On a Monday morning, I leave Guwahati for Shillong, the familiar road bending into green hills. I have been making this commute for 15 years, weekends in Guwahati, the working week in Shillong. The journey is barely three hours, but it crosses more than a geographical border. My Assam-coded number plate—“AS” in white on black—is the first thing anyone sees before they see me. In Assam, it’s a bureaucratic identity marker. In Meghalaya, it’s something else entirely: sometimes curiosity, sometimes caution, occasionally hostility.
“I know Shillong better than some of my friends in Guwahati,” I remind myself. But the number plate tells another story, one I cannot rewrite without changing my registration papers.
The First Glance Test
At Jorabat, the border post between Assam and Meghalaya, vehicles queue in uneven lines. A police officer scans each windshield, eyes pausing on the registration code.
“If it’s ML (Meghalaya), I might just wave them through,” a traffic constable in Ri-Bhoi district tells me, speaking on condition of anonymity. “With AS, we may ask a few more questions. It’s not about discrimination, sometimes it’s for safety, sometimes because of instructions from above during sensitive periods.”
Private vehicles, he insists, are rarely harassed. Yet even a “few more questions” is enough to remind a driver that the number plate is also a passport, one that can be questioned at will.
Everyday Readings of Outsiderness
The gaze works both ways. A friend from Shillong tells me that driving his ML-registered car into Guwahati can feel just as loaded. “They look at you twice, especially if you stop in certain markets,” he says. “You get questions locals don’t get. It’s subtle, but you feel it.”
These moments are rarely hostile in an overt way. But they are quiet reminders that mobility in the Northeast is not just about roads, it is about routes of perception.
Taxi Union Tensions
Commercial transport sharpens the divide. Shillong’s taxi unions have long complained about Assam-registered vehicles picking up passengers within Meghalaya.
“Considering the limited work opportunities here, if cars from Assam start operating inside, it hurts livelihoods,” says a union member.
The sentiment is mirrored across the border. In Guwahati’s Beltola market, dozens of Meghalaya-registered vans arrive daily with vegetables and flowers. “We welcome them,” a vendor tells me, “but when it comes to local transport business, it’s different. Competition is tough.”
The number plate becomes shorthand for economic competition, masking deeper structural issues, chief among them the absence of a coordinated transport policy between Northeast states.
From Number Plates to Identity Politics
Vehicle registration codes are meant to be administrative details. But in a region where the insider–outsider debate remains politically charged, they become instant markers of belonging or its absence.
Meghalaya does not have an Inner Line Permit (ILP) like Nagaland, Mizoram, or Arunachal Pradesh, but civil society groups continue to demand one. An AS plate entering Shillong is not just a car; it is, to some, a symbol of migration, demographic change, and sometimes even threat.
In Assam, the anxieties point in other directions—fear of demographic shifts due to cross-border migration from Bangladesh, which in turn colours perceptions of “outsiders” from neighbouring states in certain districts.
Checkpoint Conversations and Selective Scrutiny
During tense political moments, scrutiny sharpens. In 2019, during the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests, both Assam and Meghalaya saw spikes in vehicle checks. I remember driving to a wedding in Shillong during that period. At the border, officers glanced at my AS plate and asked if I was attending a political rally. I had to produce the wedding invitation card before they waved me through.
The “I Am One of You” Problem
Over the years, I have told friends in Shillong, “I am one of you.” I have celebrated Christmas here, bought books from Laitumkhrah’s street stalls, and eaten more than my share of Jadoh.
But my number plate refuses to cooperate.
Belonging in the Northeast is not always about shared landscapes or intertwined histories. It is about how the state apparatus and community perception lock onto visible symbols. The irony is that these borders are relatively new—drawn by administrative decisions after Independence. Long before that, communities, markets, and marriages flowed freely across them.
Economics Under the Hood
For many, the number plate is less about ethnicity than economics. Commercial operators see it as a proxy for who gets access to local markets. Remove the economic angle, and most people stop caring.
Yet livelihoods are tied to mobility. Cross-border trade in vegetables, betel nut, and timber happens daily, blurring the same lines that politics works to harden. But when disputes arise, the number plate is often the first identity to be politicised.
When Trouble Starts
A Shillong taxi driver puts it bluntly: “If trouble starts, people will see your plate before they see your face.” History bears this out. In 2018, after the Punjabi Lane clashes in Shillong, Assam-registered tourist vehicles and trucks were reportedly targeted in certain areas. In 2019, Meghalaya-registered vehicles faced similar treatment in Assam’s border districts after an inter-state dispute. These flashpoints reveal the fragility of cross-border belonging, how quickly neighbourliness can flip into suspicion.
Reading the Road Differently
Over time, I have learned to notice the choreography of border travel:
Drivers refuelling at “neutral” stations, where their plate might draw less attention.
Friends from Meghalaya agreeing to carpool in my AS vehicle only if they know the destination neighbourhood.
A subtle slowing down before a checkpoint, not for safety, but to gauge the mood of the officers on duty.
Imagining a Different Future
What would it take for an AS plate in Shillong, or an ML plate in Guwahati, to mean nothing more than “someone from a neighbouring state”? Perhaps it begins with coordinated transport policies, equitable market access, and confidence-building measures between communities. But more deeply, it would require shifting the politics of identity, accepting that belonging can be multiple, that a person can be of one place and still be “one of you” in another.
Until then, the politics of belonging will ride quietly alongside us, painted in black on white, fixed to the front and back of our cars, asking silent questions before we even roll down the window.
The other day at the Nongpoh crossing, I mistakenly stopped my vehicle on the right, blocking another car from making a U-turn. A policeman approached, asked me politely to move left, and before letting me go, added with a half-smile, “Can you do this in Assam?”
It was a small moment, half in jest, half in truth—a reminder that in the Northeast, even a parking correction can be a lesson in borderlines.
Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of EastMojo on this or any other issue. The author teaches media studies at EFL University, Shillong Campus.
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