fits	Kinship solidarity across the Chin-Kuki-Mizo belt	Sinhala Only, 1956 as an electoral bid	The census and the map in Assam and Nepal
Policy implication	Accommodation; identity will not dissolve	Change the incentives facing elites	Do not attack the boundary; assimilation backfires

• The evidence supports a constructivist account with instrumentalist mechanics and primordialist consequences. Identities here are made, but once made they are not disposable, and people die for them.
  • Made: Bengali, Assamese, Naga and Madhesi political identities in their present form are twentieth-century constructions, several of them consolidated by colonial classification.
  • Mobilised: their political salience rises and falls with elite competition and state policy — most visibly with language, quota and constituency decisions.
  • Durable: once a boundary is drawn in blood, it does not dissolve when the incentive that created it disappears, which is why Sri Lanka’s grievance survived the LTTE’s annihilation.
• Urmila Phadnis is the essential regional theorist, and her framing governs the cases that follow: ethnic identity in South Asia is a product of the nation-building project itself, not a residue that nation-building failed to clear away.
  • She distinguishes an ethnic category — a group merely classified as distinct — from an ethnic community conscious of itself, and from an ethnic movement that makes political claims; the state’s own policies are what carry a group from one stage to the next.

Ethnicity, nation, nationality and state: keeping the terms apart

Term	What it is	Claim it makes	South Asian instance
Ethnic group	A self-aware cultural community with a myth of descent	Recognition, protection, non-discrimination	Bodos, Tharus, Mohajirs
Nationality	An ethnic group asserting a homeland and political personality short of statehood	Autonomy, federal recognition, language rights	Madhesis, Baloch before 1948, Sindhis
Nation	A community claiming the right to govern itself	Sovereignty, or its functional equivalent	Bengalis in 1971, Nagas, Tamil Eelam
State	The territorial apparatus of sovereignty	Territorial integrity and monopoly of force	Every member of the region
Ethno-nationalism	The claim that nation and state should coincide	Redraw the map to fit the people	Pashtunistan, Greater Balochistan

• The transitions between these categories are political events, not sociological facts, and they are usually triggered by what the state does.
  • Denial of recognition turns a category into a community; repression turns a community into a movement; repression of the movement turns autonomy demands into secessionist ones.
  • The reverse also happens, and matters more than pessimists concede: Mizo nationalism reverted from secession to ordinary state politics once statehood was conceded, and Tamil nationalism in India dissolved into federal bargaining after the linguistic reorganisation of states.

The analytical toolkit

Modernisation and ethnic upsurge: the prediction that failed

• Modernisation theory and Marxism agreed that ethnic competition belonged to a pre-modern era, and that education, urbanisation, income and media participation would dissolve it into class or civic identity.
  • The evidence runs the other way: social communication and mobilisation raise cultural awareness and sharpen inter-ethnic competition, and multi-ethnic states at every level of development have been affected, Western Europe included.
  • Anthony D. Smith argued the reverse of the standard prediction — that the modern scientific state produces frequent ethnic revivals, because modern communications make previously isolated groups visible to themselves and to each other.
• The mechanism is competition, not nostalgia. Modernisation multiplies both the goods worth competing for and the number of people qualified to compete for them, and ethnicity is the cheapest available coalition in that competition.
• It also restructures leadership inside the group. A younger, educated cadre displaces a traditional leadership that has failed to deliver, by raising more extreme demands — and state repression then vindicates them.
• The interventionist modern state completes the picture. A state obliged to deliver welfare, justice and development penetrates communities that colonial administration had largely left alone, and that penetration is experienced as an assault on traditional autonomy.

Horowitz: ranked systems, unranked systems and why the region secedes rather than revolts

• Donald Horowitz distinguishes ranked systems, where ethnic divisions coincide with class hierarchy, from unranked systems, where each group is internally stratified and the groups sit parallel to one another.
  • Ranked systems produce social revolution — the subordinate group attacks the hierarchy, as in Rwanda.
  • Unranked systems produce secession and partition, because each group is a potential society in itself. South Asia is overwhelmingly unranked, which is precisely why its ethnic conflicts take territorial and separatist form.
• His typology of secessionist groups by relative backwardness and regional wealth is the sharpest predictive instrument available.

Group / region	Horowitz’s prediction	South Asian case
Backward group, backward region	Secedes early, on identity grounds, regardless of cost	Nagas from 1947; Mizos from 1966
Advanced group, backward region	Secedes late, once opportunity closes in the centre	Sri Lankan Tamils after standardisation shut the professions
Backward group, advanced region	Reluctant; fears losing the region’s wealth	Sindhis against Karachi’s economy
Advanced group, advanced region	Least likely to secede; bargains instead	Mohajirs, who demanded quota and status, not a state

• Ethnic parties are Horowitz’s other central warning. In a divided society, parties that draw votes from one group only produce a census-like election, remove the incentive for cross-ethnic appeals, and drive politics toward outbidding.
  • Outbidding is the mechanism by which moderates are destroyed: S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike defeated the United National Party in 1956 by promising Sinhala Only, and having won, could not later concede without being outflanked himself.
  • India’s counter-case is instructive: all-India parties needing votes in many states cannot afford single-group appeals, which is the strongest structural argument for why Indian federalism has absorbed demands that unitary neighbours could not.

Gurr: minorities at risk and relative deprivation

• Ted Gurr’s framework begins from relative deprivation — rebellion follows not absolute poverty but the gap between what a group believes it is entitled to and what it gets.
  • The gap that matters is usually political and symbolic — language, office, representation, dignity — rather than income alone.
• His Minorities at Risk classification sorts the region’s groups usefully: ethnonationalists with a territorial claim, indigenous peoples defending land and autonomy, communal contenders competing for shares of central power, ethnoclasses in economically defined niches, and religious sects.
  • Ethnonationalists: Nagas, Baloch, Tamil Eelamists. Indigenous peoples: the Jumma of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the tribes of the North-East. Communal contenders: Afghanistan’s Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras. Ethnoclasses: Indian-origin Tamils in the Sri Lankan plantations, Mohajirs in urban Sindh.
• Gurr’s later and more optimistic finding is the one usually left out: from the mid-1990s the global incidence of ethnic war fell, and it fell where states conceded autonomy, language rights and power-sharing — accommodation works, and it is measurable.

