Mizoram

Total Area:-21,087 sqkm Population:-3.32 Million

As you head south from the Assam Valley into the hills of Mizoram, "the Land of the Highlanders", the change is instantaneous - from green paddy fields and tea estates to forests and bamboo-covered hills. Despite the difficult terrain, Mizoram is a gentle pastoral land, and the Mizos a friendly and welcoming people. Whitewashed Christian churches dot the landscape, making the region feel more like Central America than a state squeezed between Burma (Myanmar)and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.

Mizoram's two main species of bamboo flower every fifty years (one 18 years after the other), attracting hordes of rats and boosting their fertility rate fourfold. The rats devour crops in the fields, leaving famine in their wake. The first time this happened after Independence, in 1959, unpreparedness and apparent callousness on the part of Delhi and Assam led Laldenga, a clerk on the District Council, to found the Mizo Famine Front (MFF). Set up at first simply to fight the famine, it gradually transformed into the Mizo National Front (MNF), a guerrilla group fighting for Independent Mizoram. The government's heavy-handed response in 1967, rounding up Mizos from their homes into guarded villages under curfew, not only boosted support for the MNF, but also wiped out the traditional Mizo way of life at a stroke. Bangladeshi independence was a bitter blow to the MNF, who relied on Pakistan support, and moderates on both sides eventually brought them to the negotiating table, where statehood was granted in 1986 in return for an end to the armed national liberation struggle. Laldenga became chief minister of the new state, but his administration proved rather a damp squib, and he lost to Congress in the following elections. The MNF have been in peaceful opposition ever since. A few diehards tried to continue the armed struggle, but without their leader, and with no popular support, they did not last for long. For the last few years, Mizoram has been at peace. It is the land where revolution was killed by the colonialist India.