At a hilltop checkpoint in Manipur a few kilometres from the Myanmar border, the inquisitive officer known simply as Major Rocky is puzzled by the recent violence and protests in this remote corner of India but says he is determined to keep doing his job as a peacekeeper and de facto customs inspector.
“I’ve got 27 crore (Rs270m, $4.4m) of seizures in the past three or four months,” he says. “Heroin and gold coming into India, and ginseng going to Myanmar.”
There is trouble in the hills again, and it is not just the smuggling — more than 2,000km east of the Indian capital New Delhi, there has been an upsurge of separatist, ethnic and political violence in the remote north-eastern states that border Myanmar and China, undermining attempts to integrate the region into what locals call “mainland India”.