North-east India has been experiencing severe internal displacement since it entered into the postcolonial phase over the past five decades. It also received a steady flow of refugees from neighbouring East Pakistan/Bangladesh, Tibet and Myanmar, fleeing political, social, economic, ideological and environmental persecution. In recent years, however, another problem that has been engaging the attention of social scientists and policy analysts is that of internal displacement. […] For us: ‘Internally displaced persons are persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or leave their homes or place of habitual residence, in particular, as a result of, or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalised violence, violation of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognised state border’. […] Society in Assam has historically been multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-caste, multi-class and multi-lingual in composition wherein the Asamiyas have constituted the majority national group. Sociologically speaking, Assam's society has been extraordinarily plural in its composition and highly uneven in structure.

Here, we conceptualize the north-east/Assam as a periphery within a larger periphery (India) in the global context. Its peripheral location and its resultant underdevelopment and distorted political response to underdevelopments have made the society in Assam perpetually vulnerable to various kinds of violence, conflict and displacement.