Except Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya, all the five states in the northeast are part of the Inner Line Permit (ILP) system, where people from mainland India would not be allowed to enter without permission. ILP is known as mini-visa which scrutinises the entry and stay of Indians in these states.
In Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, the system is in full force while in Sikkim, which shares border with West Bengal, the system is operating only in the northern part. Manipur is the new state to adopt the ILP as the state had been demanding it for the last five decades. The intense negotiation between Chief Minister N. Biren Singh and Union Home Minister Amit Shah made it possible.
"It's not a win for me, but a win for the state. People have been fighting for long," said the chief minister.
The ILP is aimed at protecting the states from outsider influence. Forget about buying properties, anybody who would like to enter these states would have to take permission from at least a district commissioner rank officer.
In Nagaland, the ILP was earlier confined only to the hill districts. But on Tuesday, the state government issued a circular covering the entire state under the ILP system. It includes the commercial capital of the state, Dimapur, which had been exempted from ILP earlier as people from all over India do business there. Dimapur is bordering Assam.
The state government issued the order a day after the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha.
It said, “Every non-indigenous person settled and entering the district of Dimapur which was hitherto not covered under the inner line shall be required to obtain the Inner Line Permit in the same manner as applicable in other part of Nagaland.”
The government justified its act saying Nagaland is a part of the tribal belt under the Land Revenue Act.
The business in the entire Nagaland belt is controlled by people from West Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam. As a result of that, Dimapur is called the mini-India of northeast. The controversy on the Citizenship Bill prompted the Nagaland government, where BJP is the major constituent and has the deputy chief minister, to take the emergency decision. However, people who entered Dimapur before 1979 and have been continuously living in the district would be exempted from the ILP.
The most surprising element is that the Meghalaya government has also decided to move towards that direction with Chief Minister Conrad Sangma taking a decision to make visitors of Meghalaya inform the government about their stay limit in the state. A bill has been passed in Meghalaya Assembly in this regard, but Governor Tathagata Roy is yet to sign the bill.
Sangma said, “I hope the governor would sign the bill immediately. I leave it to his merit.”
Roy, however, has refused to say anything on it. But there are many who feel the decision is the first step towards bringing the ILP in Meghalaya.
As tension mounts in Tripura and parts of Assam, there would be fresh demands for ILP in those areas as the Union government has decided to exempt ILP and Schedule 6 areas from the ambit of Citizenship Bill. As protests raged, the BJP government in Tripura has suspended Internet and messaging service, while in Assam, the state government slowed it down considerably.
The tribals of the hilly areas of Tripura are demanding ILP across the state as the state had received a lot of Hindu refugees from Bangladesh after partition and after the 1971 war.
All these happened after the Union government withdrew special status of Jammu and Kashmir and bifurcated the state. The Modi government has taken a completely different approach towards the northeastern states.
