Rage of the margins: Geography as key to NE

Sudheendra Kulkarni
Indian Express, January 28

For some people, geography shapes history. When geography changes, their destiny too changes — often for the worse, as can be seen in the case of the people of Assam and other Northeastern states. I had pointed out the anomaly of this region sharing only a 21 km border with the rest of India, whereas its border with Bangladesh is 1,829 km.

But take a closer look at India’s map, and another anomaly strikes you. The region, which was well-connected to the rest of undivided India, and also to South-East Asia, through the sea route before 1947, has no access at all to the Bay of Bengal. The southern tip of Tripura comes tantalisingly close to Chittagong, Bangladesh’s second largest port. But India deprived itself of an approach to it — and through it to the rest of the Northeast.

This was because the leaders of our freedom movement lacked the foresight and the assertiveness to stake a perfectly legitimate claim, during negotiations over Partition, on at least a part of Chittagong, whose glorious contribution to India’s freedom movement bears no elaboration here.

Result: Geography suddenly changed for our north-eastern compatriots. They became land-locked. Their traditional road, rail and river transportation system, running through East Bengal, also got completely disrupted. And the Northeast became a distant ‘margin’ in the eyes of ‘mainland’ India. Not surprisingly, some people in the region started to view “mainlanders” as “Indians” and themselves only as Mizos or Nagas or Kukis or Bodos or Assamese. What a tragedy!

I read with tears the following account in former Indian Express editor B.G. Verghese’s book, India’s North-East Resurgent, of the region’s isolation from the rest of the country: “...100-150 years ago, the Brahmaputra valley was in the vanguard of Indian development and globalisation. Its alluring and ever-expanding tea production and exports triggered a variety of investments with backward and forward linkages. The discovery of coal and oil in upper Assam had resulted in the development of mining and forestry. The region was a pioneer, an investment leader, a moderniser. It attracted capital and entrepreneurs... the Northeast was then a part of the mainland, a land of opportunity, an open economy well-linked with markets at home and abroad through Calcutta and Chittagong. This has been forgotten because things changed.”

We can hence see why Partition was an unmitigated disaster for Assam and the Northeast. Just as individuals feel restless when they are deprived of the open sky and the freedom to move and build relationships, communities too feel imprisoned when they are cut off from their natural neighbours and those with whom they interacted.

In Assam, this economic and geographical isolation was compounded by the influx of Bangladeshis, which is threatening the very identity and existence of Assamese. The vote-bank inspired insensitivity of the Congress led to Assamese anger finding dangerous vent in the ISI-backed ULFA.

In an insightful essay titled ‘The Margins Strike Back’, Prof Udayon Misra of Dibrugarh University writes: “Not only did the economy of Assam take a sharp downward slide, but one of the more significant aspects of this geographical isolation was the resurgence of the separatist mindset, which had remained submerged or sidelined during the freedom struggle.”

If isolation, influx of Bangladeshis, and externally-aided extremist violence are at the root of the turmoil, the solution must squarely address each of these causes. This is where we need to realise that Bangladesh, which has become the main source of the problem because of the rise of anti-India feelings fanned by Islamist forces there, has to be made a partner in solving it.

Partition was in many ways a disaster for the people of East Bengal too. The Muslim League’s bogus ‘Two-Nation theory’ had never found enthusiastic support there, and after 1947 it was hobbled with unnatural boundaries, surrounded by India on east, west and north. Much off Bangladesh’s backwardness is because of its cutting off from Mother India in 1947 and because Indian and Bangladeshi leaders failed to create an imaginatively co-operative architecture between the two countries.

However, we should not remain prisoners of the past, one that was a product of the colonial era in its dying moments. We should explore creative new ideas and bold new initiatives. This exploration will continue next week.