Kaufman: symbolic politics

• Stuart Kaufman argues that ethnic war requires three things together: hostile myths about the other group, ethnic fear for the group’s very existence, and political opportunity to act.
  • Sri Lanka is the cleanest case: the myth of the island as the Buddhist dhammadipa; the fear that a Sinhala majority is a global minority beside sixty million Tamils across the strait; and the opportunity created by competitive elections.
  • Manipur in 2023 shows the same structure compressed into months rather than decades.

Posen: the security dilemma applied to ethnic groups

• Barry Posen transposed the international-relations security dilemma to groups inside a state whose central authority has weakened or collapsed.
  • When the state can no longer guarantee anybody’s safety, each group must provide its own, and every defensive measure — a village guard, a stockpile, a road block — is indistinguishable from preparation for attack.
  • The dilemma is worst where groups are intermingled rather than concentrated, because defence then requires clearing territory, which is the logic that produces ethnic cleansing.
• Applications are exact: Afghanistan after 1992 and again after 2021; Manipur’s valley-hill geography once the police armouries were emptied; the Chittagong Hill Tracts during the settlement programme; and Colombo in July 1983, where the state’s forces stood aside.

Weiner: sons of the soil

• Myron Weiner’s “sons of the soil” thesis is the single most apt frame for the North-East and for Sri Lanka, and deserves to be stated exactly.
  • Conflict arises where a locally rooted but educationally backward population confronts a migrant population advanced in education and employment, at the moment when the local group’s own educated class is expanding and the modern-sector jobs are not.
  • The demand that follows is nativist and preferential — jobs, land, admissions and political office reserved for the sons of the soil.
  • Weiner’s related notion of the politics of scarcity explains why competition for education and employment, rather than ideology, is the ordinary content of ethnic conflict in the region.
• The fit is close in three places: Assam, where a Bengali-speaking professional and cultivating presence provoked exactly this response; Sri Lanka, where Sinhala grievance was framed around Tamil over-representation in the colonial professions and the public service; and Balochistan and Sindh, where Punjabi and Pashtun in-migration produced the same nativist politics.

Self-determination against uti possidetis

• Self-determination is the legal engine of every ethno-national claim in the region, and it is systematically blunted by a competing principle.
  • External self-determination — the right of a colonised people to independence — is settled law and was the basis of decolonisation.
  • Internal self-determination — the right of a community inside an existing state to govern its own affairs — is where every South Asian dispute actually sits, and it confers no right to secede.
• Uti possidetis juris is the countervailing rule: the administrative boundaries a colonial power left behind become the international boundaries of the successor states, regardless of whom they cut through.
  • Applied across Latin America, entrenched by the Organisation of African Unity in 1964, and reapplied in Europe by the Badinter Commission when Yugoslavia dissolved, it is the reason the Durand Line, the Radcliffe Line and the McMahon Line all survive their own illogic.
• The United Nations settled the balance in the same breath in which it proclaimed the right.

“Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), paragraph 6

• The consequence is a permanent asymmetry that shapes the whole region’s diplomacy: every state defends territorial integrity absolutely at the international level while being tempted, at the bilateral level, to encourage somebody else’s separatists.
  • The Kurds are the limiting case of the same asymmetry outside the region — divided among Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria and a majority in none, they have been alternately armed and suppressed by each as bilateral relations dictated.
  • Bangladesh in 1971 is the region’s only successful secession, and even that succeeded through external military intervention rather than through the recognition of a legal right — which is why every state in the region reads it as a precedent to be prevented rather than followed.
  • Neera Chandhoke’s reformulation is the useful one: self-determination should be understood as a claim to effective democratic participation and cultural security within a state, since the territorial reading generates more minorities than it liberates.

Why South Asia is unusually prone to ethnic conflict

• State-building was compressed into decades rather than centuries. European states had four hundred years to fuse populations, and used a violence no contemporary state could survive; South Asian states were asked to do it in a generation, under universal suffrage.
• Partition drew the founding boundaries in weeks, on a religious criterion, with no reference to any other identity.
  • Punjab and Bengal were cut through the middle of two of the subcontinent’s most coherent linguistic communities.
  • Sylhet’s referendum, the Chittagong Hill Tracts’ award and the Gilgit agency’s fate were decided without consulting the overwhelmingly non-Muslim or non-Bengali populations concerned.
  • The North-East was left connected to the rest of India by a corridor twenty-odd kilometres wide, converting an internal region into a strategic frontier overnight.
• Several post-colonial constitutions took a majoritarian turn that manufactured the minorities they then had to police.

State	The majoritarian move	Group it created as a grievance-bearer
Sri Lanka	Sinhala Only, 1956; Buddhism given the foremost place in the 1972 constitution	Tamils, plus Muslims and Indian-origin plantation Tamils
Pakistan	Urdu as sole national language, 1948; Islamic republic from 1956; Bengali resisted until 1954	Bengalis first, then Baloch, Sindhis, Pashtuns
Bangladesh	Bengali ethno-linguistic nationalism, 1972; Islam as state religion, 1988	Jumma peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts; Hindus
Nepal	Hindu kingdom and Nepali as the sole official language under the 1990 constitution	Madhesis, Janajatis, Tharus
Myanmar	Burman-Buddhist nationalism; 1982 citizenship law by “national races”	Rohingya, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Shan
India	Adopted linguistic reorganisation from 1956 and asymmetric provisions instead	The counter-case, and the region’s most instructive one

• Majoritarianism and minoritarianism feed on each other, and the syndrome is sharpest in democracies, where exclusive control of power by the majority community is justified in the language of democratic legitimacy.
  • It takes two forms: a national majority pitted against a regional majority that is a national minority, and a regional majority up against the national majority — which is the shape of the Sikh, Kashmiri, Tamil, Baloch and Sindhi questions alike.
• These are plural societies without plural institutions. Communities meet in the marketplace and in the bureaucracy but not in shared civic organisations, and the state offers majority rule without minority guarantees — which reads to the minority as permanent exclusion rather than as democracy.
• Frontier populations carry demographic anxiety as a permanent condition. Communities facing far larger neighbouring populations experience ordinary migration as existential, which is why the fear of becoming a minority in one’s own homeland recurs identically in Assam, Balochistan, the Chittagong Hill Tracts and Sinhala politics about the Palk Strait.
• External involvement then makes the difference between grievance and war. Discontent without outside support tends to stay constitutional; the weapons, money and media exposure that sustain an insurgency for decades are very rarely generated domestically.

