North-East-India

North East India

The Northeast region of India consists of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura and is tenuously connected to the rest of India by the Siliguri Corridor. The Northeast region is extraordinary diverse along ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic lines and has, due to its location, strong ethnic and cultural ties with Southeast Asia.  The region further accounts for the largest concentration of tribal people in the country and consist of more than 160 Scheduled Tribes. These tribes belong to five different ethnic groups with over 400 distinct tribal and sub- tribal groupings which again speak over 170 languages.

Northeast India has been the theatre of the earliest and longest lasting insurgency in the country where violence commenced in 1952 on the various demand of independence. This was later followed by the Mizo rebellion in 1966 and a multiplicity of recent conflicts has proliferated since the late 1970s. According to one estimate, there are about 65 major militant organisations currently operating in the region and thus every state except for Sikkim is at present affected by some form of insurgent violence. Some groups call for a separate state, others for regional autonomy while some groupings demand complete independence. The state of Tripura provides a classic case of how the tribes, once a majority in the kingdom, were slowly reduced to a minority as the Indian state grew in power, facing the threat of being disposed of their land, language and culture. Mass migration after the formation of Pakistan and subsequently Bangladesh further contributed to widespread insurgency and violent conflicts. Although the Indian government has arranged federal structures and entered into separate ceasefire agreements with some of the various insurgency groups in order to settle these violent struggles, not all initiatives have been equally successful.

Furthermore, the question of human security and displacement continues to serve as a major challenge in the Northeast region of India.