Ethnic Conflicts and Insurgency in North-East India

India’s North-East is the one part of the country where the state’s authority has had to be argued for rather than assumed. Eight states and more than two hundred ethnic groups sit at the end of a land corridor barely twenty kilometres wide, on territory colonial administration deliberately held apart from British India. Every instrument the Indian state possesses — statehood, councils, constitutional exceptions, accords, emergency powers — has been tried here, which makes the region the best test of what the constitutional order can absorb.

Why the North-East is a distinct political problem

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• Eight states — Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura — cover 2,62,179 sq km, just under 8% of India’s area, and hold about 4.58 crore people, under 4% of the population.
  • Assam alone holds more than three crore of that total; the seven other states share roughly a quarter of the region’s people across two-thirds of its land.
• The region’s boundary is overwhelmingly international. It carries 5,484 km of international border — with Bangladesh (1,880 km), Myanmar (1,643 km), China (1,346 km), Bhutan (516 km) and Nepal (99 km) — while its link to the rest of India is a single narrow neck of West Bengal.
  • The standard formulation, that 98-99% of the region’s boundary is international, is not rhetorical: this is in geographical terms an enclave attached to India by a thread.
• The Siliguri corridor — the “chicken’s neck” — runs roughly 170 km by 60 km, narrowing to about 20-22 km at its tightest point between Nepal and Bangladesh.
  • Every road, rail line, pipeline and power connection to the rest of India passes through it — at once a development bottleneck and a standing strategic anxiety.
• The populations are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian mainland. Most hill communities are of Tibeto-Burman and Mongoloid stock, historically closer to South-East Asia than to South Asia, with over 200 ethnic groups and a comparable number of languages and dialects.
  • Cultural difference is not by itself a cause of conflict. What matters is that it was politically organised — first by colonial exclusion, then by state boundaries drawn without reference to it.

The colonial inheritance: administered as a frontier, not a province

• The Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873 drew an “Inner Line” beyond which British subjects and outsiders could not pass without a permit, sealing the hills off from the plains economy.
  • Its purpose was to protect the tea, oil and timber interests of the plains; its effect was to keep the hill communities outside the administrative and revenue system.
• The Government of India Act 1935 formalised this by classifying most of the hill tracts as Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas, where provincial legislation did not apply automatically and the Governor administered at discretion.
  • The consequence is decisive: large parts of the hills never experienced central administration before 1947. The colonial state took nearly a century to annex the region and governed it as a loose frontier throughout.
• Allegiance to the new Indian nation-state was thin from the beginning. Communities that had never been administered by Delhi or Calcutta were asked, at independence, to accept an authority whose legitimacy had no local history.
• Partition severed the region physically. The creation of East Pakistan in 1947 cut the road, rail and river routes that had connected Assam and Tripura to Calcutta through the Bengal delta, leaving only the Siliguri corridor.
  • Tripura, oriented commercially towards Chittagong and Comilla, became a cul-de-sac overnight.

The North-East was administered as a frontier long before it was governed as a territory, and that difference has never entirely closed.

• The Inner Line survives as the Inner Line Permit, still required of Indian citizens from other states entering Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur — Manipur having been added in December 2019, on the eve of the citizenship amendment.
  • Meghalaya has pressed for its extension for several years, most recently in the state assembly, and the demand is a live item in the state’s politics.
  • The permit is an anti-migration instrument dressed as a travel document, and its survival eighty years after independence shows how central the indigeneity question remains.

The organising frame: three overlapping problems

Treating the North-East as one problem is the commonest analytical error. Its conflicts fall into three families with different causes, different constituencies and demonstrably different solutions; states appear under more than one of them, and Manipur under all three at once.

• AFSPA cuts across all three. It is the standing security instrument in each family of conflict, and the debate over it is therefore common to the whole region rather than specific to any one state.
• The development question also cuts across all three. Every settlement since the 1980s has carried a financial package, on the assumption that grievance is at bottom about deprivation — an assumption the region’s own record repeatedly complicates.

The constitutional architecture of accommodation

Reorganising Assam

• Assam was the parent state. At independence it contained what are now Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, alongside the princely states of Manipur and Tripura, which acceded separately.
• The North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, 1971 carried out the decisive restructuring, converting Meghalaya from a sub-state into a full state and upgrading Manipur and Tripura, all with effect from 21 January 1972.

• Statehood was used as a conflict-resolution device, not merely an administrative one. Nagaland and Mizoram were both created out of negotiated settlements with armed movements, which distinguishes them from the development-grievance states created elsewhere in India.
• The pattern also created the next problem. Each new state contained minorities of its own, and the communities left inside larger units — Bodos in Assam, Kukis and Nagas in Manipur, tribal Tripuris in Tripura — read the precedent as an argument for their own territory.

The Sixth Schedule

• The Sixth Schedule, under Articles 244(2) and 275(1), provides autonomous district and regional councils in the tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram — a distinct arrangement from the Fifth Schedule that governs tribal areas elsewhere in India.
• Ten autonomous councils now operate, and several more communities are demanding them.

• The powers are genuinely legislative, not merely advisory. Councils may make laws on land, management of forests other than reserved forests, shifting cultivation, inheritance of property, marriage, divorce and social custom, may levy specified taxes, and may license mineral extraction.
  • They run their own village and district courts for disputes between scheduled tribes, and may establish schools, dispensaries, roads and markets.
  • A council has up to thirty members, four nominated by the Governor and the rest elected on adult franchise.
• Paragraph 12A is the standing structural criticism. Where a council law conflicts with a state legislature’s law on the same subject, the state law prevails — which means autonomy exists at the state’s sufferance.
• A second criticism is that the councils multiplied power centres rather than devolving power. Creating a council in a district with several tribes converts the council election into a contest between them, so the arrangement generates inter-tribal competition it was meant to contain.
• A third is that the councils have become a career ladder. The charge, made bluntly in the research literature, is that a council is “a mere platform for aspiring politicians who nurture ambitions to contest assembly polls in the future” rather than an institution of self-government.
• Chronic underfunding compounds all of this. Councils depend on state transfers for almost everything beyond their small tax base, and audit findings on misuse of funds are recurrent.

