There is a map of India that hangs in every government school. It shows the country as one unbroken landmass – a bold, saffron-orange shape with clean borders and neat state lines. Look to the far right, past the chicken-neck corridor of Siliguri, and you will find a cluster of small states pressed together like an afterthought. That, in a single image, is how Delhi has always seen the Northeast.
Not as a living, breathing mosaic of over 200 distinct tribal communities, dozens of languages, centuries-old customary laws, and ecosystems unlike anywhere else on the subcontinent but as a peripheral zone to be administered, contained, and occasionally remembered during election season.
The result? Decades of policy failure so consistent, so unbroken, it can no longer be called negligence. It must be called structural.
A Government That Speaks One Language in a Region of Many
India’s federal governance model was designed – however imperfectly -to accommodate diversity. And yet, when it comes to the Northeast, the Centre has repeatedly reached for the same blunt instrument: centrally designed schemes, uniformly applied, with no regard for local context.
Take the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), India’s rural road connectivity programme. On paper, it promises all-weather roads to remote villages. In practice, in states like Arunachal Pradesh where villages sit atop ridgelines, separated by gorges, and connected through generations of forest trail knowledge -centrally mandated road specifications have led to projects that either collapse in monsoon or devastate ecologically fragile hillsides. The scheme was not wrong. It was simply not designed for here.
Or consider the National Food Security Act, which distributes subsidised grain under PDS. In large parts of Nagaland, Meghalaya, and Mizoram, rice from Bengal or Andhra Pradesh sits rotting in godowns while local populations prefer indigenous grain varieties better suited to their diet, altitude, and tradition. But there is no provision for local procurement. The template does not allow it.
This is not an accident of poor implementation. This is the ideology of uniformity the dangerous belief that what works for Uttar Pradesh must work for Manipur.
The AFSPA Wound That Never Closes
No conversation about Delhi’s relationship with the Northeast is complete without addressing the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 – a colonial-era legislation that grants military personnel near-total immunity for operations in “disturbed areas.”
For over six decades, large portions of the Northeast have lived under this law. What it has produced is not peace. It has produced a generation of people who have learned to fear the uniform of their own country.
The Extrajudicial Execution Victim Families Association of Manipur (EEVFAM) documented over 1,500 alleged fake encounter killings in the state between 1979 and 2012. The Supreme Court of India, in its landmark 2016 ruling, acknowledged that the Army and paramilitary forces cannot claim immunity for killings that may constitute crimes. And yet, AFSPA remains. Prosecutions remain elusive. Families remain without justice.
Irom Sharmila fasted for 16 continuous years demanding its repeal. Delhi did not blink. If a woman starving herself for over a decade cannot move the needle on a policy conversation, what does that tell us about how much the Centre values Northeastern lives?
Tribal Autonomy on Paper, Bureaucratic Chokehold in Practice
The Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution is one of the most remarkable pieces of governance architecture in the world — a framework that gives Autonomous District Councils (ADCs) the power to legislate on land, forests, and customary law for tribal communities. It was a genuine attempt to honour indigenous self-governance.
Except the Centre has spent seven decades systematically hollowing it out.
ADCs in Meghalaya, Assam, and Tripura operate with chronically underfunded mandates. Their legislative powers are routinely overridden by state governments acting on Central directives. Forest rights recognized under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 are denied to communities that have stewarded those forests for generations — because the verification process requires documents that no tribal elder ever needed and no one ever told them to collect.
The autonomous councils exist. The autonomy does not.
“Act East” But Who Benefits?
The government’s Act East Policy – the successor to the Look East Policy – presents the Northeast as India’s gateway to Southeast Asia. Highways. Trade corridors. Connectivity infrastructure. It sounds visionary.
But ask a Naga farmer in Mon district, or a Mizo weaver in Champhai, who exactly is being connected to what. The infrastructure being built serves national trade interests and corporate logistics chains, not the livelihoods of local communities who are often displaced without adequate resettlement to make way for the very roads and dams that are supposed to “develop” them.
Hydropower projects in Arunachal Pradesh – over 160 planned or under construction – have been pushed without meaningful Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) from the communities downstream. Rivers that are not just water sources but sacred, living presences in indigenous cosmology are being dammed for electricity that will largely power cities in the plains.
Development, when it arrives on someone else’s terms, is just another word for dispossession.
What Genuine Federalism Would Look Like
This is not a call for separatism. It is a call for honesty.
Genuine federalism – the kind the Northeast deserves – would mean allowing states to adapt central schemes to local realities, not just implement them as received. It would mean fully funding and empowering Autonomous District Councils, not treating them as ceremonial. It would mean repealing AFSPA and building peace through political negotiation, not military occupation. It would mean designing development projects with communities, not for them.
Most of all, it would mean Delhi learning to listen -to the Bodo farmer, the Meitei human rights activist, the Khasi matriarch, the Adi hunter – before it legislates for them.
The Northeast is not a problem to be solved. It is a civilization to be respected.
Until Delhi understands that distinction, the map on that schoolroom wall will remain exactly what it has always been: a lie told in saffron ink.
