ABSTRACT
The colonial encounter had an overwhelming impact on the 'identity consciousness' among the Zo/Mizo people or the Zo hnahthlak. A quick re-capitulation of colonial history would enable the reader to have a bird's eye view of the evolution of identity politics in and around present-day Mizoram, and construe the contested nature of identity politics in the public sphere among the Zo hnahthlak. The debate on generic 'Mizo' versus phonetic 'Zomi' identity forms a complex web of the interlayered process of identity building or identity formation among the tribes in Mizoram. Through such gossip/chatting and group interaction, the raw material for 'Zomi' Zo hnahthlak re-unification gets proliferated in the virtual space towards 'a community-in-building'. One of the most useful ways of evaluating the prospects of the Internet to function as a public sphere, given its inherent limitations, comes from Mark Poster’s Cyber-democracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere.
