Home Minister Amit Shah on Saturday said the interstate boundary dispute between Arunachal Pradesh and Assam would be resolved by 2023.
It must be noted that the Assembly election in Arunachal Pradesh is due in 2024.
Addressing a function at the Ramakrishna Mission School at Deomali in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tirap district, he underscored insurgency and interstate boundary disputes as the two major problems in the northeast.
“More than 60% of the disputed areas on the Assam-Meghalaya boundary has been resolved. We are optimistic that similar disputes between Arunachal Pradesh and Assam would be resolved by next year,” Mr. Shah said.
On March 29, Assam and Meghalaya had sealed a “fifty-fifty” agreement on six of the 12 dispute sectors along their 885 km boundary. Assam also has boundary disputes with Mizoram and Nagaland.
Mr. Shah said the Centre was committed to fulfilling three goals for the overall progress of the region.
“The first goal is to not only safeguard the local culture, languages, tradition but also to enrich them. The second is to make the northeast free from disputes, guns, insurgency and give its youth a platform for competing with their contemporaries beyond. The third is to ensure all the States in the northeast are on a par with the developed States elsewhere in the country,” he said., adding that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) is working on these goals.
Crediting Prime Minister Narendra Modi with solving various problems of the northeast in the last eight years, Mr. Shah said: “Modiji started finding solution to the problems here. More than 9,000 youths, who were waging a war, laid down their weapons and joined the mainstream.”
He highlighted how the BJP-led government solved the problems of bandhs and blockades in Manipur, the Bru refugee issue of Mizoram and Tripura and restored peace in large swathes of Assam by signing the Bodo peace accord.
"Youths of northeast no longer carry guns and petrol bombs. They are now carrying laptops and are launching startups. This is the path of development that the Centre has envisaged for the region," he said.
"Manipur, which was earlier known for bandhs and blockades for more than 200 days a year, is now witnessing a sea of change without any bandh during the last five years of BJP rule in the state," he said.
Mr. Shah said the insurgency in the Bodoland region of Assam was resolved through the signing of the Bodo Peace Accord.
