ABSTRACT
This chapter describes why ethnic mobilizations take on more frequently political and militant forms in the North East. It examines the significance of social, economic and cultural diversity in the North East for radical politics in the region and explains why territorial solutions to ethnic conflicts have most often resulted in more conflicts, and also sometimes worked here. It uses official and other reliable unofficial statistical data and supplements them with detailed elite interviews on the States carried out during 2015-17. India's North East comprising today eight States of the federation–Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura– remains a very diverse, ethnically speaking, strategically significant and the hotbed of varieties of ethnic radical politics. In terms of religion too, this region is especially very diverse because unlike the rest of India where Hindus are a predominant majority, in the North East, Hindus are a majority in population in only three States–Assam, Sikkim and Tripura.
