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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

31/12/23 06:39 AM IST

History of Northeast

In News
  • On December 30, 1971, two laws — the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act and the North-Eastern Council Act — were enacted by Parliament.
The Northeast
  • Northeast India officially comprises eights states — Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura — which are a part of the North-Eastern Council, a statutory advisory body that plays a role in development planning, and region-level policy making.
  • Pre-Independence, five of these eight present-day states (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram) were a part of colonial Assam.
  • Manipur and Tripura were princely states, with resident British political officers answering to the governor of Assam.
  • Sikkim, the most unique of the eight, was juridically independent but under British paramountcy. It became an independent country in 1947, before being annexed by India in 1975.
  • In 2001 Sikkim was made a member of the North Eastern Council, and thus officially a part of the Northeast.
Frontier Province
  • Colonial Assam was a “frontier province” in British India. Like the North West Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in present-day Pakistan), the political legal setup in the province was very different from the rest of the country.
  • Direct rule was limited to territories behind the administrative border, known as the ‘settled districts’ of Assam (most of present-day Assam and Sylhet, now in Bangladesh).
  • These densely populated districts were — and still are — the region’s economic heartland, with thriving tea, coal, and oil industries emerging in the nineteenth century.
  • Beyond these districts lay the so-called ‘excluded areas’ or the ‘Hill areas’, controlled by various tribes, with minimal presence of the colonial state.
  • These areas were (and still are, relatively speaking) sparsely populated, and provided a buffer zone between the ‘settled districts’ and the international border.
  • For instance, like the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) located between the ‘settled districts’ of the NWFP and the international border with Afghanistan, the North East Frontier Tracts (modern-day Arunachal Pradesh and a part Nagaland) was carved out in 1914, and located between the ‘settled districts’ of Assam, and the international border with Tibet and Burma.
National Security Concerns
  • Northeast India, as an official place-name, is born out of the postcolonial Indian state’s attempts to turn this imperial frontier space into the national space of a “normal sovereign state.
  • After 1947, 98 per cent of the region’s borders became international (with China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Bhutan).
  • A roughly 22 km wide land corridor in Siliguri, often referred to as the “chicken’s neck”, became its sole physical connection with the rest of India.
  • By the 1960s, national security concerns were further heightened. India lost a border war with China in 1962, with the Chinese entering all the way into Assam, and the movement for Naga independence was in full swing.
  • India and Pakistan fought a war in 1965, and the Mizo rebellion began the following year.
  • Fears about the challenge to national security if the country’s external and domestic enemies were to join hands, became jarringly immediate.
  • With the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act of 1971, Manipur and Tripura, previously union territories, were given statehood.
  • Meghalaya was carved out of two previously autonomous districts within Assam, and so was the union territory of Mizoram.
  • The erstwhile North East Frontier Agency became the union territory of Arunachal Pradesh. Both Mizoram and Arunachal would be granted full statehood in 1987.
Source- Indian Express

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