Sri Lanka: the case that turned an internal question into an Indian one

Sri Lanka is the indispensable case because every step of the mechanism is visible in it — a majoritarian policy sequence producing an armed movement, a neighbouring state’s domestic politics forcing it to intervene, an intervention that failed, and an unfinished settlement that remains a live bilateral issue nearly four decades later.

“The ethnic groups that inhabit Ceylon have never shared a common identity except as subjects of the British Empire.”

— Marshall Singer

The manufacture of the grievance, step by step

• Citizenship legislation of 1948–49 disenfranchised the Indian-origin Tamils brought from Tamil Nadu as plantation labour, leaving close to a million people stateless in the country of their birth.
  • The Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 and the Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) Act of 1949, with the accompanying elections amendment, removed both citizenship and the franchise.
• The Sirimavo–Shastri Pact of 1964 attempted a bilateral solution by dividing the stateless population between the two countries — roughly 525,000 to be repatriated to India and 300,000 granted Sri Lankan citizenship — with the Sirimavo–Gandhi understanding of 1974 dividing the remainder.
  • Nehru had resisted the demand throughout the 1950s, on the ground that accepting responsibility for a settled overseas population would set a precedent India could not afford elsewhere.
  • A domestic exclusion had thus already become an inter-state negotiation before any violence occurred — the mechanism in its purest form.
• The Official Language Act of 1956 — Sinhala Only — is the decisive act. It made Sinhala the sole official language and, with it, made the public service and the professions progressively inaccessible to Tamil speakers.
  • The Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957 and the Senanayake–Chelvanayakam Pact of 1965 each attempted regional accommodation and each was abandoned under pressure from the Sinhala opposition and the Buddhist clergy — the outbidding dynamic in operation.
  • The riots of 1958 were the first mass anti-Tamil violence and followed directly from the language policy.
• Standardisation of university admissions from the early 1970s cut Tamil entry into medicine and engineering by applying language-weighted and then district-based criteria.
  • This is the Weiner mechanism exactly: a majority that felt itself educationally disadvantaged under colonial arrangements used state power to reallocate scarce professional places, and radicalised an entire generation of Tamil youth in doing so.
• The 1972 constitution made the island a republic, gave Buddhism the foremost place, and removed the minority safeguard clause inherited from the colonial constitution; the 1978 constitution conceded Tamil “national language” status while retaining Sinhala as the language of administration.
• The political demand turned separatist in 1976: the Vaddukoddai Resolution committed the Tamil United Liberation Front to a sovereign Tamil Eelam, and the LTTE was founded in the same year out of the Tamil New Tigers.
• Riots in 1977, the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in 1981, and above all Black July 1983 — in which somewhere between two and three thousand Tamils were killed while the state’s forces stood aside — ended the possibility of a constitutional settlement.
  • The Sixth Amendment of 1983 required every member of parliament to forswear separatism, which drove the elected Tamil leadership out of the legislature and left the field to the armed groups.

Why it became India’s problem

• Tamil Nadu’s co-ethnic politics made non-intervention electorally impossible. Sri Lankan Tamil suffering was reported to sixty million Tamils in an Indian state with its own history of linguistic nationalism, and both Dravidian parties competed to champion it.
• The refugee inflow made it administratively unavoidable: roughly a quarter of a million Tamils crossed to India after 1983, and tens of thousands remain in camps in Tamil Nadu to this day.
• India armed and trained the militants. From about 1983, India’s external intelligence agency trained and equipped several Tamil groups, including the LTTE, TELO, EPRLF, EROS and PLOTE, on Indian soil.
  • The stated purpose was leverage — to compel Colombo to negotiate devolution — not the creation of an independent Eelam.
  • The strategic context mattered: Colombo’s turn to the United States, Pakistan, Israel and China after 1977, and its talks over facilities at Trincomalee, made India acutely sensitive to extra-regional presence on the island.
• The mediation attempts failed in sequence — the Thimphu talks of 1985, hosted in Bhutan and mediated by India, collapsed over the Tamil demand for recognition of a homeland, nationhood and the right of self-determination.
• Operation Poomalai, June 1987 — the airdrop of supplies over the Jaffna peninsula in violation of Sri Lankan airspace after an earlier naval attempt was turned back — was the point at which India’s involvement became overt coercion.

The Accord, the Peace Keeping Force and the price of leverage

• The Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 29 July 1987 was a bilateral treaty that attempted to settle another country’s internal ethnic conflict, and its terms show exactly what each side wanted.
  • It recognised Sri Lanka as a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious society, and the Northern and Eastern provinces as areas of historical habitation of Tamil-speaking peoples.
  • It provided for devolution to provincial councils with land, police and financial powers, and for Tamil as an official language — devolution inside a unitary state, not a federal structure, which is the distinction on which the whole subsequent dispute turns.
  • India undertook to deploy a peacekeeping force to disarm the militants; the militants were to surrender their weapons; the Sri Lankan army was to return to barracks.
  • The accompanying exchange of letters is the strategic core: Colombo undertook not to allow its ports or territory to be used in a manner prejudicial to India’s security, not to permit foreign military presence, and to review the Trincomalee arrangements; India undertook not to allow its territory to be used by Tamil militants.
• The Thirteenth Amendment of November 1987 and the Provincial Councils Act gave the Accord constitutional form, creating nine provincial councils and a temporarily merged North-Eastern province.
• Neither side accepted it. The Sinhala majority read it as a foreign imposition on sovereignty; the LTTE refused to disarm; the elected Tamil leadership found the devolved powers hollow.
• The Indian Peace Keeping Force ended by fighting the group India had armed. More than 1,100 Indian soldiers were killed, allegations of abuses against Tamil civilians destroyed India’s standing with the population it had intervened for, and it withdrew by March 1990 — President Premadasa having demanded it while himself supplying the LTTE.
• The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 by the LTTE closed the chapter: India banned the organisation in 1992, Tamil Nadu’s sympathy for it evaporated, and Indian policy has since been hands-off on the war and insistent only on the political settlement.
  • Shivshankar Menon’s assessment is the standard one: the intervention was driven by strategic and domestic considerations together, and its failure was not inevitable but was made so by the attempt to be simultaneously mediator, patron and enforcer.

The leverage temptation is self-defeating because insurgent proxies outlive the policy that created them — the clearest proof is that the group India armed in 1983 assassinated India’s former Prime Minister in 1991.

