If you needed evidence of how much of an ‘Other’ the Northeast is to the rest of the country, the national media’s coverage of the current elections in the three states of the region is a good example. An average newspaper reader may be forgiven for thinking that the only elections that are taking place right now are in the US.

Welcome to the Northeast, a part of the country you and I call our own, yet a region remote from our consciousness. This remoteness leads to inattention or to a strange kind of attention. We like to handle remote objects with shorthand descriptions. Hence the usual stereotypes of politics in the Northeast: ethnic politics of various tribes, anti-national insurgencies, terrorism, corruption and instability. Or the romantic stereotypes of innocent tribals, victims of the nation-state and development.

Perhaps the starting point of making sense of politics in the Northeast is to recognise its internal diversity. Just as you cannot lump together Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to produce an animal called South Indian politics, you cannot put together Meghalaya, Tripura and Nagaland and talk meaningfully about Northeastern politics.

Nagaland represents one extreme of the spectrum, where over-ground electoral politics plays second fiddle to its underground counterpart. Routine issues of governance take a back seat here to the larger question of peace in a state where a significant proportion of the Naga population has neither reconciled to being Indian nor to the boundaries of Nagaland within the Indian Union.

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