Article 371A and the asymmetric provisions

• Article 371A for Nagaland is the strongest asymmetric provision in the Constitution.
  • No Act of Parliament applies on Naga religious or social practices, customary law and procedure, civil and criminal justice under that law, or ownership and transfer of land, unless the Nagaland assembly so resolves.
  • This is not a delegated power the Union may withdraw, but a standing carve-out from Parliament’s own legislative competence, conditional on a state assembly’s consent.
  • It also placed law and order under the Governor’s special responsibility during the period of internal disturbance, and gave the Governor charge of funds for the Tuensang district in the state’s first decade.

• Asymmetry is the region’s normal condition, not an exception to it. The Indian federation carries different terms for different North-Eastern states because uniform terms were never politically available.
• The limits of asymmetry are equally clear. Article 371C gives Manipur’s hill districts a committee of the assembly, not a share of executive power, and the inadequacy of that arrangement is central to the Kuki-Zo case for separate administration today.

Regional institutions

• The North Eastern Council, established by the North Eastern Council Act, 1971 and reconstituted by the amendment of 2002, is the region’s apex planning body.
  • The 2002 amendment added Sikkim as the eighth member and made the Council a regional planning agency, with the Union Home Minister as chairman and the DoNER Minister as vice-chairman, alongside the Governors and Chief Ministers.
• The Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region was created in 2001, the only Union ministry defined by a region rather than a subject — recognition of the region’s distinctness and, to critics, of its treatment as a special case rather than an ordinary part of the federation.

Indigeneity and migration

Assam: the demographic question that structures everything else

• Assam’s migration history is colonial in origin. Tea plantations from the 1830s imported labour from central India; the Bengal Presidency’s revenue administration brought Bengali clerks and professionals; and from the late nineteenth century colonial policy actively settled Bengali Muslim peasants from Mymensingh on Brahmaputra char lands to raise cultivation.
  • The 2011 census recorded roughly 15 million Assamese speakers and 9 million Bengali speakers, with Bodos the largest tribal community.
  • Migration did not stop at independence, and rose again around the 1971 war and after.
• The Assam Movement of 1979-85, led by the All Assam Students’ Union and the Asom Gana Sangram Parishad, demanded detection, deletion from electoral rolls and deportation of illegal migrants, and constitutional safeguards for the Assamese people.
  • Its trigger was electoral: doubtful names discovered in large numbers on the Mangaldoi rolls in 1979.
  • Myron Weiner analysed exactly this politics as a “sons of the soil” movement — competition between an indigenous middle class and a migrant one for state employment, land and political office, rather than a simple cultural quarrel.
• The Nellie massacre of 18 February 1983 killed over two thousand people, mostly Bengali-origin Muslims, during the boycotted election of that year, and remains the single worst episode of the movement.
  • No one was convicted, the Tewary Commission’s report was never published, and that absence of accountability has fed the grievance since.
• The Assam Accord of 15 August 1985 ended the movement.
  • Clause 5 set 24 March 1971 as the cut-off: those who entered before 1 January 1966 were regularised; entrants between 1966 and 24 March 1971 were struck off the rolls for ten years and then restored; those entering on or after 25 March 1971 were to be detected and expelled.
  • Clause 6 promised constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to protect the cultural, social and linguistic identity of the Assamese people — and remained unimplemented for over three decades.
  • Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955 was inserted to give the Accord’s cut-off statutory force.
• The Justice Biplab Sarma Committee, constituted in 2019, reported in 2020 on how Clause 6 should be implemented.
  • It proposed defining “Assamese people” to include indigenous tribals and other native communities plus Indian citizens resident in Assam on or before 1 January 1951 and their descendants — a 1951 cut-off for safeguards distinct from the 1971 cut-off for citizenship.
  • It recommended large reservations for that category in the legislature, local bodies and government employment, land safeguards and language protection.
  • Assam decided in 2024-25 to implement a majority of the committee’s recommendations — those within the state’s own competence — deferring the remainder, which require constitutional amendment or Union action, including reservation of assembly seats and an Inner Line Permit for Assam.
• The IMDT Act and its striking down. The Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983 applied only to Assam and placed the burden of proving that a person was a foreigner on the complainant and the state, unlike the Foreigners Act 1946, which places it on the person.
  • In Sarbananda Sonowal v. Union of India (2005) the Supreme Court struck the Act down, holding that large-scale illegal migration amounted to “external aggression” within Article 355 and that the IMDT’s procedure had made detection practically impossible.
• ULFA emerged directly from the movement. The United Liberation Front of Asom, founded in 1979, took the movement’s grievance to its secessionist conclusion — a sovereign Assam — and was banned in 1990, when Operation Bajrang began.
  • The organisation split in 2011: the pro-talks faction under Arabinda Rajkhowa entered negotiations, while Paresh Baruah’s ULFA-Independent continued from across the border.
  • The tripartite Memorandum of Settlement of 29 December 2023 with the pro-talks faction committed the government to safeguards for indigenous identity, land rights and a development package, and the faction to disband. ULFA-Independent has not joined, and remains the only significant armed outfit left in Assam.