After 2009: an unfinished settlement that is still a bilateral issue

• The war ended militarily in May 2009 with the destruction of the LTTE and the killing of Prabhakaran. Militancy was ended by force; the political question was not settled.
• The Thirteenth Amendment remains India’s declared benchmark and remains incompletely implemented.
  • Police powers have never been devolved; land powers are contested; the Governor, appointed by the President, retains decisive authority over provincial administration.
  • The North-Eastern merger was undone in 2006 when the Supreme Court held it invalid, removing the territorial premise of the 1987 settlement.
  • Provincial council elections have not been held since 2018, which makes the councils an argument about paper rather than an operating tier of government.
• Accountability internationalised the dispute further. Sri Lanka co-sponsored a Human Rights Council resolution in 2015 and withdrew from it in 2020, after which the Council created an external evidence-gathering mechanism over Colombo’s objection.
  • India’s voting record has oscillated — against Sri Lanka in 2012 and 2013 under acute pressure from Tamil Nadu, abstaining subsequently — and the 2013 vote precipitated the DMK’s withdrawal from the ruling coalition in New Delhi, the sharpest illustration in the region of a state party altering a national foreign-policy position.
• The current position under President Dissanayake is genuinely open. His movement won an unprecedented mandate across the island in 2024, including in Jaffna, which is the first time a party without Tamil-nationalist credentials has carried the northern heartland.
  • His government’s emphasis is on anti-corruption, equal citizenship and economic recovery rather than territorial devolution, and it has been non-committal on police powers.
  • The practical test is whether provincial council elections are held, since a settlement that exists only as a constitutional provision has never satisfied anyone.
• The fishermen question keeps the dispute alive in a second register. Arrests in the Palk Bay, bottom-trawling and the status of Kachchatheevu, ceded under the agreements of 1974 and 1976, are the everyday form in which Tamil Nadu experiences the relationship.

The North-East: treating the region through its external dimension

The domestic anatomy of these insurgencies — the autonomous councils, the constitutional special provisions, the peace processes’ internal politics — belongs to the study of Indian federalism. What belongs here is the fact that not one of the North-East’s insurgencies could have lasted as long as it did without territory belonging to a neighbouring state.

Sanctuary as the organising fact

Group	Sanctuary used	How it ended, or did not
Naga National Council, later NSCN factions	East Pakistan from the 1950s, China from the late 1960s, Myanmar’s Sagaing region throughout	Myanmar sanctuary persists; NSCN-K based across the border
Mizo National Front	East Pakistan, then the Chittagong Hill Tracts and Arakan	Liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 removed the rear base; settlement followed in 1986
ULFA, NDFB, KLO	Bhutan’s southern forests; Bangladesh under the 2001–06 government	Operation All Clear, December 2003; Bangladeshi crackdown from 2009
Meitei valley groups	Myanmar’s Sagaing region; earlier Bangladesh	Persist; Myanmar’s civil war has reopened space
Kuki-Zo armed groups	Cross-border kinship with Chin State	Suspension-of-operations arrangements; unresolved

• The pattern the table shows is the argument. Where sanctuary was removed by a neighbour, insurgency declined sharply; where the neighbour could not or would not act, it persisted regardless of what India did on its own side of the line.

Bhutan’s Operation All Clear

• In December 2003 the Royal Bhutan Army cleared roughly thirty camps of ULFA, the NDFB and the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation from its southern forests, with Indian forces sealing the border rather than crossing it.
• It is the region’s model of what a neighbour can do, and its preconditions are exactly why it has not been replicated.
  • A small, cohesive state with no domestic constituency sympathetic to the insurgents.
  • A relationship of exceptional trust with India, in which the operation carried no accusation of subservience.
• Its limit is equally instructive: the camps moved rather than disappeared, relocating to Bangladesh and Myanmar — sanctuary denial in one jurisdiction displaces the problem unless every jurisdiction acts.

Bangladesh after 2009 — the clearest evidence that neighbourly relations matter

• The contrast across a single change of government in Dhaka is as close to a controlled experiment as the region offers.
  • 2001–06: the coalition government in Dhaka provided sanctuary to ULFA and other North-East groups, and Pakistan’s services and jihadist networks operated with tolerance; India’s protests achieved nothing.
  • The Chittagong arms haul of April 2004 — ten truckloads of weapons seized at a state-owned jetty, later established in court to have been destined for insurgents in India’s North-East — is the documentary proof of what sanctuary meant in practice.
  • From 2009: a systematic crackdown, the closure of camps, and the handover of ULFA’s chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa in December 2009 and its general secretary Anup Chetia in November 2015.
  • The Extradition Treaty of 2013, subsequently amended to ease the evidentiary threshold, gave the arrangement legal form; the Land Boundary Agreement of 2015 removed the enclaves that had been the ideal terrain for illicit movement.
• The result was measurable in India’s own territory. With sanctuary gone, ULFA’s fighting capacity collapsed, its pro-talks faction negotiated, and a memorandum of settlement was signed in December 2023 — a settlement that was not available while a rear base existed.
• This is the strongest available evidence that improving relations with neighbours works, and equally the evidence for its limit: the ULFA faction that rejected the settlement operates from Myanmar, because one neighbour’s cooperation does not close every border.
• It is also evidence of fragility. The arrangement depended on a particular government in Dhaka; a security relationship built on one party’s tenure rather than on institutions is renegotiated at every change of government, which is exactly what has followed the political transition in Bangladesh since 2024.

