Identity politics in northeast India

Abstract

India’s Northeast has long been risen by protracted armed conflicts for secession and movements for other forms of autonomy. India’s Northeast, the confederation of eight states (i.e, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura) is home to around 200 indigenous communities. All these communities struggle for recognition by the Indian government and have their own respective struggle for identity. This paper examines how various brands of identity politics since the colonial days have served to create the basis of exclusion of groups, resulting in various forms of rifts, often envisaged in binary terms, majority-minority, sons of the soil-immigrant, local outsiders, tribal-non-tribal, hills, plains, inter tribal and intra-tribal.