As Myanmar’s civil war enters its fifth year and repression deepens in Bangladesh’s southeastern hills, instability is steadily concentrating along India’s northeastern frontier. Airstrikes, village burnings, and mass displacement now define everyday life across much of Myanmar’s Chin State. In Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, militarization and demographic engineering continue, despite a 1997 peace accord that remains only partially implemented.
These crises are often treated as distinct national problems. In reality, they converge most sharply across India’s seven northeastern states, often called “the Seven Sisters.” This borderland is home to communities whose kinship networks, languages, and political histories long predate the boundaries that divide them. Zo peoples— known variously as Kuki, Zo or Chin—span India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh, while Chakma communities straddle the India–Bangladesh border. Displacement in one country inevitably reverberates across the others. Recent political realignments in Dhaka and a shift away from the revanchist interim administration of Muhammad Yunus may temporarily ease rhetorical tensions, but the deeper structural pressures shaping the region remain firmly in place.
Yet New Delhi continues to approach the region primarily as an internal security space, governed through legal exception, administrative discretion, and development-led incorporation. The strategy has produced periods of calm. But calm without political settlement is inherently fragile. As violence intensifies on both flanks, the limits of governing without legitimacy are becoming increasingly evident.
Pacification and Peripheral Incorporation
In fact, India’s northeast has long occupied an ambiguous position within the union. Under British rule, much of it was administered through special regulations that treated it as a frontier buffer rather than a civic space. Independence did not dismantle this logic but rather absorbed and institutionalized it.
Armed resistance to incorporation among Nagas, Mizos, Kukis, and others was met with overwhelming force. In 1966, during the Mizo uprising, the Indian Air Force bombed Aizawl: the only instance of India deploying airpower against its own citizens. Beginning in 1958, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) granted sweeping powers of arrest and lethal force to security forces, while shielding them from prosecution without central approval. Though presented as temporary, AFSPA became a durable instrument of governance across much of the region.
Over time, military pacification reduced insurgent violence. After the Mizo Peace Accord of 1986 and successive ceasefire arrangements with Naga groups, fatalities declined sharply after the early 2000s. Remarkably, the Indian northeast is no longer in open rebellion—even the ethnic violence that erupted in Manipur in 2023 did not involve secessionist demands. Kuki organizations sought a separate administrative arrangement within the constitutional framework, not independence: the conflict was rooted in land policy, ethnic hierarchy, and perceived state bias, rather than rejection of Indian sovereignty.
Yet the architecture of governance in the region continues to reflect wartime exceptionalism. AFSPA has been withdrawn from most of Mizoram, Tripura, and Meghalaya, and scaled back in parts of Assam and Nagaland following the 2015 Naga framework agreement. However, the rollback of emergency legislation has not been accompanied by systematic truth-seeking, land restitution, or civilian accountability. Ceasefires froze armed conflict without repairing fractured political relationships. Credible elections have been held regularly and statehood (within the Indian union) was eventually granted. Yet civilian institutions have often operated under an implicit security veto, with extraordinary powers embedded in routine administration. Wartime checkpoints blight the landscape of Manipur even today, with Kuki-majority and Meitei-majority regions cordoned off from each other de facto, though not de jure.
Thus, the northeast was never fully integrated into the Indian mainstream. Instead, it has been administratively absorbed but politically subordinated—classic peripheral incorporation. To this day, stability rests less on reconciliation than on the managed containment of dissent.
Development, Dispossession, and Cross-Border Economies
This trajectory has also reshaped the region’s political economy. Communal land systems, shifting cultivation practices, and porous borders historically limited state extraction and commercial penetration. Nonetheless, the decline of insurgency created conditions for deeper intervention and integration into national and transnational circuits of capital—on terms largely defined by the center.
For instance, India’s Act East policy reimagines the northeast as a gateway to Southeast Asia. Projects such as the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project promise connectivity and growth. Yet development has often extended the logic of security rather than replaced it. Projects are centrally driven, local consent remains uneven, and land acquisition is frequently coercive. In militarized zones, infrastructure arrives alongside surveillance.
Connectivity corridors formalize land tenure, reconfigure customary authority, and open previously insulated regions to extraction and commodity flows. Thus, the shift from insurgency to infrastructure does not represent a simple transition from violence to peace, but a move from overt military coercion to developmental dispossession. Incorporation into markets has been uneven, reinforcing the Indian northeast’s role as a managed periphery whose stability underwrites strategic corridors and resource flows. This is myopic: infrastructure and connectivity may reduce physical distance, but they do not automatically generate political trust.
