‘Successful re-grouping of Mizo villagers, a tribute to the Army,’ noted the Times of India in its report on village groupings in 1967. The backdrop of this report was the village groupings undertaken in the Mizo Hills as a part of India's counter-insurgency strategy. The grouping was undertaken under Rule 57 of the Defence of India (DoI) Rules, 1962, in the Mizo Hills. The application of the DoI Rules implied the suspension of fundamental rights that further allowed the state to hold any person without explanation. As the rule goes, it was meant to be used against enemy states or threats of external aggression. Implemented in four phases, the grouped villages covered the major parts of the Mizo Hills, except the southern district formerly known as the Chhimtuipui district. The imposition of the DoI Rules also meant that the military was given inordinate powers to undertake counter-insurgency operations.

Village groupings refer to the forcible relocation of the population into larger villages. When used in the case of counter-insurgency, the objective is to isolate civilian populations from the rebels and undertake developmental activities. The Times of India report on village groupings (1967) demonstrates this fact when it noted, ‘Hundreds of able-bodied Mizos have been employed in road-building. Other avenues of employment are also being found for artisans. Agriculturists are being given the wherewithal to adopt improved practices for raising good crops.’ It continued, ‘With better economic opportunities and perhaps better water-supply arrangements, the new villages bid fair to prosper in the years to come.’

The use of village groupings as a counter-insurgency strategy has a deeper history and legacy. Inspired by the colonial mode of control, its utility was behind its prominence in counter-insurgency policy, particularly in the post-World War II period. In the global discourse of counter-insurgency, village groupings are mostly referred to as ‘camps’, and wherever they were implemented, they remade societies and transformed them. More than an ‘exception’, village groupings were a common and normalized practice in counter-insurgency measures, whereby states continued to confine and incarcerate ‘undesirable’ populations. Furthermore, its widespread practice across the globe has made it widely popular—ranging from the ‘new villages’ in Malaya (Hack 2012), the ‘strategic hamlets’ in the Vietnam War (Cullather 2006), and ‘villagization’ in Kenya (Whittaker 2012) to ‘development poles’ in Guatemala (Grandia 2013), ‘village evacuation’ in Turkey (Jongerden 2010), and ‘village grouping’ in India (Nunthara 1989).