The NRC and citizenship

• The National Register of Citizens for Assam was updated under Supreme Court supervision from 2013, using the 24 March 1971 cut-off and requiring applicants to establish either their own presence before that date or descent from someone who was.
• The final list of 31 August 2019 excluded 19,06,657 people out of about 3.3 crore applicants — a result that satisfied nobody.
  • Assamese nationalist organisations argued the number was far too low; groups working with the excluded argued the process had wrongly caught genuine citizens, particularly women without documentary lineage and people whose names varied across records.
  • The state government itself sought re-verification of a proportion of the entries.
• The register remains in limbo. The Registrar General has not notified it, rejection slips setting out the grounds of exclusion were never issued at scale, and the excluded therefore have neither citizenship confirmed nor an appeal they can actually mount.
  • This is the central unresolved fact of Assam’s politics: an exercise conducted at enormous cost that has produced no legal consequence for anybody.
• The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 fast-tracked citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who entered India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan on or before 31 December 2014.
  • Assam opposed it on grounds precisely opposite to the objection raised elsewhere in India.
    • Elsewhere the complaint was religious discrimination against Muslims; in Assam it was that the Act would regularise Bengali Hindu migrants the Accord had marked for deletion, shifting the effective cut-off from 1971 to 2014.
  • The Act’s own carve-outs concede the force of the regional objection: it does not apply in the Sixth Schedule tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram, or in the Inner Line Permit states.
• In Re: Section 6A of the Citizenship Act (17 October 2024) upheld the provision 4:1, a five-judge bench of Chief Justice Chandrachud and Justices Surya Kant, M.M. Sundresh, J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra.
  • The majority held that Assam’s situation was distinct in magnitude, that the 25 March 1971 date bore a rational nexus to the influx following Pakistan’s military crackdown, and that Section 6A was a legislative solution consistent with the partition-era philosophy of Articles 6 and 7.
  • It rejected the Article 29(1) argument that demographic change by itself violates the right of a section of citizens to conserve its culture, and rejected the claim that migration constituted “external aggression” requiring the Union to act under Article 355 against a statute Parliament had itself enacted.
  • Justice Surya Kant added that the provision’s failure lay in implementation rather than in the law, and directed that detection and deportation machinery operate under continuing judicial supervision.
  • Justice Pardiwala dissented, holding Section 6A prospectively unconstitutional on a reasoning of “temporal unreasonableness”: a provision valid when enacted becomes arbitrary once it operates indefinitely without an end date and without any incentive on migrants to come forward.
• The Foreigners Tribunals are the machinery through which the question is actually decided — quasi-judicial bodies in Assam that determine nationality on references from the border police.
  • Criticism centres on short-term contractual appointments, inconsistent standards of proof, ex parte orders against people never served notice, and the burden of proof lying on the individual under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act.
  • Those declared foreign are held in detention centres, now formally designated transit camps; the Supreme Court has repeatedly intervened over conditions and the length of detention.

Bodoland: autonomy inside Assam

• The Bodos are Assam’s largest plains tribal community, and their movement inverted the Assam Movement’s logic: the Assamese-speaking majority that saw itself as indigenous against Bengali migrants was, to the Bodos, itself the assimilating power.
  • Language was the trigger — Assamese imposed as the medium of instruction and administration — which is why the Bodo case is read as ethno-nationalism intertwined with institutional and social exclusion based on language.
• The All Bodo Students’ Union under Upendra Nath Brahma launched the agitation for a separate state in 1987 under the slogan of dividing Assam fifty-fifty. Brahma’s death in 1990 removed the movement’s most restraining figure.
• Three accords mark the trajectory, each conceding more than the last.

• The 2020 settlement traded the demand for a state against enhanced autonomy, a Bodo-Kachari welfare council for Bodos outside the territory, and a substantial development package.
  • The 2025 Bodoland Territorial Council election produced a change of administration, displacing the incumbent alliance — evidence that the council has become the arena of ordinary competitive politics rather than of insurgency.
• The unresolved element is the non-Bodo population. Bodos are a minority within the Bodoland Territorial Region, and the ethnic violence of 1993, 2008, 2012 and 2014 against Adivasi and Bengali-origin Muslim residents came out of precisely that arithmetic — an autonomous territory named for a community that does not constitute its majority.

Tripura: when the indigenous population becomes the minority

• Tripura underwent the most complete demographic transformation of any Indian state. Partition and the 1971 war drove successive waves of Bengali migration from East Bengal into a princely state whose tribal communities had been the overwhelming majority.
  • The indigenous share fell from roughly half the population at independence to under a third by the 1980s, and the tribal population became a minority in its own homeland without a single boundary being redrawn.
• The insurgency followed the demography. The Tripura National Volunteers waged an armed campaign through the 1980s and signed an accord in 1988; the All Tripura Tiger Force and the National Liberation Front of Tripura succeeded it through the 1990s and 2000s, with the NLFT adding a religious dimension through forced conversion.
• The Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council, established under the Sixth Schedule in 1985, covers about two-thirds of the state’s area but only about a third of its people, and has always been the institutional core of the tribal claim.
• Tipra Motha, led by Pradyot Kishore Manikya Debbarma, transformed the demand into electoral politics, winning control of the council in 2021 and becoming the principal opposition in the 2023 assembly election on the demand for “Greater Tipraland” — a separate state or constitutionally protected territory for the indigenous Tiprasa.
• A tripartite agreement — the Tiprasa Accord — was signed on 2 March 2024 between the Union government, the Tripura government and Tipra Motha, committing all sides to resolve questions of history, land, political rights, economic development, identity, culture and language through a joint working group, with the party agreeing to end agitation.
  • Implementation has been the sticking point since. Tipra Motha has repeatedly warned that its alliance with the state government depends on the accord being carried out, and Debbarma has continued to press the Greater Tipraland demand publicly while negotiating within the framework.
  • Talks acquired fresh momentum after the party’s showing in the council elections, with a new interlocutor appointed, but the substantive questions of land rights and constitutional protection remain open.

Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya

• The Chakma-Hajong question in Arunachal Pradesh arises from a settlement India itself carried out. Buddhist Chakmas and Hindu Hajongs, displaced from the Chittagong Hill Tracts by the Kaptai dam and by religious persecution, were settled by the Government of India in the North-East Frontier Agency between 1964 and 1969.
  • Their descendants, born in India, were denied citizenship, ration cards and land rights by a state whose own politics rests on protecting a tribal majority.
  • In National Human Rights Commission v. State of Arunachal Pradesh (1996) the Supreme Court directed the state to protect the Chakmas’ life and liberty against forcible eviction, holding that Article 21 protects non-citizens.
  • In Committee for Citizenship Rights of the Chakmas of Arunachal Pradesh (2015) the Court directed the Union to process their citizenship applications under Section 5(1)(a) of the Citizenship Act.
  • The direction remains substantially unimplemented. Local organisations argue that conferring citizenship would alter the state’s demography and dilute the tribal population’s protected status, and the National Human Rights Commission has had to repeat the direction.
  • The case states the region’s indigeneity dilemma at its sharpest: a stateless community confronting a very small one.
• Meghalaya’s anti-outsider politics has run since the state’s creation, directed first at Bengali and Nepali residents and later at traders and labourers from elsewhere in India, with periodic violence in Shillong.
  • The Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council, formed in the 1990s to demand a Khasi homeland, was the state’s principal armed outfit; its strength has collapsed and talks with the government have proceeded episodically.
  • The state’s active demand is instead the Inner Line Permit, pressed by student groups and taken up by successive Chief Ministers with the Union government; a state registration requirement for visitors operates in the meantime.
  • Meghalaya shows that once the indigeneity frame exists, it does not stay confined to the states that first used it.

Autonomy and statehood

The Naga movement: the oldest insurgency in India

• The Naga claim predates Indian independence. The Naga Club, formed in 1918 by clerks, headmen and returning members of the Labour Corps sent to France, submitted a memorandum to the Simon Commission in 1929 asking to be left out of the reformed Indian constitution.
  • The claim was therefore never a response to Indian policy: it asserted that the Nagas had never been part of India and had come under British administration only in the nineteenth century.
• The Naga National Council, formed in 1946 and led from 1950 by Angami Zapu Phizo, turned this into a demand for sovereignty.
  • The Nine-Point Agreement of June 1947, negotiated with Assam’s Governor Akbar Hydari, granted ten years of administrative and judicial autonomy, after which the Nagas would decide their future.
    • The two sides read the final clause incompatibly — the Nagas as a right of secession, the Government of India as a review of arrangements.
  • The NNC declared independence on 14 August 1947, and claimed that a plebiscite conducted on 16 May 1951 returned overwhelming support for sovereignty. The Government of India has never accepted the plebiscite as valid.
  • The Naga boycott of the 1952 general election, the formation of an underground Naga Federal Government and army, and the movement into armed conflict from 1956 brought the Indian Army into an internal conflict for the first time since independence — and produced the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in 1958.
• The Sixteen-Point Agreement of 1960, negotiated with the moderate Naga People’s Convention rather than the NNC, produced statehood in 1963 and the guarantees now in Article 371A.
  • It split the movement permanently: statehood satisfied one section and was denounced by the underground as a settlement made with people who had no mandate to make it.
• The Shillong Accord of 11 November 1975, under which an NNC delegation accepted the Indian Constitution and agreed to surrender arms, produced the movement’s decisive rupture.
  • Leaders in the Burmese camps denounced it as a betrayal, and in 1980 Isak Chishi Swu, Thuingaleng Muivah and S.S. Khaplang founded the National Socialist Council of Nagaland.
  • The NSCN itself split in 1988 into NSCN (Isak-Muivah), drawing on Tangkhul Nagas of Manipur, and NSCN (Khaplang), drawing on Konyak and Myanmar-based Nagas. Factional violence between them, and later among their own offshoots, has killed more Nagas than the conflict with the Indian state.

The peace process and why it has not concluded

• A ceasefire with NSCN-IM took effect on 1 August 1997, and has been renewed since. Talks have run for close to three decades and several hundred rounds, initially at the level of Prime Ministers and abroad, later through an interlocutor.
• The Framework Agreement of 3 August 2015 recorded agreement in principle on a settlement based on “shared sovereignty” and on recognising the “unique history and position” of the Nagas. Its text has never been published, which is itself a source of dispute — the two sides have publicly disagreed about what it says.
• Three obstacles have kept it unconcluded.
  • A separate Naga flag and constitution, which NSCN-IM treats as non-negotiable and the Government of India has refused, having removed exactly those features from Jammu and Kashmir in 2019.
  • Nagalim, or Greater Nagaland — integrating Naga-inhabited areas of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh with Nagaland. All three assemblies have resolved against any alteration of their boundaries, and the Union cannot concede it without opening a second conflict in each.
  • A parallel and competing track. The Working Committee of the Naga National Political Groups, formed in 2017 from seven and later more factions, negotiates separately on an “Agreed Position” and has signalled willingness to settle within the Constitution.
    • The government’s ability to sign with the NNPGs weakens NSCN-IM’s leverage; NSCN-IM’s signature is what would make a settlement durable.
• A further split in 2026 — a faction operating from Myanmar and led by Ikato Chishi Swu, son of the NSCN’s co-founder, declaring a provisional government and asserting that the ceasefire’s spirit had ceased to exist — has narrowed the settlement’s likely reach still further.
  • This is the recurring structure of the Naga process: every settlement produces the faction that rejects it, and each rejection becomes the next armed group.

