After the Mizo National Front declared independence in March 1966 and seized Aizawl, the Indian Air Force strafed and bombed the town in the only instance of India using air power on its own territory, an action the government did not publicly acknowledge for decades. The Union Cabinet approved a regrouping scheme in December 1966, and from 1967 the army moved villagers out of their settlements, often burning the abandoned houses and granaries, into guarded roadside camps under curfew and rationing. Records show 516 of 764 villages emptied and about 236,000 people relocated, close to four-fifths of the rural population; jhum cultivation cycles were broken, and villages were never restored to their former sites. Similar grouping had been used in Nagaland from the late 1950s. The Mizo insurgency ended with the 1986 accord and Mizoram's statehood; the grouping years remain central to Mizo public memory and to arguments about the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which remains in force in parts of the north-east.
The Indian Army regrouped the rural population of the Mizo Hills into guarded settlements to cut off the Mizo National Front
The 1971 Indian census counted 332,390 people in the Mizo district, the overwhelming majority rural and living in dispersed hill villages. Grouping also took place in Nagaland, whose 1971 population was about 516,000, so the true denominator for the combined operation is larger; the Mizoram figure is used because the great bulk of the documented regrouping happened there.
No death toll was compiled. Deaths occurred in the 1966 air attacks on Aizawl and other towns, in army operations and from disease and hunger in the grouping centres, but none of these were systematically counted; the harm was principally displacement, hunger and the destruction of homes and crops.
Army operational records, later Indian official accounts and Mizo civil-society testimony document the burning of abandoned villages and the curfew and pass regime in grouping centres.
India