FEELING LEFT OUT - Regionalism and the republic

POLITICS AND PLAY

RAMACHANDRA GUHA
The Telegraph, 20 January

The recent attacks on Bihari labourers by the United Liberation Front of Asom are criminal acts, and deserve to be treated as such by the security forces, and by the people of Assam. But they also need to be viewed historically, as an undoubtedly perverted manifestation of a popular sentiment that has existed since the beginning of the Indian Republic, and which has indeed shaped and reshaped that republic. This is a sentiment based on the attachment to one’s language and locality.

‘Regionalism’, to give the sentiment a name (or academic label), has come in different forms and been accompanied by varying degrees of violence. The first and most legitimate kind of regionalism has demanded a separate space or state of one’s own, withal a space or state resting securely within the Union of India. This variety of regionalism was pioneered by the Telugu-speaking residents of the erstwhile Madras Presidency. The forms of protest it used were attacks on state property, and the hunger-fast, most definitively in the case of Potti Sriramulu, who in 1952 died after not eating for 52 days, his death leading, in the short term, to the creation of the state of Andhra Pradesh and, in the long term, to the wholesale redrawing of the map of India on linguistic lines.

The creation of states based on language did not, however, lead to the extinction of regional sentiments. This now expressed itself in the shape of asking for a better deal from the Centre. The pioneers here were the Tamils, who argued that the Central government was a captive of north Indian (and specifically Hindi-speaking) interests. The protests were loud, and successful; in 1967, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam became the first regional party to win power through the ballot-box. They were later emulated by the Akali Dal in Punjab, the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh, and the Asom Gana Parishad in Assam, all of whom won state elections by successfully claiming that they stood for the rights of their regions against the hegemonic domination of the Centre. These parties proclaimed themselves regional by their very names, but it is also possible to view the West Bengal unit of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — at least during the period when it was led by Jyoti Basu and its finances taken care of by Ashok Mitra — as a regional party claiming to stand for the interests of Bengal and Bengalis against the Machiavellian designs of New Delhi.

The redrawing of India’s map, meanwhile, still left people dissatisfied.

The success of regionalism spawned a new species which academics were to name sub-regionalism. For, within the new states based on language, there yet existed groups who were minorities in the state as a whole, but who occupied a definite territory within it, and who, by virtue of language or ethnicity, had enough to bring them together and to bind them against the majority community in that state. These communities include the Nepalis in West Bengal and the Bodo-speakers in Assam, both of whom organized movements for separate states of their own, but had to be content in the end with autonomous councils within the existing order.

More successful were the hill people of Uttar Pradesh, whose protests delivered to them a new state called Uttaranchal, and the tribal and other residents of the Chhotanagpur Plateau, who were finally to claim, from a reluctant Bihar, the state of Jharkhand for which they had been fighting from well before Independence.

The kinds of regionalism itemized in the preceding paragraphs are mostly legitimate. To ask for a state within India — or an autonomous council with a state — where one can feel secure about one’s identity, is not necessarily inconsistent either with democracy or with patriotism.

One can successfully, and happily, be both Tamil (or Kannadiga, or Malayali, or Gujarati) and Indian. However, in the history of our nation, regionalism has sometimes taken the form of parochialism. This can be benign, as in the claims — or pretensions — of the Bengali bhadralok that their literature, music, dress and cuisine are superior to those found anywhere else in India. But it can also be bloody, as in the attacks on Bihari labourers by the Ulfa cadre, behind which rests the belief that only Assamese speakers have the right to live in Assam.

If the leaders in the former or benign variety of parochialism have been the Bengalis, the pioneers of this latter or bloody variety were the Maharashtrians. In the mid-Sixties, Shiv Sena goons in Bombay began to attack South Indians as ‘outsiders’ to the city. Udupi restaurants were torched, and offices and factories warned not to employ south Indians in their establishments. In later years, the ire of the Shiv Sena has been vented against Bengalis and Biharis, likewise viewed by them as interlopers in the sacred soil of Maharashtra.

