State Day is a public holiday in the Indian state of Mizoram on February 20th each year. This regional holiday commemorates the day in 1987 when Mizoram gained its statehood. Mizoram is a state in north-eastern India. It shares a border with Bangladesh and Myanmar.
The name is derived from "Mizo", the collective name of the native inhabitants, and "Ram", which means land. When the British arrived in the region in the middle of the 19th century, their focus was on Assam and its famous resources such as tea and silk. However, the British faced ongoing attacks from the tribes in the neighbouring Lushai Hills, that they decided to subjugate the tribal chiefs and made what is modern-day Mizoram, part of Assam. Several of Mizorams Public Holidays honour the resistance to the British by the local tribes at this time.
Even though Mizoram always had a separate identity and culture from that of Assam, it remained part of Assam following independence from Britain in 1947. The 1960s saw an increasing call for Mizoram to end its status as a part of Assam and seek its own statehood. As a result of this pressure, Mizoram was carved out from Assam as a Union Territory in January 1972. On February 20th 1987, Mizoram became the 23rd state of India, following the Fifty-Third Amendment of the Indian Constitution in 1986.