Nagaland Director General of Police (Prisons, Home Guards and Civil Defence) Rupin Sarma announcing that 30 per cent of the state’s population consumes drugs should not come as a surprise to anyone. Nor should the fact that personnel of the Assam Police recover hundreds of crores of rupees worth of drugs every year. Just in the way no one ought to be surprised that there are peddlers from Assam now operating in places as distant as Ernakulam in Kerala.

According to a Times of India report dated Kochi November 4, 2022, “after a lull” there has been an increase in the smuggling of heroin from Assam into the state with the arrest of four immigrant labourers carrying the narcotic by the Kothamangalam Excise department.
What seems to go unnoticed, all the while, is the fact that the international border the Northeastern states without various countries are porous, especially when it comes to Bangladesh and Myanmar, and that is where the drugs come in from. That is exactly the route that the illegal arms trade took as militant outfits in Myanmar got into peace processes with that government. A lot of the drugs come in from across that border. That is also the route, from neighbouring Bangladesh, that illegal migrants take, creating unrest in the Northeast and now the country as the demand for an NRC and related issues gain ground in Bharat.
Not every community in the Northeast is rootless. Illegal migrants who come across the border are and they are footloose. That is the floating population that is now setting up ghettoes in cities and towns across the country, with a finger in just about everything illegal, from logging to gun running to drug peddling.
Trouble though is that there is a section of people and the media within the country that will shield these people as they go about doing what they do–for votes or simply to prove that they are better than the rest of the country, defining themselves, in however convoluted a way, as ‘secular’. At risk is the country.