The June 2026 Assam–Nagaland tripartite MoU on mineral exploration and the concurrent AFSPA withdrawal signal a new paradigm in India's Northeast policy. Discuss.

AFSPA, 1958 lets the government notify "disturbed areas" and gives armed forces sweeping powers of arrest and search [1]. Its retreat alongside the June 2026 Assam–Nagaland mineral-oil MoU [2] marks a shift from coercive containment to development-led, negotiated engagement.

From security-first to development-led policy

• The tripartite MoU (Centre–Assam–Nagaland) facilitates mineral oil operations in the disputed boundary belt, with extraction potential projected to rise more than tenfold from current levels [2].
• Resource development, not garrisoning, becomes the stabilising instrument — dovetailing with the Act East Policy, which treats the region as India's gateway to ASEAN.

Normalisation of the legal order

• Disturbed-area coverage has been pruned incrementally: from April 2023 AFSPA applied to only eight districts of Assam, and notification stood withdrawn from 19 police stations across seven Manipur districts [3].
• This continues full withdrawal from Tripura (2015) and Meghalaya (2018) [4], shrinking reliance on the Section 6 bar on prosecution without central sanction — AFSPA's core accountability criticism [1].

A cooperative-federal method

• The Centre acted as facilitator, not adjudicator, converting a decades-old inter-State boundary dispute into a revenue-sharing arrangement [2].
• It builds on sustained peace-accord diplomacy with insurgent and ethnic groups in the region [5], substituting negotiation for suppression.

Where the paradigm is still untested

• Manipur's ethnic violence shows security gains are reversible; the Naga political settlement remains incomplete.
• Rollback demands state police and intelligence capacity-building, plus redressal for past excesses, or a vacuum may follow.

The MoU and AFSPA's retreat together reframe the Northeast from a security frontier to a development frontier, with cooperative federalism as the method. Sustaining it requires sequencing withdrawal with institutional capacity and inclusive resource-sharing, so that peace rests on consent rather than exception — realising the Article 355 duty in its protective, not punitive, spirit.