Enemies, Subjects and Allies in Wartime Indian Northeast

For the indigenous peoples from the borderland Indian Northeast, cases of ‘mistaken identities’ based on their race are common occurrences. The most recent and known instance of this is the ‘Oting Massacre’ of 2021. Just around Christmas, in Oting village, Nagaland, a truck carrying Naga coal miners were shot at indiscriminately by the Indian army on the pretext of a counter-insurgency operation. This incident, described by the Home Minister of India as a case of ‘mistaken identity’, resulted in the death of 14 Naga civilians. Such catastrophic failure of ‘credible intelligence’ owing to racial confusion is rendered possible because of the entrenched post/colonial architecture of racialisation intact in the region. At no other time were the global processes of racialisation more magnified than during World War II when the region became a strategically integral part of the China–Burma–India theatre. Wars dictate unambiguous demarcation of ‘enemy’ and ‘friend’, but the two superstructures were both breached and reinstated in wartime Northeast India. The specificity of the context—characterised by ongoing empire-building activities in the final years of the British empire, the rising involvement of the USA in Asia, and the production of the region as remote and existing in the interstices of India and Burma proper—evinced a whole host of complications, and race was a centrepiece of this story. This chapter will explore how the categories of ‘enemy’, ‘friend’ and ‘ally’ were imagined and re/produced. It will also explore the ways in which indigenous host communities engaged with and shaped these ideas, and how their friendship was sought out, sought after, bought and extracted.