Mahmood Ansari
(Professor in Economics, Assam University, Silchar)
Assam in northeast India is once again in the thick of electioneering—fiery speeches, hectic alliances, multiple inaugurations, and innumerable promises. Political formations have already arranged themselves into familiar camps.
In the region, the Bharatiya Janata Party works with the North Eastern Democratic Alliance (NEDA), which has been in place since 2016, and it remains the dominant regional coalition. In Assam, the Congress has helped assemble a counter-bloc, the Asom Sonmilito Morcha (ASM), by bringing together more than half a dozen regional outfits ahead of the 2026 Assembly election contest. These are the visible, immediate manoeuvres of electoral politics. Seeking the verdict of voters, with the express purpose of becoming the next ruling party in the government, is the goal.
But beneath this churn, a deeper and more consequential political idea is stirring. It is shaping up within and beyond Assam—one that seeks not merely to rearrange alliances but to rewrite the very grammar of politics in this part of the country. It is the idea of “thansa”—unity—expressed through a proposal to merge existing regional and indigenous parties into a single political organisation: a “One Northeast” party, with one constitution, one ideology, one leadership, and one flag. Pioneering political leaders of this pan-regional project are Pradyot Debbarma of Tripura, Conrad Sangma of Meghalaya, Daniel Langthasa of Assam, and the politicians from Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram.
This is not coalition politics as usual. It is a long-term gamble against civil and political fragmentation itself. It is not at all an alliance or the coalition of parties but a different kind of venture – the merger to form a single political organisation.
It originates from disillusionment. A growing section of indigenous and tribal political leaders—and the constituencies they claim to represent—argue that decades of alliances with national parties have yielded little by way of substantive empowerment. Cultural erosion continues. Land alienation persists.
The dissatisfaction driving this initiative is neither sudden nor shallow. It has long been a feeling that political decisions affecting the region are shaped elsewhere—primarily in Delhi, and closer home, in Guwahati.
From this disillusionment emerges a radical proposition: that the Northeast’s chronic political weakness stems from its structural disunity. Too many parties, too many leaders, too many competing ethnic claims—leaving the region perpetually divided and easily managed by larger national formations.
The proposed alternative rejects both splinter politics and the familiar spectacle of party-hopping politicians. Instead, it calls for institutional merger—an audacious attempt to consolidate political voice across ethnic, linguistic, and state boundaries.
As a vision, it is bold. In practice, it is fraught.
At the heart of this political articulation lies a shared emotional experience—one that cuts across communities. Central to this mobilisation is the enduring experience of racial discrimination and social marginalisation faced by the Aboriginal and Indigenous populations at the grassroots. For decades, people from this region have lived with the sting of racial profiling, cultural stereotyping, and everyday humiliation, particularly in metropolitan India. These experiences, often dismissed as anecdotal, form the affective glue binding the call for unity. These generate an aspiration for a politics of dignity—one that insists the region must speak not in fragments, but as a collective.
This emotional register blends seamlessly with long-standing anxieties around land, identity, and demographic change. The rhetoric of “outsiders”—from mainland India and from across the Bangladesh border—continues to animate political mobilisation. Central to the political mobilisation is the clarion call of unity amongst the indigenous and tribal populations for the purpose of safeguarding land, language, and identity against the onslaught of the outsiders from the rest of India and foreigners from Bangladesh.
The promise of thansa (unity) is thus both defensive and aspiration-orientated: protection from erasure and assertion of collective worth.
The significance of this project lies not merely in its symbolic emotional appeal but also in the structural conditions. These conditions, while enabling, are also potentially constraining such unification.
The geography of the Northeast lends the project both urgency and tragedy. Connected to the Indian mainland by the narrow Siliguri Corridor—the infamous “chicken’s neck”—and bordered by multiple countries, the region has long experienced itself as distant, peripheral, and vulnerable. Physical isolation has often translated into political marginality.
The present civil and political project attempts to invert this condition. It seeks to transform remoteness into solidarity and vulnerability into bargaining power. The logic is simple: a unified political platform representing multiple states and communities could negotiate more forcefully with the Centre, challenge sub-national dominance within the region, and resist being treated as an administrative afterthought.