Myanmar, kinship and the Free Movement Regime

• The 1,643-kilometre border with Myanmar runs through the homelands of the communities it divides. The boundary derives from a colonial line of 1826 and was demarcated without reference to Naga, Kuki-Chin-Mizo, Meitei or Kachin settlement.
• The Free Movement Regime recognised that fact. Residents within sixteen kilometres of the border on either side could cross without visa or passport for a limited stay — an arrangement that sustained kinship, marriage, ritual, seasonal cultivation and the everyday trade the border districts actually live on.
• Its scrapping was announced by the Home Minister on 8 February 2024, together with approval for fencing the entire border, on grounds of insurgent movement, arms and narcotics trafficking and demographic pressure in Manipur.
  • The formal notification has still not issued. What operates in practice is a border-pass regime administered by the Assam Rifles, with the permitted distance tightened from sixteen kilometres to about ten and movement recorded.
• The implications for the region’s ethno-political dynamics are substantial, and they cut several ways.
  • Severed kinship networks: Nagas in Myanmar’s Sagaing region and the Chin, Kuki, Zo and Mizo communities across the Chin hills are the same peoples as those in Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram; a permit regime makes attending a funeral an administrative act.
  • Suppressed informal economies: border districts depend on unrecorded cross-border trade in goods, livestock and labour; formalisation without alternative livelihoods is experienced as impoverishment.
  • Federal friction: the Mizoram and Nagaland assemblies formally opposed both the scrapping and the fencing, and Naga civil society treats the boundary itself as illegitimate — so the decision has become a centre-state dispute about a foreign-policy instrument.
  • Interaction with the Manipur conflict: the state government has framed cross-border movement as illegal immigration bearing on the status of Kuki-Zo communities, so the fence has been drawn into a live ethnic dispute as an argument rather than a measure.
  • Refugee reception: Mizoram has continued to shelter tens of thousands of Chin refugees from Myanmar’s civil war on the explicit basis of Zo ethnic kinship, notwithstanding central advisories to identify and deport them — the plainest instance in India of a state government conducting its own refugee policy.
  • The countervailing case is real: an unregulated border during a civil war, with the Arakan Army and other armed organisations controlling large stretches of the far side, carries genuine costs in weapons, narcotics and insurgent transit.
• The deeper point is that fencing addresses movement and not allegiance. A boundary that a population regards as arbitrary is not made legitimate by being made physical, and the measure risks converting a manageable irritant into a nationalist grievance.

The Kuki-Zo and Chin connection as a foreign-policy problem

• The Manipur conflict from May 2023 turned a state-level dispute into a foreign-policy question in a matter of weeks, and the mechanism was transnational kinship.
  • Chin, Mizo, Kuki and Zo communities across India, Myanmar and Bangladesh share descent claims and a long-standing reunification aspiration.
  • Mizoram’s political leadership publicly identified with the Kuki-Zo side and with Chin refugees, while Manipur’s government framed the same populations as illegal entrants.
  • A Kuki-Chin armed movement emerged in Bangladesh’s Bandarban district, drawing on the same kinship space, which means the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the Chin hills and Manipur now form a single connected security theatre with three sovereigns in it.

Pakistan: the state whose own ethnic question defined it

• Pakistan’s ethnic conflicts are the reason the subject is the most sensitive in its politics, because the country has already been divided once on precisely this axis.
• 1971 is the region’s only completed ethnic secession, and it was linguistic before it was anything else.
  • Urdu declared the sole national language in 1948 for a country whose largest single group spoke Bengali; the language movement and the killings of February 1952 created Bangladesh’s founding myth.
  • East Pakistan held the majority of the population and a small minority of the army, the bureaucracy and the development spending; the Six Points of 1966 demanded federal autonomy, not separation.
  • The refusal to seat the winner of the 1970 election and the military crackdown of March 1971 converted an autonomy movement into a war of independence, which India’s intervention decided.
  • Ayesha Jalal’s explanation of the underlying weakness is the standard one: a thin party organisation at independence, set against a disproportionately inherited army and an acute security threat, gave the military-bureaucratic apparatus primacy — leaving no political machinery capable of accommodating ethnic demands.
  • The lesson Pakistan drew was the opposite of the obvious one — greater centralisation and a harder ideological definition of the state — which is why the same grievances recur in the surviving provinces.
• Balochistan is the longest-running insurgency in the region, with armed phases in 1948, 1958–59, 1962–63, 1973–77 and continuously since the mid-2000s.
  • The grievance dates from the accession of the Khanate of Kalat in March 1948, which Baloch nationalists have always described as coerced.
  • The grievance structure is textbook Gurr: the province holds the country’s longest coastline, its largest gas reserves and much of its mineral wealth, and sits last on every human development indicator.
  • Political exclusion compounds it — negligible representation in the officer corps and the senior bureaucracy of a state in which the army is the decisive institution, and Punjab, with more than half the population, supplies the bulk of it.
  • The killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti in 2006 transformed a tribal revolt into a broader nationalist movement with a younger, more educated and more urban cadre.
  • Chinese investment radicalised it further. Gwadar and the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor are read locally as demographic engineering — a fear that in-migration and settlement will make the Baloch a minority in their own province — and Baloch nationalists have attacked Chinese personnel and projects repeatedly.
  • The cross-border dimension is threefold: Baloch populations in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan and southern Afghanistan; a leadership in exile; and Pakistan’s standing allegation of Indian sponsorship, which India denies.
  • As an instrument it would be a poor one: the insurgency is fragmented, carries none of Kashmir’s international salience, and India’s own position on self-determination makes the moral case hard to sustain.
• Pashtun nationalism is the oldest challenge to Pakistan’s territorial idea.
  • The Durand Line of 1893 divided the Pashtun heartland; Afghanistan cast the only vote against Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations in 1947 and has never formally accepted the line.
  • The Pashtunistan demand and Bacha Khan’s movement gave the grievance an organised political form; the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement from 2018 revived it in a rights-based, explicitly non-violent register.
  • The strategic consequence is the whole architecture of Pakistan’s Afghan policy. Fear of an irredentist Pashtun claim is the origin of “strategic depth” and of the insistence on a compliant government in Kabul — which is why an ethnic question inside Pakistan has structured a thirty-year regional war.
  • The irony is complete: the Taliban government Pakistan cultivated also refuses to accept the Durand Line, and the fencing of it has produced armed clashes between the two states. Ethnic nationalism outlives patronage.
• Sindh carries two ethnic questions at once, which is why Karachi has been the region’s most violent city.
  • Sindhi nationalism arose against the One Unit scheme of 1955–70 that dissolved the provinces, and found expression in G.M. Syed’s Sindhudesh demand; the language riots of 1972 over Sindhi’s official status were among the deadliest of the period.
  • Mohajir politics is the mirror image — a migrant community from India, initially dominant in the bureaucracy, which experienced the quota system and Sindhi assertion as displacement, and which organised from 1984 into a party of urban Sindh with its own armed wing.
  • Horowitz’s typology explains the difference: the Mohajirs, an advanced group in an advanced region, demanded status and quota, never a state; the Sindhis, whose province’s wealth sat in cities they did not control, produced a secessionist idiom they could never operationalise.
• Gilgit-Baltistan is the constitutional void in the middle of the dispute.
  • Administered by Pakistan since 1947, it is not a province, has no representation in the National Assembly, and has no settled constitutional status — governed instead by successive executive orders granting a self-governance framework short of provincehood.
  • The reason is the Kashmir dispute itself: formal integration would concede that the state’s accession question is closed, which Pakistan’s own position forbids.
  • Its largely Shia population has faced sectarian violence and, on the local account, demographic change through settlement — an ethnic and sectarian grievance sitting on the transit route of the economic corridor to Gwadar.
  • India’s position is that any alteration of its status is illegal, so the constitutional limbo of a mountain population is simultaneously a bilateral territorial dispute.