Frontier Nagaland: a settlement inside the settlement

• The Eastern Nagaland People’s Organisation has demanded a separate state of “Frontier Nagaland” since 2010, on behalf of tribes in the six eastern districts, citing sustained neglect and backwardness relative to the state’s west.
• A tripartite agreement signed on 5 February 2026 by the Union government, the Nagaland government and the ENPO created the Frontier Nagaland Territorial Authority covering Tuensang, Mon, Kiphire, Longleng, Noklak and Shamator.
  • The Authority is to receive legislative, executive and financial powers over a devolved list of subjects — reported to run to 46 — including land, agriculture and rural development, with allocations based on the region’s population and area.
  • The design principle is autonomy without partition: Nagaland is not divided, and the arrangement works within the existing constitutional settlement for the state.
  • The enabling Bill was deferred in the Nagaland Assembly in March 2026 at the Centre’s request, so the Authority is agreed but not yet constituted — an illustration of how far the distance can be between a signed accord and a working institution.
• The design is the region’s characteristic compromise in its most recent form: a territorial authority instead of a state, devolution instead of division, and an existing constitutional protection left intact.
  • It confirms that the Union’s working method remains the manufacture of graded autonomy, and its result will be read closely by every other sub-regional claimant — most consequentially by the Kuki-Zo in Manipur.

Oting and the limits of impunity

• On 4 December 2021 a Para Special Forces unit ambushed a pickup truck carrying coal miners at Oting in Mon district, killing six.
  • Seven more villagers and one soldier died in the confrontation that followed, and another civilian in police firing the next day — fourteen civilians in all. The operation rested on faulty intelligence and no militants were involved.
• The Nagaland assembly resolved unanimously for the repeal of AFSPA, and the killings became the most powerful argument against the Act since the Manorama case.
• The prosecution failed on the Act’s own terms. A state Special Investigation Team chargesheeted 30 army personnel, but the Union government declined sanction under Section 6 of AFSPA, and on 18 September 2024 the Supreme Court closed the criminal proceedings, holding that they could resume only if sanction were granted.
  • The sequence shows the immunity clause working more plainly than any commission report: an investigation completed, an accused identified, a prosecution that cannot begin.

Mizoram: the settlement that worked

• The Mautam famine of 1959 began the movement. The bamboo flowering cycle that recurs roughly every forty-eight years produced a rat population explosion and destroyed the harvest across the Lushai Hills.
  • The Assam government’s response was slow and dismissive, and the relief body formed to fill the gap — the Mizo National Famine Front — converted into the Mizo National Front in 1961 under Laldenga.
  • Famine relief became nationalism by the most direct route available: the state’s failure to feed a population was read as proof that the state did not regard it as its own.
• On 1 March 1966 the MNF declared independence and launched Operation Jericho, seizing government installations across Aizawl and Lunglei.
  • The Indian Air Force bombed Aizawl on 5 March 1966 — the only occasion on which India has used air power against its own civilian population on its own territory. The government did not formally acknowledge it for decades.
  • The response included village grouping, the forced concentration of scattered hill villages into roadside settlements under military supervision, which uprooted most of the rural population.
• The Mizo Accord of 30 June 1986, signed by Laldenga, the Union Home Secretary and the state, ended a twenty-year insurgency.
  • The MNF renounced secession and surrendered arms; the Union granted statehood, which took effect on 20 February 1987, along with a separate High Court bench and a university.
  • Article 371G was inserted, protecting Mizo customary law, religious and social practice, and land ownership on the Nagaland model.
  • Laldenga became Chief Minister of the state he had fought to leave, and the MNF has since alternated in power through ordinary elections.
• Mizoram has had no insurgency since. The state’s literacy, human development and law-and-order indicators are among the country’s best, and 30 June is observed as Remna Ni, peace day.

Mizoram is the strongest evidence India possesses that federal accommodation ends insurgency where force alone did not.

• The comparison identifies the conditions of successful accommodation, and they are structural rather than moral: a compact and homogeneous claimant, a demand that fits inside existing boundaries, a leadership able to bind its own movement, and no symbolic demand that the Union cannot grant without precedent elsewhere.
• Atul Kohli singles out the handling of Assam and Mizoram in the 1980s as the model — accommodation offered by a central leadership secure enough to concede — and contrasts it with the coercive handling of Punjab in the same decade.

Territory and inter-ethnic conflict within states

Manipur: three nationalisms in one state

• Manipur’s grievance begins with its accession. The Merger Agreement of 21 September 1949, signed by Maharaja Bodhchandra under conditions Manipuris have always regarded as coercive, dissolved a kingdom with its own constitution and elected assembly into a Union territory.
  • Reduction to a centrally administered territory, and the delay of statehood until 21 January 1972, left a resentment every subsequent insurgent group has invoked.
• The state’s geography is its politics. The Imphal valley, about a tenth of the area, holds the Meitei majority and most of the population; the surrounding hills, nine-tenths of the area, hold Naga and Kuki-Zo communities recognised as Scheduled Tribes.
  • Meiteis may not buy land in the hills, which are protected; hill communities may buy in the valley. This asymmetry, designed to protect tribal land, is the Meitei case for Scheduled Tribe status and the tribal case against it.
  • Article 371C gives the hill districts only a Hill Areas Committee of the assembly, and the valley’s demographic weight ensures a permanent Meitei majority in the legislature.
• Manipur is where Naga nationalism competes with Meitei and Kuki nationalism simultaneously. The Nagalim claim would remove the state’s northern hills; Meitei nationalism insists on territorial integrity; and Kuki-Zo politics asserts a claim on the same hill districts the Nagas claim.
  • The Naga-Kuki violence of 1992-93 killed hundreds — by one contemporary count around 400 people between January and September 1993 — and displaced tens of thousands, as NSCN-IM pressed Kuki villages to leave areas claimed for Nagalim.
• Armed groups proliferated as no other state’s did. The United National Liberation Front (1964), the People’s Liberation Army (1978), PREPAK and the Kangleipak Communist Party are the principal valley-based outfits; over time more than a hundred groups have been counted, hill and valley together.
• The human-rights record produced its own politics. The custodial killing and mutilation of Thangjam Manorama in July 2004 brought the protest by Meira Paibi women outside the Assam Rifles headquarters at Kangla, and prompted the constitution of the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee.
  • Irom Sharmila fasted for sixteen years, from 2000 to 2016, demanding repeal of AFSPA after the Malom killings — the longest hunger strike on record, sustained by force-feeding under judicial custody.
• The Suspension of Operations framework, agreed in 2008 between the Union government, the state and Kuki armed groups under the Kuki National Organisation and the United People’s Front, confined cadres to designated camps with arms in monitored storage in exchange for talks.
  • The state government withdrew from the agreement with two groups in March 2023, alleging their involvement in agitation against forest evictions — six weeks before the violence began.