Spillover, Narcotics, and Regional Conflict
In fact, such incomplete integration leaves the door open for cross-border spillovers. Since the 2021 coup, Myanmar’s military has intensified operations against resistance-held territories, including Chin State along India’s border. Airstrikes on villages, churches and schools have displaced tens of thousands. Entire communities have crossed into the Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, seeking refuge among ethnic kin.
For Zo communities in Mizoram (also known as Kukis in Manipur), this war is not a distant affair. Villages bombed in Chin State are bound by kinship and shared history to villages across the border. Refugee flows, trauma, and arms circulate across a frontier that exists more firmly in Indian administrative doctrine than in lived reality.
Conflict in Myanmar also poses another problem: its borderlands adjoin the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s largest synthetic drug production zones. As central authority weakens, methamphetamine and other narcotics move more freely across porous terrain into India and Bangladesh, entangling insurgent groups, criminal networks, and local livelihoods.
Demography, Violence and Conditional Belonging
This also intersects with the Rohingya crisis. Beginning in 2017, the Burmese military’s genocidal campaign in Rakhine State drove more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh, consolidating demographic control over contested territory. Dhaka bore the immediate humanitarian burden but resisted long-term integration, confining refugees to tightly regulated camps and relocating thousands to the remote island of Bhasan Char.
India, for its part, declined to recognize the Rohingyas as refugees, instead categorizing them as illegal migrants and initiating detention and deportation proceedings. Across three states, the same population is rendered differently disposable: expelled in Myanmar, contained in Bangladesh, and securitized in India.
The crisis ultimately reflects a broader regional pattern in which citizenship functions as an instrument of territorial consolidation. Expulsion clears land and reshapes demography, containment disciplines mobility and labor, and securitization reinforces majoritarian political projects. Across this frontier, belonging is not presumed, but remains contingent upon administrative and military caprice.
The politics of demography has long shaped instability in the Indian northeast. In the state of Tripura, resettlement of Bengali Hindu refugees after Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh war transformed Indigenous communities from an overwhelming majority into a political minority within a generation. Insurgency followed—driven less by ideology than by dispossession without representation. Its decline, in turn, reflected effective counterinsurgency and demographic consolidation more than reconciliation.
The state of Assam witnessed a different but equally violent trajectory. Decades of migration triggered anxieties over cultural and political survival, culminating in the 1983 Nellie massacre, where over 2,000 Bengali Muslim villagers were killed in a single day. No one was held accountable. Like the bombing of Aizawl, the episode faded from Indian national memory—enabled by the region’s long governance through exception.
More recently, India’s updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam between 2013 and 2019 bureaucratized demographic anxiety. Nearly 1.9 million residents were excluded through opaque documentation standards and inconsistent adjudication. Presented as administrative correction, the NRC institutionalized conditional belonging.
Across the border in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, militarization and state-backed settlement continue despite the 1997 Peace Accord. Land ownership and Indigenous autonomy are being reshaped in real time. Chakma communities straddle the border, and memories of displacement—from the Kaptai Dam incident to more recent land seizures—reverberate across boundaries, intensifying anxiety and securitized responses within India.
Migration to and from the Indian northeast continues to restructure access to land, labor, and state resources. Citizenship documentation, suspicion, and conditional acceptance thus become not merely administrative technology for regulating property and welfare, but a means of managing populations in a region historically treated as peripheral.
Racialized exclusion reinforces this conditionality. Citizens from the northeast often face harassment and misrecognition in mainland India. The 2025 case of Anjel Chakma, a student from Tripura reportedly subjected to racial abuse before being killed in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, is particularly stark, not least because his father had served in India’s Border Security Force. The northeast is so peripheral that even lifelong service to the state did not guarantee social belonging.
From Buffer to Fracture Line
This frontier now lies between Myanmar’s aerial war against its own citizens and Bangladesh’s quieter militarization in the CHT. What were once buffer zones have become a fracture line where three fragile state projects collide: military collapse in civil war-riven Myanmar, majoritarian consolidation in Bangladesh’s peripheries, and securitized democracy in the Indian northeast.
New Delhi’s strategy—pacification, administrative discretion, and development-led incorporation—delivered calm when instability was episodic and external buffers held. However, it is less suited to a frontier defined by cross-border warfare, mass displacement, and layered statelessness.
The northeast has not been fully integrated into the republic; instead, it has been incorporated merely as a managed periphery—strategically vital and economically improving, yet politically subordinated. Stability secured through coercion and demographic engineering may endure in periods of relative quiet, but it is far more fragile when surrounded by fracture.
In a borderland shaped by uneven development and contested belonging, justice is not just a moral imperative, but a structural prerequisite for resilience.