In Northeast India, cultural identities often become victims of disinformation and even portrayals as “Balkanising forces” to India’s national integrity. In recent years, this development has become a recurring tactic by the state and its affiliate media, representing Northeast cultural identities as adversarial anytime they do not conform to the state’s narrative. To the Mizo and Zo people in other states, it is a manipulation that reflects not only a disregard for their heritage but a much larger narrative war embarked on to subvert Northeast identities and cultures.
The recent accusations against Mizoram Chief Minister Pu Lalduhoma present a familiar pattern. His speech to unite and invoke cultural unity has been framed as a separatist agenda on the one hand, and he was weaponized by mainstream narratives for ammunition in showing the Mizo people as having “separatist” tendencies.
This is beyond rhetoric; this is about tacit suppression of minority identity and its control, reshaping these minorities for convenience into political tools that conform to the state’s narrative.
Tactics like these only serve to relegate these communities further onto the periphery while reinforcing their already legitimate expressions of identity into the destabilising ones—at best—that won’t allow a proper set of rightful claims to cultural pride and unity.
A Manufactured Threat: Mizo Identity in the Crosshairs
In September 2024, CM Lalduhoma spoke in Indianapolis about the shared history and identity of the Zo (Chin-Kuki-Zomi-Mizo) people across India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. He did not talk of secession but of unity—a deep-seated cultural tie that crosses borders, a result of the Northeast’s peculiar history. However, in days to come, the speech got distorted by the media narrative and political voices into a thinly veiled separatist agenda. These stories invoked “security concerns” and “foreign interference”, projecting Lalduhoma’s message as a call for secession rather than one of cultural solidarity.
The swiftness and continuity with which this narrative has taken hold indicate an organised operation, albeit at the behest of the right-wing elements, to destabilise the Northeast states in order to accomplish the goals of the ruling party.
In this, the strategy reflects what Scott calls the state’s “legibility” project—a tendency to simplify and control complex identities by reframing them in convenient binaries, such as “loyal” or “separatist.” Such an approach not only distorts the intentions of the Zo people but goes further still to paint them as adversaries in their homeland. This is a general tactic—one of the state narratives labelling expressions of cultural pride as hostile acts—that the Zo people of Manipur (Kuki-Zomi) are already putting up with.
The silence on Manipur’s Zo people: A case of neglect
The systemic neglect and active suppression of the Zo people—the Kuki-Zomi tribes of Manipur, a sister community both culturally and linguistically to the Mizos of Mizoram—is a story that has been running for decades.
In the brutal and continuing ethnic violence that has shaken Manipur since May 2023, more than 60,000 people were displaced, hundreds of villages burnt, and about 250 churches were torched throughout the state—sadly, the most significant number of church burnings in the history of India.
Both military interventions and state inactions have kept the Kuki-Zomi people, mostly Christians, sandwiched between military interventions and state inaction.
This negligence, as a pattern, plays the role of keeping the Zo people in a marginal and politically disempowered position, remaining just a “manageable group”.
It silences them by not responding to their needs, pushing them to the periphery. Any assertion of identity, resistance, or call for justice by the Zo people gets branded as “anti-national” or “secessionist”, stoking not just ‘nationalist anxieties’ in the ‘mainland’, but more so, the fears of ‘angering/displeasing’ the centre among the ‘peripheral’ Zo people.
This is a case of state-mediated cultural ‘bullying’, all the while keeping up appearances of moral righteousness, and yet denying any duty of care to them and systematically inter their voices.
The Narrative war against Northeast identities
Such disinformation follows a pattern of vilification, misrepresentation, and silencing. The case of Lalduhoma’s speech and its reception by mainstream and social media is a case in point. National media launched a particular portrayal of his words as a “call for a Christian nation…in the likes of East Timor”.
In addition, his call for cultural unity was framed as an act of religious and political insubordination. Such a tactic, which corners cultural pride as a separatist threat, reflects the long history of suppressing ‘peripheral’ Northeast voices whenever they have asserted themselves.
By branding the Mizo and Zo peoples as “separatists,” such state media reframe legitimate claims of cultural recognition into a threat to national security. This then is used to build up public opinion in favour of increased militarization, control and surveillance, as opposed to making legitimate attempts to understand.
This technique of criminalising the grievances of ‘peripheral people’ fits into a broader narrative strategy – framing their demands for justice as agitation, and enabling the state to justify its failure to address their concerns.
Based on character assassination and suppression, this story essentially allows the state to retain its stranglehold in the Northeast without an honest attempt to address the core issues related to marginalisation and discrimination.
The cost of ignoring marginalized voices
The impact of this misinformation operation ripples out into larger circles in the entire Northeast. For instance, in ascribing a threat to Zo cultural assertion, the state overtly conveys that Northeastern identities are not particularly valuable, except as ‘exotic’ ‘tribes’ that can be turned into fetishized commodities.
Any sort of cultural assertion beyond the ‘exoticized’ fetish of the mainland imagination is flung down a spiral of mistrust and resentment, obscuring the real issues of instability arising out of neglect and repression, and the unwillingness for accommodative reforms.
These are not passive narratives but active tools of domination. They mould public perception, distort policy responses, and rationalise repressive interventions. The Northeast, particularly with its legacy of resistance against state hegemony, has been consistently subjected to this sort of discursive manipulation.
Every time the state rephrases such a cry for cultural identity as separatism, it takes away that much more from the legitimacy of the voices of these communities to be able to raise their demands without retribution.
Towards a Just Representation of Northeast Identities
The story of the Northeast communities needs to be understood as what James Scott calls ‘weapons of the weak’ – subtle yet powerful forms of resistance employed by subaltern groups to voice frustration and challenge state control.
Through solidarity and self-advocacy, the Mizo and their allies are well-positioned to evoke their rich cultural heritage while resisting the reduction of their culture and ways of life to commodity fetishism.
By cultivating narratives that reflect local realities, the Mizos, and the Zo people at large collectively resist being framed as inherently destabilising. This is not a mere act of denying mischaracterizations but a promise to preserve the region’s unique history and vibrant culture.
These communities are not separatists but citizens for whom their demands for recognition and respect are no more than what the Indian Constitution promises them. Yet again, the state’s response distorts these aspirations into a threat, deepening the divides it claims to bridge.
To be genuinely inclusive, India needs to accept the Northeast as part of its cultural mosaic, not a ‘tribal’ problem to be managed, with suppression, increased surveillance and control – something that the colonial British did throughout their reign – something that the Indian National Movement fought against.
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