Afghanistan: ethnicity as the structure of the state itself

• Afghanistan is the region’s clearest case of ethnicity as the organising principle of politics rather than one cleavage among several.
  • The principal communities are Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek, with Turkmen, Aimaq, Baloch and Nuristani populations besides; no census has been conducted since 1979, so every proportion is contested — and the contest over the numbers is itself political.
• State power has been Pashtun by default for two and a half centuries, and every non-Pashtun assertion has been read in Kabul as a challenge to the state rather than a claim within it.
• The Northern Alliance was an ethnic coalition before it was anything else — Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara forces resisting a Taliban movement whose base was and is overwhelmingly Pashtun.
  • India, Russia and Iran supported it, India operating through facilities in Tajikistan; the alignment demonstrates the general rule that outside powers pick ethnic partners, and thereby harden ethnic boundaries.
• The Hazaras are the region’s most persecuted community, Shia in a Sunni polity and historically the lowest-ranked group in a system that otherwise fits Horowitz’s unranked model, and they have remained targets under successive regimes.
• Afghanistan’s ethnic map is an input to three neighbours’ policies at once — Pakistan’s through the Pashtun question, Iran’s through the Hazaras and the Persian-speaking north, India’s through its relationships in the non-Pashtun north — which is what an insulator state means in practice.

Bangladesh: the Chittagong Hill Tracts

• The Chittagong Hill Tracts were awarded to Pakistan in 1947 despite an overwhelmingly non-Muslim, non-Bengali population, and the grievance begins there.
• The Kaptai dam of the early 1960s displaced roughly a hundred thousand people, of whom tens of thousands of Chakmas crossed into India — the origin of the Chakma-Hajong question in Arunachal Pradesh, on which the Supreme Court eventually directed the processing of citizenship claims.
• Independence in 1971 did not help, because the new state defined itself in Bengali ethno-linguistic terms; the demand for constitutional autonomy was refused, and the Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti and its armed wing took the field from the mid-1970s.
• A state-sponsored settlement programme from around 1979 transformed the demography, moving large numbers of plains Bengalis into the hills and reducing the indigenous share from a large majority at independence to roughly half — demographic engineering as counter-insurgency, and the same instrument alleged in Balochistan.
• The cross-border consequence was a refugee movement into Tripura, where tens of thousands of Jumma refugees lived in camps into the 1990s — putting the conflict on the India–Bangladesh agenda and giving the insurgents a sanctuary in exactly the way Indian insurgents used Bangladesh.
• The Peace Accord of 2 December 1997 settled the war on paper: a Regional Council, three Hill District Councils, a Ministry of Chittagong Hill Tracts Affairs, a Land Commission, refugee repatriation and rehabilitation of combatants.
  • Implementation has been partial for nearly three decades: the land commission has not resolved the settlement question, the withdrawal of security camps is incomplete, and the Regional Council’s powers remain contested.
• The area has re-entered the regional security map through an armed Kuki-Chin movement in Bandarban whose constituency crosses into Mizoram and the Chin hills, tying the Hill Tracts to Manipur and Myanmar in a single kinship theatre.

Nepal: the Madhesi question and the five-month blockade

• The Madhesis of the Terai are the region’s clearest case of an ethnic grievance converting directly into a bilateral crisis.
  • They constitute roughly a fifth of Nepal’s population; the Terai holds about half of it; and their linguistic, cultural and matrimonial links across the open border with Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are dense and continuous.
  • The grievance is old: under the 1990 constitution Nepal was a Hindu kingdom with Nepali as its sole official language, and hill-origin elites dominated the army, bureaucracy and politics; Madhesis were widely treated as culturally Indian and therefore suspect.
• The 2015 constitution triggered the crisis on three specific points, each of which is a design decision rather than an accident.
  • Federal boundaries: the seven provinces were drawn to cut the Terai vertically, dividing Madhesi-majority districts among provinces with hill majorities and denying them a province in which they would be a majority.
  • Citizenship: naturalisation provisions bearing on children of foreign-born mothers fell disproportionately on a population that marries across the border.
  • Representation: constituency delimitation weighted by geography as well as population diluted the Terai’s plains majority.
• India’s response is the pivot of the whole episode. New Delhi “noted” rather than welcomed the constitution and pressed for amendment; a blockade of the border crossings, principally at Birgunj, ran roughly five months from late September 2015 into February 2016, immediately after a devastating earthquake.
  • The agitation was Madhesi and the obstruction was on Nepali soil, but the shortage was universal and the blame was Indian. Nepal read it as coercion by a neighbour over its sovereign constitutional choices.
  • The strategic consequence was permanent: Nepal signed a transit and transport agreement with China in 2016, ending India’s monopoly on its access to the sea in principle if not yet fully in practice, and “India blockaded us” entered Nepali politics as a durable line available to any party.
  • Constitutional amendments in 2016 addressed representation and citizenship in part; the provincial boundary question was never resolved, which is why the grievance is dormant rather than settled.
• The Madhesi case is not the only one. Janajati communities across dozens of recognised groups pressed for identity-based federal units, and Tharu mobilisation in the western Terai produced the lethal confrontation at Tikapur.
  • The common thread is that federalism’s map was itself the object of the conflict — what happens when a state federalises after ethnic mobilisation rather than before it.

Kashmir, treated as an ethnic-national question

• Kashmir belongs here only for its structure, not its history, which is the property of the India–Pakistan relationship.
  • Its ethno-national content is Kashmiriyat — a regional identity distinct from both Indian and Pakistani nationalisms — layered over a religious majority inside a territorial dispute between two states.
  • The internal ethnic map is itself plural: the Kashmiri-speaking Muslim valley, Dogra-majority Jammu and Buddhist and Shia Ladakh have opposed claims, which is why any single settlement formula fails at least one of them.
  • The displacement of the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990 is the region’s least-addressed ethnic cleansing, and its unresolved status obstructs any settlement narrative.
• The cross-border mechanism appears here in its most weaponised form: a co-ethnic constituency across the line, an external state treating it as a strategic asset, sanctuary and training infrastructure, and a self-determination claim met by territorial integrity on both sides.
• The regional cost is that it disables the institutions. The dispute is why the region’s premier organisation has not met at summit level since 2014, and it is what makes every other impediment harder to solve.