Whether this inversion is achievable remains an open question. And, to understand why unity has remained elusive, one must return to history.
The erstwhile larger Assam and NEFA were never constituted as a coherent political region under colonial rule. It was produced as a frontier beyond the imperial comfort zone—administered through consideration of distance, exception, and difference. The hills and the plains, the tribes and the non-tribes, the princely states and the excluded areas were grouped together for administrative convenience – an executive assemblage, not political integration.
Colonial governance relied on separation rather than synthesis. Instruments like the Inner Line Permit system and the classification of “excluded” and “partially excluded” areas beyond Assam institutionalised political isolation. These measures, designed to manage diversity and reduce administrative cost, hardened boundaries between communities. While they preserved cultural distinctiveness, they also entrenched suspicion—between hills and plains, indigenous populations and immigrants, tribe and non-tribe.
At the level of civil society, there used to be, however, a persistent demand to simplify and reduce the line system. One such demand was raised at the district official’s conference in Shillong in 1928. The demands were not met. And the result was a legacy of fragmentation that outlived colonialism.
Demographic change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries intensified these fractures. Migration into the Assam plains generated acute fears among indigenous communities—of dispossession, assimilation, and cultural extinction.
Political mobilisation emerged in response, but under severe constraints. The emergence of a shared political consciousness across ethnic and geographical lines proved difficult. The colonial state discouraged cross-ethnic unity, preferring to govern through difference. Fragmentation proliferated. Political mobilisation in this context was constrained. In such a space, only divisions existed, and that too proliferated with spans of time. Yet, unity was not absent as an aspiration.
The early twentieth century witnessed significant, if limited, attempts at collective political organisation. Plains tribes such as the Lalungs, Kacharis, Bodos, and Rajbongshis articulated shared anxieties over land and demographic displacement in districts like Goalpara and Nowgong. Organisations such as the Assam Bodo Chatra Sanmilan, the Kachari and Rajbongshi Sanmilans, and later the Assam Plain Tribal League sought to transcend narrow ethnic confines and raise a united voice.
The Assam Plain Tribal League, formed in 1933, marked a notable moment—bringing together Kachari and Rajbongshi organisations to demand land protection and political representation. These movements demanded land protection, political representation, and safeguards against cultural assimilation. Earlier cultural movements, such as the Bodo Sahitya Sabha’s agitation in the 1870s over script and language, underscored the intimate link between cultural survival and political autonomy.
Political milestones followed. The Bordoloi ministry’s 1939 land settlement policies attempted to protect tribal belts. The 1946 All Tribal Party Leaders’ Conference in Shillong demanded reservations, representation in the Constituent Assembly, and inclusion in central governance. Leaders like Bhimbor Deuri, Kalicharan Brahma, Samsonsing Ingti, and Abdul Rashid articulated a politics that combined cultural assertion with constitutional demands.
Yet these efforts failed to achieve comprehensive unity amongst the indigenous populations. Their reach was limited—geographically, socially, and politically. The deep divide amongst the peoples of hills, valleys and plains remained intact. Unity during the first half of the twentieth century endured as aspiration and sentiment, not structure. No political party created the structure of cultural autonomy and political self-governance in Assam and erstwhile territories under the North Eastern Frontier Agency in India in the northeast.
Seen in this longue durée, the present call for “One Northeast” is neither entirely new nor historically unprecedented. It rearticulates older aspirations—freedom from sub-regional domination, protection of land and identity, and resistance to central government apathy—in a new political vocabulary. What is new is the emphasis on merging parties instead of forming alliances and prioritising institutional unity over mere sentiment. The ambition is to forge unity without erasing diversity—to create concord among indigenous populations while respecting cultural plurality.
It is a challenging task to strike a balance. Whether this endeavour matures into a durable political force remains uncertain. Yet, its emergence signals something undeniable—a renewed regional consciousness, a refusal to remain perpetually fragmented, and a desire for collective dignity.
In a region long treated as a frontier rather than a partner, the idea of Thansa is an invitation—to imagine the Northeast not as a collection of margins, but as a political whole. Whether that imagination can be translated into reality is the question that now confronts both the region and its leaders.