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When not just goods, but fear too piles

A report from NH39, India’s most unsafe highway where insurgent groups call the shots

Photographs by Ozzie Hoppe

By no stretch of imagination is Dimapur, the commercial hub of Nagaland, a pleasant place to live in. On a damp Sunday morning, it feels like I have walked into a tropical war zone — there is a strange uneasiness in the air and the roads have been chiselled away by passing trucks and frequent downpours into an uneven slush of concrete and mud: a consequence of frictional forces and persistent civic indifference.