The number of people displaced by ethnic violence in Assam since July 20 is about to cross the 5-lakh mark, making this India’s largest internal migration, comparable to the cross-border influx during Partition or the Bangladesh War. Thousands of people from the Northeast who migrated to mainland cities, especially Bangalore, have fled in panic to their home states. This speaks of colossal callousness within the mainstream towards a region that every government and every national party claims belongs irrevocably to India, even more integrally and organically than Jammu and Kashmir. Few in mainland India comprehend the absurdity of claiming such territorial ownership when they exhort the Northeast’s people to become “confident citizens†of the nation while minimising the injustices, violence and bloodshed heaped upon them, not least through draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives impunity for outright murder of anyone merely suspected of intention to infringe a routine prohibitory order.