ABSTRACT
The subject ‘crime’ has been subsumed within the discussion on violence, unless in some specific cases mentioning criminal acts has become necessary. It may be underlined that most of the references to crime in relation to ethnicity or migratory movements in North-East India (INE) get obfuscated as politics assumes primacy over everything else. The structural link between the demand for tribal autonomy and the centre’s compulsion to pump more and more financial aid into the region took its toll, with the region becoming one of the most violent and disturbed in India. The multiplicity of ethnicity in the INE and their respective demands for more and more autonomy on the one hand and, on the other, the Indian state’s willingness to listen to them only when they take up arms has created a nexus between the insurgency, central aid, corruption and extortion syndromes, in which every party seems to have developed a stake.
