India - Assam and India's Northeast

India's northeast is treated like a rich mother-in-law by New Delhi-hit up for its riches but never invited to dinner. Connected to the rest of India only by a thread, but exploited like a pipeline, India's northeast has been racked by a half-century of separatist insurrection, tribal wars, massacres, terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Little wonder-some 200 aboriginal groups comprise the northeast's population. Every day, someone is killed due to strife in one of the seven northeast states, at least five of which are suffering from violent insurgencies, mostly tribal-based. AIDS and drug smuggling are rampant. The states have been stripped of their oil and tea and have received little in return, spawning separatist groups like the All Tripura Tiger Force, ULFA, the Bodo Liberation Tigers and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland. However, India's "chicken neck"-as the 20-kilometer wide strip of Indian land separating Nepal and Bangladesh is called-doesn't necessarily divide the good guys and the bad guys. The Bodos have been in a slugfest with the Assamese-to protect their language and culture-and even with each other. Meanwhile, Manipur, with a 2,000-year history as a colorful kingdom with a constitution dating from 1180, is better known these days as just another deadly stop along the heroin funnel from Burma. More than 60 people were killed during a single two-week period in July 1997. Most of the killing here is related to the Naga's fight for independence (more than 1,500 people have died in Nagaland alone), the battle for control of Burma's drug smuggling routes and good ol' Hatfield and McCoy shoot-outs. Separatist guerrillas have started enforcing their own antidrug policy: narcotics users are shot in the head after three warnings. In Assam, tea plantation owners are raising a private army of 7,000-8,000 retired soldiers to guard the plantations. The 200 tea estates will also continue to pay protection money to the insurgents.