Between the actions of the Shiv Sena and the Ulfa, Bihari migrant labourers have also been killed by Khalistani terrorists in Punjab, and by the mujahedin in Kashmir. These killings are crimes as defined by the Indian Penal Code; they are also, and more disturbingly, a challenge to the very idea of India. The Constitution of India grants its citizens the right to live and work in any part of the Union. Free movement is the basis of citizenship; only if that can be assured can we claim to be one nation from Kashmir to Kanyakumari (or from Kohima to Kandla).

The most militant and (if you will) dangerous form of regionalism is based on the desire, or hope, or fantasy, to leave the Republic of India and form a separate nation of one’s own. This is the hope (or fantasy) that once animated A. Z. Phizo’s Naga National Council, and now animates T. Muivah’s National Socialist Council of Nagaland. Likewise, generations of Kashmiri militants — and non-Kashmiri militants in Kashmir — have given their lives and taken the lives of others in pursuit of their dream of a nation separate and distinct from India. The Sikh extremists of the Eighties also hoped to form their own nation-state. In fact, even the Dravidian movement for many years formally upheld a right to carve a separate nation out of India. (It was only in 1963, and as a result of the jingoism unleashed by China’s war with India, that this demand was dropped from the DMK’s manifesto.)

This variety of regionalism also has a name: we call it secessionism. It is even less legitimate than parochialism, and far more costly. Some 60,000 lives have been lost in Kashmir, and several thousand lives apiece in Nagaland since the Fifties, and in Punjab in the Eighties and Nineties. Happily, the Sikhs have once more become an integral and invaluable part of the nation. So too the Mizos, who once fought for a separate country, but after 1986 made their peace with the Republic of India.

Thus, regionalism in India has come in three varieties — regionalism properly so called, parochialism, and secessionism. The odd, and possibly unique, thing about the Ulfa is that it has simultaneously partaken of all varieties of regionalism. That is why the common people of Assam have never turned completely against the militants, for the sentiment of being left out, of being discriminated against, is pervasive among them too. They may not agree with the Ulfa’s wish to forge a separate nation, or approve of its killings of migrant labourers, but they yet feel that their state has been treated with contempt and condescension by the rest of India. So too with Nagaland and Kashmir, the two other states where regionalism has been both violent as well as intractable, refusing to arrive at a compact with the Union of India.

The author can be reached at ramguha@vsnl.com

Interview with Sanjib Barua, a specialist on the North-East

Can you explain the conditions under which agitation in Assam began? Did this movement have much popular support?

The Assam movement of 1979-85 – a campaign that protested what the supporters described as a de facto policy of admitting and enfranchising "foreigners" -- is certainly an important watershed in the political history of Assam. Assam's present ruling party, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), as well as the insurgent organization, United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) both have their roots in the Assam movement. The movement was popular in the sense that there were hundreds and thousands of people out in the streets to support the campaign. But there is an important caveat. What may be equally important is the hundreds and thousands of people who were not out in the streets. For supporters of the Assam movement were unlikely to include Assam's so-called "immigrant communities." Indeed the indiscriminate use of words like "foreigner" and "Bangladeshi" during the campaign made many people in these communities quite insecure.

The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) was initially a movement with mass popular support. Is this still true today? Where does ULFA receive its funding (from NRIs or through extortion or voluntary donations? There has also been some speculation that Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, covertly provides funding). How has ULFA's ideology changed over time?

I will not go so far as to say that ULFA ever had "mass popular support." But there was once a significant level of sympathy, for sure. While writing my book, I struggled with finding a way of describing the particular relationship between ULFA and Assamese society. The relationship cannot be reduced to how much support there was. I borrowed the term intertextuality from literary theory to come to grips with that relationship. Literary theorists use the term intertextuality to talk about the complex ways in which one text (e.g. a story, a poem or a film) is related to other texts. The term "intertextual" allowed me to get out of the simple-minded question of how many Assamese supported Assam's independence. Because while the answer to the question may be less than 1 per cent, it would not explain ULFA's influence. The point is that issues that ULFA raised were connected (in complex ways) to issues that had been central to Assamese mainstream social discourse.