The conflict from 2023

• The immediate trigger was a court order. On 27 March 2023 the Manipur High Court directed the state to consider including the Meitei community in the Scheduled Tribe list and to send a recommendation to the Union government within four weeks.
  • The Supreme Court observed on 17 May 2023 that the order was “completely factually wrong”, since a state has no power to add to the Scheduled Tribes list, which is a matter for Parliament under Article 342.
  • The High Court itself deleted the offending paragraph on 21 February 2024, but by then the order had done its work.
• Violence began on 3 May 2023, after a Tribal Solidarity March called by the All Tribal Students’ Union of Manipur against the order, and did not subside.
• The underlying issues were older than the order.
  • Scheduled Tribe status for the Meitei, which tribal communities read as an attempt to acquire the right to buy hill land while retaining valley dominance.
  • Land and the hill-valley divide, aggravated by eviction drives from reserved and protected forests that fell disproportionately on Kuki-Zo villages.
  • The poppy-cultivation campaign and the state government’s framing of it, which linked eradication to allegations of illegal migration from Myanmar and of “narco-terrorism”, identifying an entire community with a criminal economy.
  • The withdrawal from the Suspension of Operations, which removed the one framework restraining armed Kuki groups.
• The scale. Official counts placed the toll at over 200 dead and close to 60,000 displaced, with several thousand houses destroyed; independent counts of the dead run above 250, and relief-camp mortality has added several hundred more.
• Roughly 6,000 weapons were looted from state armouries in the first weeks, with recovery reaching about 85% only by 2026 — a collapse of the state’s monopoly of force that turned a riot into a sustained armed conflict.
• Buffer zones policed by central forces became a de facto partition. Meiteis left the hills and Kuki-Zo left the valley; the hill districts have functioned without state police, doctors, teachers or officials from the other community since 2023, with their own checkpoints and their own administration in practice.
• The Supreme Court took suo motu cognizance on 7 August 2023, criticising the state’s handling after video evidence of sexual violence emerged, and appointed a committee of three former women judges headed by Justice Gita Mittal to oversee relief, rehabilitation, compensation and the restoration of identity documents.
• Political collapse followed. Chief Minister N. Biren Singh resigned on 9 February 2025, and President’s Rule was imposed on 13 February 2025, the assembly being placed in suspended animation.
• President’s Rule was revoked on 4 February 2026, with Yumnam Khemchand Singh sworn in as Chief Minister at the head of the existing assembly majority.
• The first direct engagement between the new state government and the Kuki-Zo Council took place at Guwahati on 21 March 2026 — the first such contact in nearly three years. No agreement was reached; the Chief Minister described it as a beginning on the trust deficit.
  • Earlier attempts had failed on the same point: at Union Home Ministry talks the Meitei organisations were prepared to sign a draft on free movement and highway access, and the Kuki-Zo side declined.
• The Kuki-Zo demand is for separate administration — a Union territory with a legislature, on the argument that coexistence under the present arrangement is no longer possible.
  • The Union government has refused, stating that policy does not support creating a new union territory, while the separation it declines to recognise operates on the ground every day.
  • This is the hardest question in the region. Conceding it would reward territorial separation achieved by violence, and would be cited at once by the Nagas of Manipur and by every community told to settle for a council.
    • Refusing it leaves a population that will not accept the state’s authority inside a state whose boundaries the Union insists on preserving.

Manipur is where every instrument of accommodation used successfully elsewhere in the region is read by one community as a threat to another.

Inter-state boundaries

• The internal boundaries drawn when states were carved out of Assam were never surveyed on the ground, and Assam has an unsettled border with almost every neighbour.
• Assam-Mizoram turns on a conflict of colonial notifications: Mizoram claims the inner-line reserved forest boundary of 1875, Assam the district boundary notified in 1933, which Mizoram never accepted.
  • On 26 July 2021 police forces of the two states exchanged fire at Lailapur, killing six Assam police personnel and a civilian — the first instance of armed conflict between the police of two Indian states.
  • A status quo has since held along the 164.6 km boundary; official-level talks last met in April 2025, and the next round has been awaited for over a year.
• Assam-Meghalaya identified twelve areas of difference along their border.
  • A Memorandum of Understanding of 29 March 2022 settled six of the twelve, with land divided between the states in each.
  • Demarcation of the settled sectors by the Survey of India is still under way, and the second phase covering the six harder areas has not begun; a firing incident at Mukroh in November 2022 killed six and demonstrated how quickly the dispute can turn lethal.
• These disputes are ethnic questions in cartographic form: what is contested is which community’s villages fall under which state’s land laws, reservation rosters and police.