How ethnic conflict actually damages regional cooperation

The damage is not general ill-will. It runs through five identifiable mechanisms, each of which can be described precisely and each of which has its own remedy.

Sanctuary and safe havens

• Insurgencies that would otherwise be police problems become durable wars when the base area lies under a different sovereign, because the state losing men cannot reach the men killing them.
• The demand it generates is for extraterritorial action — Indian operations across the Myanmar border, Bhutan’s clearance of its own territory, Pakistan’s operations toward Afghanistan — each of which is a sovereignty incident as well as a security one.

The leverage temptation

• A state that can host, arm or merely tolerate a neighbour’s insurgents holds a cheap and deniable instrument, and every state in the region has reached for it.
  • Pakistan in Kashmir and Punjab; India with the Tamil militants and, on Islamabad’s allegation, in Balochistan; Bangladesh under one government with the North-East groups; China historically with the Naga and Mizo movements and with armed organisations on Myanmar’s frontier; Afghanistan with the Pashtun claim.
• It is almost always self-defeating, and the reasons are structural rather than moral.
  • Proxies acquire their own objectives and outlive the policy — the LTTE’s assassination of Rajiv Gandhi being the definitive instance.
  • It contaminates the host’s own politics with armed networks that do not disband on instruction, which is the experience of Pakistan’s western frontier.
  • It forecloses cooperation on everything else, because a state that suspects sponsorship will not sign transit, water or trade agreements that increase its exposure.

Refugee flows becoming bilateral disputes

• Ethnic violence produces population movement, and population movement lands on a neighbour that had no voice in the policy causing it.
  • Sri Lankan Tamils into Tamil Nadu; Jummas into Tripura; Chakmas into Arunachal Pradesh; Chin and other communities into Mizoram and Manipur; Rohingya into Bangladesh in overwhelming numbers and thence onward.
• Absence of a legal framework makes each episode ad hoc. India is not party to the Refugee Convention and has no asylum statute, so every group’s treatment is a discretionary political decision — which invites the charge of selectivity.

Diaspora and co-ethnic politics constraining foreign policy

• Where a state’s own citizens are co-ethnics of a neighbour’s minority, foreign policy is made under a domestic veto.
  • Tamil Nadu on Sri Lanka is the strongest case: assembly resolutions, the Kachchatheevu demand, and a coalition partner’s exit from the union government over a vote at the Human Rights Council.
  • Mizoram on Myanmar: a state government sheltering refugees on kinship grounds against central advisories, and opposing a border policy decided in New Delhi.
  • Nagaland on the Free Movement Regime, where the state’s own institutions dispute the legitimacy of the international boundary.
  • West Bengal on Bangladesh, where a state’s veto blocked the Teesta agreement in 2011 and delayed the land boundary settlement — a constraint whose political form has changed with the state’s change of government in 2026, while the underlying hydrological objection about north Bengal’s dry-season command area has not.
• Constitutionally this is a federal problem with no clean answer. Foreign affairs and treaty-making are union subjects, but implementation runs through the states, and no Indian government can execute a neighbourhood policy that a border state’s electorate rejects.
• Rajat Ganguly’s work on kin-state intervention supplies the general rule: states intervene in a neighbour’s ethnic conflict primarily because of pressure from their own co-ethnic constituency, and such interventions rarely resolve the conflict — they usually internationalise and prolong it.

Securitised borders and the economies they suppress

• The standard response to a cross-border ethnic insurgency is to harden the border, and hardening imposes its costs on exactly the populations already aggrieved.
  • India–Bangladesh: of the 4,096.7-kilometre boundary, about 3,232 kilometres are fenced on the government’s own figures, with roughly 864 kilometres unfenced and about 175 kilometres treated as non-feasible.
  • India–Myanmar: fencing of the full 1,643 kilometres has been approved, and the permit regime has replaced free movement.
  • India–Pakistan: fenced, floodlit and mined along most of its length.
• The suppressed activity is not primarily criminal. Border districts run on unrecorded trade, seasonal labour, livestock movement and shared markets, none of which survives a permit regime intact.
• The unintended political effect is to validate the insurgent’s claim. A community told that its kin across the line are foreigners, and that its ordinary movement is now a security matter, is being taught the very proposition the state wishes it would abandon.
• The alternative instruments are under-used — border haats, regulated local trade, documented but generous movement regimes — and their record where tried is good.

Institutional paralysis

• Regional institutions are formally barred from the subject. The region’s principal organisation excludes bilateral and contentious issues from its deliberations by charter, which removes precisely the disputes that matter from the only forum designed to address them.
• A regional convention on terrorism exists and has existed since the 1980s, with a later protocol on financing, and it has produced almost nothing operational because implementation requires the mutual trust the disputes have destroyed.

What has actually worked

Mizoram, 1986 — South Asia’s most successful insurgency termination

• The Mizoram Accord of 30 June 1986 ended a twenty-year insurgency, and it has held for four decades — the region’s only unambiguous success, and worth analysing as a model rather than merely citing.
  • The Mizo National Front abandoned the demand for independence, surrendered arms, and was permitted to contest elections; Laldenga became Chief Minister; Mizoram became a state in February 1987.
• Why it worked, in terms the rest of the region can use.
  • A single organisation with a single recognised leader who could deliver the movement — the condition absent in every factionalised conflict since.
  • A coherent territorial claim matching an existing administrative unit, so statehood was an available answer.
  • Statehood conceded rather than autonomy offered — the demand was met at its own level, not one below it.
  • A genuine amnesty and political rehabilitation, with the insurgent leadership taking office rather than being prosecuted.
  • And the cross-border condition, which is usually omitted: the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 removed the movement’s rear base in East Pakistan and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The settlement became possible when sanctuary ended.

India–Bangladesh security cooperation since 2009

• Camp closures, the handover of insurgent leadership, an extradition treaty, coordinated border management and the removal of the enclaves together produced the sharpest decline in insurgent capability the North-East has seen.
• The limits are as instructive as the achievement. The cooperation was bilateral, executive-led and personalised, without institutional guarantees; it did not extend to the Myanmar frontier; and it addressed capability without addressing any of the underlying grievances about land, identity and demographic change.