About ULFA's funding, apart from ULFA leaders, probably no one knows the full story. There is no doubt that enormous amount of money was collected from businesses in the 1980s. Even major Indian business houses involved in Assam's tea industry are implicated in giving money to ULFA. Certainly large amounts were collected from the hundreds of small traders or businessmen. I have not heard of NRIs funding ULFA. In Indian newspapers there are speculations about ISI involvement. But there is no way of knowing for sure.

Has ULFA's ideology changed over time? In the face of Indian security operations, I doubt if ULFA today functions as a unified organization, with a clear program, where loyal cadres carry out policy decisions. The violence by ULFA, by pro-government former militants referred to as SULFA (the 'S' stands for surrender), and the government's counter-insurgency operations have combined to create a rather murky situation of many unexplained killings. Among the victims of secret killers, or death squads, if you wish, are families of top ULFA leaders. Then there were a number of mass killings of Hindi-speaking peoples late last year. Some news reports have speculated about a possible shift in ULFA's ideology from these ethnically targeted incidents. But the circumstances simply are too murky for me to engage in such speculation.

How closely is Assam's future linked to other northeastern states where there are also insurgency movements (the most obvious examples being Manipur and Nagaland)?

The tragedy of northeast India is that it has been a relatively sparsely populated region in a densely populated sub-continent. The numbers comprising groups like Assamese, Manipuris, Nagas or Mizos are not small by global standards, but tiny by the standards of the sub-continent. For Indians from the heartland, it is easier to think of the whole region as a single region, rather than make distinctions. I can imagine Indian policy-makers, say in the Home Ministry in Delhi, making India's northeast policy. But the region has peoples with distinct histories and concerns. At the same time there is also a sense of a shared predicament. Regional political parties, student organizations and insurgent groups have from time to time tried to co-ordinate their activities.

But it is important to emphasize the distinct histories and issues, for often they animate particular insurgencies. Let me take one of your examples – Manipur. Many in the Indian heartland have barely heard of what, in the Indian scheme of things, is only a tiny northeastern state of less than 2 million people. But to most Manipuris their polity was one of the oldest cases of successful state formation in Asia. Indeed the Cheitharol Kumbaba, the royal chronicle of Manipur, lists a continuous lineage of kings that goes as far back as the year 33 AD.

Manipur became a part of British colonial India in 1891. The British ruled it as a "native state." Four days before India's independence on August 15th 1947, Maharaja Buddhachandra Singh signed the instrument of accession entrusting only defence, communication and foreign affairs to the government of India. But soon after, Manipur had to give in to independent India's larger project of bringing all the former "native states" firmly under its control.

A merger agreement signed in October 1949 under very suspicious circumstances, according to which Manipur lost the autonomy that it had negotiated two years earlier, arouses quite a bit of emotions in Manipur. Manipuri insurgent groups regard the merger as illegal and unconstitutional. The controversy is not unlike that surrounding the merger agreement on Kashmir. But how many people in India have ever heard of this controversy?

Why is it that the insurgency in Assam doesn't seem to have the same hold over the Indian popular imagination as for example the one in Kashmir or even in Punjab? Assam gets much less press coverage and clearly does not elicit comparable popular reactions (as for instance any discussion of Kashmiri secessionism does).

The Indian popular imagination probably has far too many issues competing for its attention. Kashmir is different because the issue has been at the center of India and Pakistan's collective self-definitions. It is both an international and domestic conflict. Punjab's location – next to Delhi -- and the fact that the conflict involves a community that is at the very heart of the Indian establishment – from the military to the business world – perhaps accounts for the interest.

By contrast, Assam and the northeast are very far away; a "sensitive border region" to use an Indian cliché; the image it evokes is of a borderland full of deviants conducting subversion.

But the Indian lack of interest is understandable too. After all, everyone has limits to what they can be interested in. So the question is why should northeasterners have to go to Delhi and plead with the Indian media: "Please, get interested in us"? The reason they have to do that is obvious: because decisions are made in Delhi. I am therefore more interested in changing that structural situation. Hence my emphasis on decentralization.

