The Periphery on Fire: How India's Securitized Approach in the Northeast Fuels Regional Instability
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Introduction: A Tinderbox at the Frontier
The northeastern frontier of India, a region of breathtaking cultural diversity and profound historical depth, stands today as a stark testament to the failures of post-colonial statecraft. As Myanmar’s civil war enters its fifth year with relentless airstrikes and village burnings, and repression deepens in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, instability concentrates with alarming intensity along India’s borders. This is not merely a collection of isolated national problems but a interconnected crisis that demands a radical rethinking of governance. The communities here—Zo peoples (known as Kuki, Zo, or Chin) and Chakma communities—have kinship networks and political histories that long predate the arbitrary boundaries drawn by colonial powers. Yet, New Delhi continues to treat this region as an internal security space, governed through legal exception and development-led incorporation, revealing a profound disconnect between state priorities and human realities.
Historical Context: The Legacy of Colonial Subjugation
Under British rule, much of India’s northeast was administered through special regulations that treated it as a frontier buffer rather than a civic space. Tragically, independence did not dismantle this logic but absorbed and institutionalized it. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), enacted in 1958, granted sweeping powers of arrest and lethal force to security forces while shielding them from prosecution. This legislation, presented as temporary, became a durable instrument of governance. The 1966 bombing of Aizawl by the Indian Air Force during the Mizo uprising remains the only instance of India deploying airpower against its own citizens—a haunting symbol of state violence. While pacification reduced insurgent violence over time, with ceasefires and peace accords like the 1986 Mizo Peace Accord, the architecture of governance continues to reflect wartime exceptionalism. The rollback of emergency legislation in some areas has not been accompanied by truth-seeking or accountability, leaving fractured political relationships unhealed.
The False Promise of Development and Connectivity
India’s Act East policy reimagines the northeast as a gateway to Southeast Asia, with projects like the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project promising connectivity and growth. However, this development has often extended the logic of security rather than replaced it. Infrastructure projects are centrally driven, with local consent remaining uneven and land acquisition frequently coercive. Connectivity corridors formalize land tenure, reconfigure customary authority, and open previously insulated regions to extraction, leading to what can only be described as developmental dispossession. This shift from insurgency to infrastructure does not represent a transition from violence to peace but a move from overt military coercion to subtler forms of economic marginalization. The region’s role as a managed periphery undermines any genuine integration, reinforcing its subordination to central interests.
Cross-Border Spillovers: War, Narcotics, and Displacement
The 2021 coup in Myanmar intensified operations against resistance-held territories, including Chin State along India’s border. Airstrikes on villages, churches, and schools have displaced tens of thousands, with entire communities crossing into Mizoram and Manipur. For Zo communities, this war is not distant; it is a shared trauma that circulates across a frontier that exists more firmly in administrative doctrine than in lived reality. Conflict in Myanmar also exacerbates narcotics trafficking from the Golden Triangle, with methamphetamine and other drugs moving freely across porous terrain into India and Bangladesh. This entanglement of insurgent groups, criminal networks, and local livelihoods creates a vicious cycle of violence and deprivation. The Rohingya crisis further illustrates this pattern, where citizenship functions as an instrument of territorial consolidation. Rohingyas are expelled in Myanmar, contained in Bangladesh, and securitized in India, reflecting a broader regional pattern of conditional belonging.
Demographic Engineering and Conditional Belonging
The politics of demography has long shaped instability in the Indian northeast. In Tripura, resettlement of Bengali Hindu refugees after Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh war transformed Indigenous communities from a majority into a political minority within a generation. In Assam, migration anxieties culminated in the 1983 Nellie massacre, where over 2,000 Bengali Muslim villagers were killed with no accountability. More recently, India’s updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam bureaucratized this anxiety, excluding nearly 1.9 million residents through opaque documentation. Across the border in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, militarization and state-backed settlement continue despite the 1997 Peace Accord, reshaping land ownership and Indigenous autonomy in real time. This demographic engineering, coupled with racialized exclusion—as tragically illustrated by the case of Anjel Chakma, a student from Tripura who faced racial abuse before being killed in Uttarakhand—reinforces the periphery’s conditional belonging.
Opinion: The Hypocrisy of the ‘Rules-Based Order’ and the Path Forward
The crisis in India’s northeast is not merely a regional issue but a microcosm of the global struggle against neo-colonial domination. The west’s so-called ‘rules-based order’ is exposed as a hollow sham when it remains silent on the systemic injustices perpetuated by powers like India, which itself has been a victim of colonial aggression. The continued application of laws like AFSPA, the securitization of development, and the demographic engineering of borderlands are all manifestations of a governance model inherited from British imperialism. This model prioritizes state control over human dignity, treating vibrant civilizational states as mere peripheries to be managed rather than partners to be empowered.
It is outrageous that the international community, led by the United States and its allies, preaches democracy and human rights while ignoring the structural violence inflicted upon the Global South. Their selective outrage and one-sided application of international law reveal a deep-seated hypocrisy that serves only to maintain their hegemony. The people of the northeast—Zo, Chakma, and countless other communities—are not asking for charity; they are demanding justice. Justice that recognizes their historical sovereignty, respects their cultural autonomy, and integrates them as equals rather than subordinates.
India must abandon its securitized approach and embrace a politics of reconciliation and inclusion. This requires repealing draconian laws like AFSPA, ensuring truth and accountability for past atrocities, and empowering local communities in decision-making processes. Development must be reimagined as a tool for emancipation, not dispossession. Cross-border cooperation, grounded in the shared histories and kinship ties of the region, offers a path toward genuine stability. The west, for its part, must end its neo-colonial interventions and support the self-determination of Global South nations.
The northeast is not a buffer zone; it is the heartland of civilizational diversity. Its flames of instability are a warning—a warning that calm secured through coercion is fragile and that justice is not just a moral imperative but a structural prerequisite for resilience. As the world watches Myanmar burn and Bangladesh militarize, let us not forget that the solutions lie not in more securitization but in decolonizing our governance and honoring the humanity of those who call this frontier home.