Ending India's Naga Conflict: Facts and Fictions in Postcolonial Sovereignty

For countries that became independent in the aftermath of the crisis of colonial empires in the last century, an uneven geography of power within their formal territorial boundaries was a necessary inheritance from the colonial past. Northeast India—once part of the "frontier system" of British Imperial India¹—acquired its postcolonial regional political structure and official name in the 1970s. Five of the eight states—Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Mizoram—were part of the colonial frontier province of Assam. Manipur and Tripura were "princely states"—also known as "native states"—and the resident British political officers or agents of these states answered to the governor of Assam. Sikkim was juridically independent but under British paramountcy. It became an independent country in 1947 but was annexed by India in 1975. In 2001 it was made a member of the North Eastern Council—a statutory advisory body that includes member states of the region—and thus formally a part of Northeast India.

The imperialist par excellence George Nathaniel Curzon had famously described the frontier of the British Empire as three-fold. It had an administrative border, a frontier of active protection, and an outer or advanced strategic frontier.² Today's Northeast India includes territories that in colonial times were located in all three zones of Curzon's imperial frontier. It includes what legal historian Lauren Benton calls "semiautonomous spaces that were legally and politically differentiated" as well as "more closely controlled colonial territories."³ Among spaces of the former type there are even some "frontier tracts" that were "un-administered, if not unexplored" during British colonial times. They "existed primarily in maps" at the time of decolonization.⁴ The Naga Hills district was divided into administered, unadministered, and loosely administered segments. The boundary of the administered area had gradually moved eastward from the plains of Assam.⁵ In fact, the British conquest of these areas was incomplete even at the end of Raj, and "the British handed over to India and Burma a tract of hill country with inhabitants that had never been administered and controlled by the imperial power."⁶ This tract of unadministered land, though, was claimed as British territory. The Inner Line separated the Naga Hills District—an "excluded" area—from the "settled" districts of Assam. This line remains in effect till this day and it still regulates the entry of all nonresidents—including Indian citizens—into the state. Interestingly enough, many parts of Northeast India that were "settled" in colonial times now aspire to having the Inner Line extended to their states. In this migration-intense frontier region, the contemporary appeal of this colonial institution lies in the fact that Indian citizens, as well as foreigners, require permits to enter these states and thus can be excluded from political claim making. In December 2019 in response to country-wide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which puts non-Muslim unauthorized immigrants from three South Asian countries including Bangladesh on a path to citizenship, the Indian government agreed to extend the Inner Line regime to Dimapur—Nagaland's only "plains district" and its commercial hub—and to the state of Manipur, making these areas effectively exempt from the effects of this law. First drawn in 1873, the Inner Line was originally an attempt to fence off Assam's fledgling tea plantations that were frequently attacked by "tribesmen" protesting their dispossession. In the words of historian Bodhisatvva Kar, the Inner Line was meant to "demarcate 'the hills' from 'the plains,' the nomadic from the sedentary, the jungle from the arable—in short, 'the tribal areas' from 'Assam proper.'" But it was not a fixed and rigid line—it was "a revisable, mobile and pliant boundary" that was repeatedly redrawn "in order to variously accommodate the expansive compulsions of plantation capital, the recognition of imperfection in survey maps, the security anxiety of the state and the adaptive practices of internally differentiated local communities."⁷ In effect, land was repeatedly transferred "between administration and un-administration."⁸

India's long and protracted encounter with the Naga struggle for political independence—now...