ABSTRACT
The modest and continuing gains being made by the Catalonian autonomy movement in Spain and the rather more dramatic developments in Montenegro, which in May 2006 narrowly voted in a national referendum for secession and independence from Serbia, hold promises for the separatist movements in the region. Seen in this perspective, the arguments about whether the separatist struggles — even when these become active insurgencies (till now only the Naga struggle and the resolved Mizo struggle have attained the status of active insurgencies) — can ever defeat the might of the Indian state are utterly irrelevant. The fact is that the defeat of the Indian state by the ‘armed struggles’ being waged by the various separatist groups is not even envisaged by the most belligerent of these groups. The Indian state, in this perspective, is getting more and more enfeebled, unable to resolve the larger contradictions besetting it nationally.