The necessary-but-not-sufficient argument

Insurgency	Sanctuary denied?	Political settlement?	Outcome
Mizo National Front	Yes — from 1971	Yes — statehood, 1986	Ended; durable
ULFA (pro-talks)	Yes — Bhutan 2003, Bangladesh from 2009	Yes — settlement, 2023	Substantially ended
ULFA-Independent	No — operates from Myanmar	No	Continues
NSCN factions	Partly — Myanmar sanctuary intact	Incomplete since the 2015 framework	Ceasefire without settlement
Kuki-Zo and Meitei groups	No — kinship space across three states	No	Active
Sri Lankan Tamil militancy	Yes — after 1991	No — devolution unimplemented	Militancy ended, grievance alive

• The table states the argument. Improving relations with neighbours denies capability; it does not touch grievance. Where sanctuary was denied and a settlement followed, insurgencies ended and stayed ended; where sanctuary was denied and no settlement followed, as in Sri Lanka, the war ended and the conflict did not.

Sanctuary denial addresses an insurgency’s capability and not its grievance, which is why better relations with neighbours are a necessary but never a sufficient condition.

Institutional designs for divided societies, and what the region has tried

Design	Core idea	Principal advocate	South Asian record
Consociationalism	Grand coalition, minority veto, proportionality, segmental autonomy	Arend Lijphart	Little used; the closest approximations are Afghanistan’s post-2001 power-sharing and Nepal’s inclusion quotas
Centripetalism	Electoral incentives for cross-ethnic vote-pooling; penalise ethnic outbidding	Donald Horowitz	India’s all-India parties achieve it by accident of scale rather than design
Territorial autonomy and federalism	Match a unit to the group; devolve substantively	Widely argued; Gurr’s evidence supports it	India’s linguistic reorganisation is the region’s success; Nepal’s federal map is its failure
Assimilation	One language, one nation, one civic identity	Post-colonial nation-builders generally	Uniformly counter-productive — Sinhala Only, Urdu-only, Bengali-only
Multicultural citizenship	Group-differentiated rights inside a liberal state	Will Kymlicka	Partially instantiated in India’s minority and tribal protections

• Sanjib Baruah’s critique is the corrective to any complacency about the Indian model: the North-East has been governed by a “durable disorder” in which permanent counter-insurgency, a militarised administration and a dense architecture of ethnic-territorial autonomy coexist without producing normal politics.
  • His sharper charge is that ethnicity-based territorial autonomy has been over-supplied, so that each new council creates a new minority inside a new majority’s homeland and generates the next demand — a regime that manages conflict by multiplying its units.
  • The counter-argument is the comparative one: India’s approach has produced ceasefires, settlements and a functioning electoral politics where its neighbours produced wars, and the outcome to be explained is why India’s ethnic conflicts have not become secessions.
• The comparative record outside the region supports accommodation over suppression. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 traded autonomy and power-sharing for the abandonment of violence; Canada’s handling of Quebec and the United Kingdom’s of Scottish and Welsh identity demands show that recognition defuses claims that repression hardens.
• Ashutosh Varshney’s finding on the civic side complements this: inter-communal associational life — not merely everyday contact — is what predicts whether an incident becomes a riot, which points to a class of remedy that has nothing to do with borders or force.

The record of counter-insurgency where the cross-border question was addressed

• The two theatres that dominate any assessment of India’s counter-terrorism performance are Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East, and their trajectories diverged precisely on the cross-border variable.
• Insurgency and terrorism are distinct though overlapping, and conflating them is what produces bad policy. An insurgency contests control of territory and population and therefore needs a base; terrorism is a technique of coercion through violence against civilians and needs only a target.
  • Ethnic insurgencies in the region have used terrorist methods, but measures effective against one are frequently useless against the other — sanctuary denial cripples an insurgency and barely inconveniences a small terrorist cell.
• The causes are shared in structure and different in content.
  • North-East: contested integration into the Indian union, sons-of-the-soil anxieties about migration and land, the compressed geography of a strategic corridor, chronic under-development and remoteness, and sanctuary in three neighbouring states.
  • Jammu and Kashmir: an unresolved accession dispute, a rival state’s declared strategic interest, a decade of political mismanagement culminating in the disputed election of 1987, and a fully-developed cross-border infrastructure of training and infiltration.
• The state’s instruments have been broadly similar in both: security legislation and force deployment; ceasefires and suspension-of-operations agreements; surrender and rehabilitation schemes; development and connectivity packages; restoration of elected government; and, decisively, diplomacy aimed at closing sanctuaries.
• The North-East is the case where the instruments worked, and sanctuary denial is the variable that distinguishes it.
  • Violence, civilian deaths and security-force casualties have fallen very sharply from their peaks; special security legislation has been withdrawn entirely from Tripura and Meghalaya and progressively reduced in Assam, Nagaland and Manipur; and successive accords have brought major organisations into electoral politics.
  • The exception proves the rule: the groups that remain armed are those with a base outside India’s reach, and the one theatre that deteriorated rather than improved — Manipur from 2023 — did so on a cleavage running across an international boundary.
• Jammu and Kashmir is the case where the instruments have contained without resolving, because the sanctuary is held by a state that will not close it and cannot be compelled to.
  • Local recruitment and organised militancy have declined substantially, but the capacity for high-casualty attacks persists, as the Pahalgam attack of April 2025 and India’s military response demonstrated.
• The honest assessment of effectiveness has three parts.
  • Partially effective at political settlement: successful in Mizoram and Assam, incomplete in Nagaland, absent in Manipur and Kashmir.
  • Persistently costly in legitimacy: prolonged special powers, allegations of excess and long periods without accountable local government generate the grievances that sustain recruitment, which is the standing criticism of the security-first approach and the reason accommodation has been the more durable instrument wherever it was actually tried.

Conclusion

Ethnic conflict impedes regional cooperation in South Asia because the region’s ethnic map and its political map were drawn by different hands for different purposes and have never been reconciled. Every serious ethnic question here has kin across a frontier, and that single structural fact supplies the sanctuary, the sympathy, the refugees and the temptation that convert domestic failures of accommodation into bilateral disputes.

• The remedy therefore has two halves that must move together. Neighbours must deny sanctuary, and states must concede accommodation; the record shows that either alone produces a stalemate and both together produce a settlement.
• The region’s own experience contains the answer it keeps declining to use. Linguistic reorganisation, asymmetric autonomy, amnesty and the return of insurgents to electoral politics have worked where they were genuinely tried; assimilation and majoritarian constitutions have failed everywhere they were tried.
• The bleakest finding is about institutions. The one forum designed for regional problems is barred by its own charter from discussing the disputes that matter most, which means the mechanism converting ethnic grievance into regional paralysis has no regional address at all.