The Cauldron of Conflict Politics of Peace, Governance and Development in India’s North East

In a rear-view mirror, the colonial construction of the idea of the ‘North Eastern Frontier’ was reshaped by partition as a political reality in the form of ‘North East India’ to be integrated with the Nation State. The terra incognita, as the frontier was for the British colonialism in the late eighteenth century, was to be cognized by the leadership of the ‘mainstream nationalist discourse’ at the time of working out a suitable constitutional technology required for political integration of the troubled periphery, some parts of which had already witnessed parallel (peripheral) nationalist discourse and were preparing for celebrating independence, not as constituent political units of independent India. Enigma of the Nation State was the geo-political criticality of the region shaped by partition locating it in a milieu of not-so-favourable, if not quite hostile, international politics.