AFSPA: the security instrument and its critics

• The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 descends directly from the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance of 1942, promulgated to suppress the Quit India movement — a colonial emergency instrument re-enacted by a republic, initially for the Naga Hills.
• Its operation depends on a “disturbed area” notification by the state government or the Union under Section 3, after which the armed forces acquire powers that ordinary criminal law does not confer.
  • Section 4 allows any commissioned or non-commissioned officer to fire upon and cause death on suspicion of a prohibited act, to destroy structures used as hideouts, to arrest without warrant on reasonable suspicion, and to search premises without warrant.
  • Section 6 bars prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding against anyone acting under the Act except with the previous sanction of the Central Government.
• Naga People’s Movement of Human Rights v. Union of India (1997) upheld the Act unanimously, holding that it did not confer emergency powers under Part XVIII and fell within Parliament’s competence over deployment of armed forces in aid of the civil power.
  • The Court read in safeguards: the notification must be periodically reviewed, minimum force must be used, arrested persons must be handed to the nearest police station with the least possible delay, and the Army’s own Do’s and Don’ts were made binding.
• The Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee (2005) recommended repeal of the Act, calling it “a symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination”.
  • It did not recommend withdrawing the armed forces: it proposed inserting the necessary powers, with tighter safeguards and grievance cells, into the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The report was never acted upon.
• The Santosh Hegde Commission (2013), appointed by the Supreme Court on extra-judicial killings in Manipur, examined six sample cases and found none was a genuine encounter, and held that the Act’s continuation without review had become indefensible.
• The Second Administrative Reforms Commission likewise recommended repeal, with the operative provisions folded into a reformed unlawful activities law.
• Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v. Union of India (2016) is the decisive judicial statement: the armed forces’ immunity does not extend to excessive or retaliatory force, and every death caused in a disturbed area must be investigated, whether the deceased was a militant or not.
  • The Court rejected the proposition that a person labelled an insurgent forfeits the protection of Article 21, and ordered a CBI investigation into a set of the 1,528 alleged extra-judicial killings placed before it.

• The withdrawal since 2022 is real, and is the most substantive change in the region’s security policy in decades.
  • Tripura has been free of the Act since 2015 and Meghalaya since 2018.
  • Assam has gone from the whole state to four districts — Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Charaideo and Sivasagar.
  • Nagaland retains it in eight districts and parts of five more; Arunachal Pradesh in Tirap, Changlang and Longding and parts of Namsai.
  • Manipur remains notified except for the areas of thirteen police stations across five valley districts — and the Kuki-Zo demand is that it be applied uniformly, including in the valley, which inverts the usual politics of the Act entirely.

Explaining the conflict

Narrating the accords is the easy part; the analytical question is why a region with rising literacy, expanding electoral participation and generous transfers has produced more ethnic assertion rather than less. The region’s own scholarship gives an answer that cuts against the standard expectations of modernisation theory.

• North-Eastern ethnic identity combines primordial and instrumental elements, and, as Songram Basumatary argues, cannot be reduced to either.
  • Groups in an identity crisis look for roots; on reaching a certain self-awareness they articulate their own criteria of inclusion and exclusion; and those identities are then instrumentalised to seek political and economic advantage.
  • Identity becomes at once a vehicle of psychological emancipation and a device to wrest a greater share of power and authority.
• Education and development have increased ethnic demands rather than dissolving them. Schooling was expected to replace parochial sentiment with universal ideas, and prosperity to remove the material root of conflict.
  • The regional evidence runs the other way: the more educated the population, the more articulated the ethnic claim; the greater the economic incentive, the more numerous the contests over it.
  • The region is thus a standing refutation of the idea that development substitutes for political settlement.
• State boundaries were drawn without regard to ethnic and cultural specificity. The delineation of the 1950s ignored who lived where, converting every subsequent boundary into a grievance and every minority into a claimant.
• Social exclusion supplies the mechanism. Exclusion is multidimensional — social, economic, cultural and political — and is tied to the recognition of identities, the allocation of resources and the structure of power.
  • Marshall Wolfe distinguishes exclusion from livelihood; from social services, welfare and security networks; from political choice; from popular organisation and solidarity; and from any understanding of what is happening — the last of these describing the region’s relationship with decisions made in Delhi with some precision.
  • Charles Taylor identifies an inbuilt exclusionary tendency in liberal democracies themselves.

“Democracies work well when people know one another, trust one another, and feel a sense of commitment toward one another.”

• Amartya Sen adds that the sense of one’s own identity itself “in many cases carr[ies] with it the perception of distance and divergence from other groups” — so that constructing a national identity while ignoring the specificities of smaller communities generates the very exclusion it seeks to overcome.
• The Bodo case has been read exactly this way: claims to ethno-nationalism intertwined with institutional and social exclusion organised around language.
• Ted Gurr locates the political significance of the resulting violence precisely.

“They challenge the monopoly of force imparted to the state in political theory; and, in functional terms, they are likely to interfere with and, if severe, to destroy normal political processes.”

