Shared roots, divided borders: The Mising question in Arunachal Pradesh

By Citan Pertin 

The recent controversy surrounding the application of the Inner Line Permit (ILP) system to the Mising community in Arunachal Pradesh has exposed a troubling contradiction at the heart of contemporary politics in Northeast India. In the name of protecting indigenous identity, certain sections of the ongoing ILP movement have begun treating the Mising people as outsiders to a region with which they share centuries of historical, cultural, and ancestral ties. 

What is being framed as a matter of legal enforcement is increasingly becoming a crisis of historical memory and ethnic alienation.

No serious observer can deny that Arunachal Pradesh has genuine concerns regarding demographic pressure, illegal migration, administrative corruption, and the weak implementation of the ILP system. Indigenous communities in the state have every reason to defend their land, culture, and political future. Across the Northeast, many native populations have witnessed how unchecked migration and state negligence can gradually erode local autonomy and identity. In this context, the ILP has become far more than a permit mechanism; it is widely viewed as a protective shield safeguarding the state's fragile demographic balance.

Yet the attempt to extend these anxieties indiscriminately to the Mising community represents a profound historical and moral error.

The Misings are not a recently arrived population with no connection to Arunachal Pradesh. They are part of the broader Tani ethnolinguistic world that stretches across the hills and valleys of the eastern Himalayas. Long before modern state boundaries divided Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, the ancestors of the Mising people moved through these landscapes as part of a shared cultural geography. Their oral traditions, linguistic roots, clan structures, and customary practices remain deeply connected to Tani groups such as the Adi, Galo, Nyishi, Tagin, and Apatani communities.

To suddenly classify such a people as "outsiders" simply because colonial and postcolonial administrations drew administrative boundaries between the hills and the plains is both intellectually shallow and historically dishonest.

The present controversy cannot be separated from the long and uneasy relationship between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Since Arunachal Pradesh emerged from the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), relations between the two states have often been shaped by territorial disputes, administrative tensions, and demographic anxieties. Border conflicts, disagreements over jurisdiction, and fears of encroachment have repeatedly generated suspicion between the hills and the plains. In this atmosphere, Assam has increasingly come to symbolize demographic pressure in the imagination of many Arunachalis.

Unfortunately, the Mising community now risks becoming trapped within this larger political hostility despite occupying a fundamentally different historical position.

The problem with the current discourse is that it collapses all non-APST populations into a single category of potential threat. Such thinking may appear administratively convenient, but it ignores the deeply layered realities of Northeast India. Ethnic communities in the region cannot be understood solely through the rigid language of state-issued documents and constitutional classifications. The modern borders between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh are relatively recent political constructions. The social and historical relationships between communities, however, are far older.

The Misings did not emerge from outside the Northeast to settle opportunistically in Arunachal Pradesh. Their movement between the hills and plains predates the Indian nation-state itself. To subject them to the same rhetoric often directed at illegal migrants or exploitative outsiders is therefore both inappropriate and dangerous.

More importantly, such narratives risk damaging the very foundations of inter-community solidarity in the Northeast. The Tani world has historically been bound together through kinship, migration, trade, oral traditions, and cultural exchange. If communities sharing ancestral roots begin treating one another primarily through bureaucratic categories of "insider" and "outsider," the region may gradually lose the shared civilizational bonds that once distinguished it from the more rigid identity politics seen elsewhere in India.

There is also a troubling irony in the present movement. Many groups advocating strict ILP protections justify their position by invoking indigeneity, historical belonging, and ancestral rights. Yet when the Mising community invokes those same principles—shared ancestry, historical migration, and indigenous connections to the region—their claims are often dismissed because they fall outside Arunachal Pradesh's current constitutional framework.

This exposes the selective nature of the debate. History is accepted when it strengthens one's own identity, but rejected when it complicates narrow political definitions.

None of this means that Arunachal Pradesh should abandon the ILP system or weaken protections for indigenous communities. Concerns regarding demographic vulnerability remain real. Arunachal Pradesh is one of India's most sparsely populated tribal states, and fears of marginalization cannot simply be dismissed as paranoia. However, protecting indigenous rights should not require the erasure of historical relationships between neighbouring peoples.

The issue demands political maturity rather than emotional reaction. A distinction must be made between communities with deep historical and cultural ties to the region and forms of migration that genuinely threaten demographic balance or exploit administrative loopholes. Failing to recognize this distinction risks transforming the ILP from a mechanism of protection into an instrument of alienation.

At its core, the controversy surrounding the Mising community reveals a deeper crisis unfolding across Northeast India: the gradual replacement of historical memory with defensive legalism. Communities that once recognized one another through kinship and shared heritage are increasingly being forced to negotiate belonging through paperwork, permits, and territorial suspicion.

If this trend continues unchecked, the Northeast may eventually fragment not only politically but also psychologically—divided by borders that are administrative in origin yet increasingly treated as civilizational truths.

The question, therefore, is not whether Arunachal Pradesh has the right to protect itself. It unquestionably does. The real question is whether, in the process of defending indigenous identity, the region is beginning to forget the difference between a stranger and a relative.