One of the 29 states of India, Nagaland is located in the north-east of the country on the border with Myanmar. In the colonial period, this territory was a part of Assam with a special status of the border area. After India gained independence, the indigenous population of the Naga began to struggle for the creation of their state. An active rebel movement forced the central government to make concessions; as a result, in 1963 Nagaland eventually was recognized a state.
The titular group is the Naga people, who make up about half of the state's population. The Naga languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family; consequently, linguistically the titular group differs considerably from the majority of the country who speaks Hindi. Religiously, most of the Naga are Christians, their proportion in the state is 90%. The specificity of the titular group, however, is that Naga is poorly consolidated. Despite the kinship of languages and the commonality of cultural traditions, more than a dozen Naga tribes live in isolation from each other. Also, the Naga tribes are scattered across the province, and about half of the entire Naga population reside in the neighboring states of Assam and Manipur. At the same time, almost half of the state population consists of representatives of various small tribes, none of which exceeds 5% of the total.
Despite obtaining the status of the state, the conflict in Nagaland persists. To a large extent, the tensions are due to the weak consolidation of the Naga people. Frequent fractures are endemic to insurgent Naga movements; hence, when the government manages to reach an agreement with one group, others continue the armed struggle. The dispersed localization of the Naga also has negative consequences for interethnic relations. Radical groups demand the creation of a "big Nagaland" that would unite all the Naga, but the central government does not agree with this proposal since other people live in the state side by side to Naga.