• The category “North-East” is itself part of the problem. Clubbing eight states that differ in language, race, tribe, caste, religion and heritage under one administrative tag has a homogenising effect on policy, and local aversion to the construct is well documented.
• The Sixth Schedule councils have not delivered genuine autonomy. Their introduction ended up creating multiple competing power centres rather than a real process of democratisation, and Paragraph 12A ensures the state legislature prevails wherever the two collide.
• Sanjib Baruah provides the region’s most influential critical framework across three arguments.
  • Durable disorder: the region’s condition is not a transitional breakdown but a stable equilibrium in which low-intensity conflict, negotiated ceasefires, armed groups drawing state funds and elected governments coexist indefinitely, because the arrangement is tolerable to all the actors who could end it.
  • Cosmetic federalism: the proliferation of states and councils has nationalised space and multiplied governments while leaving the substance of development priorities and fiscal power centralised — the appearance of federal accommodation without its content.
  • Counter-insurgency governance: the region’s ordinary institutions are shaped by the security paradigm, so that civil administration and counter-insurgency have blurred in practice.
• Ryan Griffiths places India among the most secession-prone states in the world, and reads the centralising policies of the 1950s to 1980s as having fanned rather than contained the movements they targeted.
• The comparative literature on identity conflict isolates three fears, and the North-East supplies the standard case of each.
  • Fear of losing a distinct identity inside an arbitrarily bounded new state — cited for the Nagas, Mizos and Assamese alike.
  • Fear of assimilation by a larger neighbouring community, met by demanding a territorial enclave.
  • Fear of marginalisation where in-migration reduces an indigenous people to a minority at home, as in Tripura.
• Udayon Misra frames the region as a periphery whose relationship to the Indian nation-state was never fully negotiated, and whose nationality questions were therefore deferred rather than resolved.
• R.K. Debbarma offers the internal critique: identity politics built on an uncritical evaluation of the self is self-defeating, because the politics of the oppressed comes to mirror the politics of the oppressor, and an identity meant to be a site of resistance turns oppressive towards the very people it claims to emancipate.
• Gurharpal Singh distinguishes movements from the core from those from the periphery, placing Nagaland in the second — and the state’s response has been consistently harder at the periphery, where the challenge is read as territorial rather than distributive.
• Atul Kohli finds that ethnic movements in India follow an inverted-U curve of rise and decline, which he reads as evidence of the state’s absorptive capacity; the North-East supplies both his strongest confirmation, in Mizoram, and his most stubborn exception, in Nagaland and Manipur.
• The Sarkaria Commission’s observation applies with particular force here: ethnic movements are never purely ethnic, since political and economic aspirations overlap them throughout, and democratic decentralisation is the way forward.
• Clemens Spiess concludes that the politics of identity lies at the heart of most of the region’s conflict constellations, and that these conflicts “represent durable challenges to the integrative and accommodative capacity of Indian democracy” — neither an alarmist verdict nor a complacent one.

Development, connectivity and the external dimension

• The region has been governed as a security frontier rather than a development region, and the criticism that the Union looks at it primarily as a question of territorial integrity — driven by anxiety about Chinese influence and cross-border sanctuary — has been made consistently by the region’s own analysts.
• The Look East Policy of 1991, restated as the Act East Policy in 2014, promised to convert the region from a dead end into a bridge to South-East Asia, with its natural resources, biodiversity and hydro-electric potential as the economic base.
  • Whether the region has actually gained is contested. Connectivity investment has risen sharply, but the corridors are trans-border projects whose benefit depends on countries India does not control, and the local objection is that market integration on these terms would bring irreversible cultural change and renewed in-migration from the rest of India.
• The two flagship corridors are both stalled.
  • The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project, linking Kolkata to Sittwe port in Myanmar and onward by river and road to Zorinpui in Mizoram, is more than a decade behind schedule; the 109 km Paletwa-Zorinpui road runs through territory contested in Myanmar’s civil war.
  • The India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway from Moreh to Mae Sot missed its 2019 target and remains unconnected, with construction suspended in the Myanmar sections.
• The Free Movement Regime has been ended in practice. The arrangement permitted hill communities living within 16 km of the 1,643 km Myanmar border to cross with a pass and stay up to two weeks, recognising that the boundary was drawn through ethnic communities rather than between them.
  • The Union government announced in February 2024 that it would scrap the regime and fence the entire border, citing unregulated movement and its bearing on the Manipur conflict; a stricter border-pass protocol reducing movement to about 10 km has since been applied, with the final formal notification still awaited.
  • Mizoram and Nagaland have both opposed the decision, and Naga organisations have opposed the fence as a line through a single people’s homeland. Fencing has progressed only a small fraction of the distance.
• Myanmar’s civil war since the coup of February 2021 has pushed the border question into the region’s internal politics.
  • Tens of thousands of Chin refugees are officially recorded in Mizoram, with aid agencies estimating more still, and the state has continued to shelter them on grounds of Chin-Kuki-Mizo ethnic kinship, notwithstanding central instructions to the contrary.
  • The same kinship across the Manipur border makes the migration allegation explosive there: what one community reads as kin, another reads as demographic invasion.
• Bangladesh’s political change since 2024 has revived two older concerns — border security against migration, and the risk that insurgent sanctuary of the kind Dhaka shut down after 2009 becomes available again. The trajectory remains genuinely uncertain.

The record, honestly assessed

• The improvement is real and large. Insurgency incidents in the region have fallen sharply since 2014 on the Union Home Ministry’s own reporting, with security-force fatalities and civilian deaths down by a still steeper margin, and large numbers of cadres surrendering year on year.
  • Manipur now accounts for roughly three-quarters of the region’s violent incidents, which is to say the North-East’s insurgency problem has largely become one state’s ethnic-conflict problem.
• A majority of the region is free of AFSPA, two states entirely, and the notified area has contracted year on year since 2022.
• Several settlements have held: Mizoram since 1986, Tripura’s outfits, the Bodo accords, ULFA in 2023.
• Against that stands a real ledger of failure: Manipur, unresolved after three years and a spell of President’s Rule; the Naga accord, unconcluded after nearly three decades of talks; the NRC, complete but without legal effect; and inter-state boundaries still unsettled after half a century.

Conclusion

The region’s own record answers the question it poses. Where the Indian state conceded a demand in constitutional form — statehood in Mizoram, autonomy in Bodoland, a territorial authority in eastern Nagaland — the conflict ended or became ordinary politics. Where it relied on coercion, or offered accommodation only after the constituency for settlement had fragmented, the conflict has persisted. Accommodation has been the effective counter-insurgency instrument, and force has principally bought the time in which accommodation was eventually negotiated.

• The limits are equally clear. Accommodation works where a demand can be given territorial or constitutional shape without creating a new minority.
  • The region’s remaining conflicts are precisely those where it cannot — Nagalim across four states, Kuki-Zo separation inside Manipur, citizenship in Assam.
  • These are failures of arithmetic rather than of will, which is why the North-East remains a durable challenge to the integrative capacity of Indian democracy rather than a problem awaiting a solution already known.