- Saturday, April 05, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE ongoing border dispute between the two northeastern states of India – Assam and Mizoram – which erupted into deadly violence last week resulting in the death of six policemen from Assam and injuries to dozens of people, has brought into the headlines the several border disputes that exist between various states of India.
Last week, India’s minister of state for home affairs Nityanad Rai told the country’s parliament that currently, there are seven inter-state boundary disputes in India and four of them are in the northeast and all of them involve Assam. Union home minister Amit Shah has said that these boundary disputes might be resolved next year when India will celebrate its 75 years of independence.
ALSO READ: India northeast crisis: Assam, Mizoram agree to settle problem peacefully
The seven inter-state border disputes in India at the moment are those between Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, Union Territory of Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh, Assam and Nagaland, Assam and Meghalaya, Assam and Mizoram, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and Maharashtra and Karnataka.
Amid crisis with Mizoram, Assam settles dispute with Nagaland
According to experts, senior Indian police officers and commentators, the inter-state boundary disputes in the northeast have remained unresolved for several years since successive governments at the Centre did not take strong efforts to settle them, Assam’s leading daily The Sentinel said in a report on Monday (2).
What is the Assam-Mizoram issue all about?
A number of states in northeast India – barring the former princely states of Tripura and Manipur and the Himalayan state of Sikkim – were carved out of Assam after India gained independence in August 1947.
As the new states of Mizoram, Meghalaya and Nagaland came up, district boundaries changed into inter-state borders and that gave rise to the discontent among the new states. The Centre left it to the states to agree on the boundaries and that did not help the matter.
“Studying all the relevant aspects, traditional and ethnic facets, the central government must sit with the disputing northeastern states and all stakeholders to resolve the boundary disputes at the earliest,” political commentator Sushanta Talukdar was quoted as saying by The Sentinel on the northeast boundary issue.
Yashovardhan Azad, former special director, Intelligence Bureau, India’s domestic intelligence agency, said: “I can only say that never can firing be allowed in situations like this, this would certainly call for a judicial enquiry because this isn’t allowed and I’ve never seen something like it.”
India’s north-east a critical region as it has a number of international borders near it, including the one with China, one of India’s biggest rivals.