A common assumption regarding insurgencies in the Third World in general, and the movement in Assam in particular, is that these are the result of an incomplete process of modernization. Could you comment on this?

I don't think the notion of "incomplete modernization" is very helpful to understanding sub-national conflicts either in the "third world" or anywhere else. After all, some of these conflicts are there in fairly "developed" or "modern" places: think of the Basque issue in Spain or Quebec in Canada. In India itself, one of the bloodiest sub-national conflicts was in Punjab, one of India's more "developed" regions.

I locate these conflicts in the contradictions inherent in a very "modern" institution: the nation state. In the annals of human history, the notion that the boundaries of a political entity should neatly coincide with that of a cultural formation – which we like to call a "nation" -- is rather new. We have all got used to seeing nation states as the most "normal" way of ordering the world – after all we call the premium global organization, the United Nations. But making nations has actually been a very bloody process, not just in the "third world," but even in the case of more established nations like France. We have developed an amnesia about the histories of what appear today to be coherent nations. The sub-national conflicts of today are part of that bloody history of nation-building -- of trying to create a global order of nation states.

You suggest in your book India Against Itself that the formation of Assam as a colonial province in 1874 marked a significant break from the past since it allowed for the implementation of policies that irrevocably changed the nature of relations among the different peoples there. One of these is the distinction the colonial authorities drew between hills people and plains people (as with the Nagas and the Assamese). Can you explain the importance of these policies in understanding the nature of the conflict as it persists today?

The problems created by the way the British colonial rulers went about forming provinces are not unique to Assam. Administrative convenience rather than pre-colonial political or cultural boundaries guided them. Postcolonial India went through an elaborate process of reorganizing states in order to have some correspondence between units of governance and India's sub-national formations.

The second part of your question, however, brings up a feature that is indeed peculiar to colonial Assam. The Inner Line introduced in 1873 sought to exclude most of the hill areas from the plains. After that, people from the plains – indeed any non-official, Indian or European – had to get special permission to enter the hills. To take your Naga example, while the Nagas and the Assamese are not the same people – and in our ethnicity-obsessed era, it may be hard to appreciate this – that did not mean there were not substantial interconnections. For instance, Assam's kings appointed Nagas to important positions like Borphukan. A powerful reminder of that historical connection is the dialect called Nagamese -- a creolized form of Assamese -- that Nagas still use as their lingua franca. The colonial inner line created the foundation for separating the hills from the plains. At the same time, the inner line had an unintended beneficial consequence. Compared to areas like Assam and Tripura, thanks to the inner line, states like Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Mizoram have been protected from a large-scale influx of population.

Another important colonial policy with important implications for the present was the fact that Assam was simply treated as an extension of Bengal. Could you comment on this?

The British colonial tendency to treat Assam as an extension of Bengal had a number of consequences. First, British officials saw the empty lands of Assam as a solution to the problems of land-scarce Bengal and, in the 1920s and 1930s, they settled East Bengali peasants in Assam as a matter of policy. Later the process acquired a life of its own. Second, the province of Assam, as constituted in 1874, included large Bengali-speaking districts, most importantly, Sylhet (in today's Bangladesh). Indeed for a brief period from 1905 to 1912, the British even experimented with a new province called East Bengal and Assam with Dacca as the capital. Third, before 1874, Assam was ruled as part of Bengal and, until 1873, Bengali was the language of the courts and government schools in Assam.

Given this history, it is hardly surprising that Assam has a very large Bengali population, though one has to remember that large numbers of the people of Bengali descent in Assam speak Assamese. At the same time, because of this history, differentiation from Bengal and Bengali culture has been a major theme in Assamese identity politics – which has made Assamese-Bengali relations sometimes conflict-prone.

In what ways did policies in the immediate postcolonial period either exacerbate or break with policies implemented previously? On a related note, it has been suggested elsewhere that the highly centralized nature of the Indian State (formed ostensibly as a result of various nation-building and developmental exigencies) has contributed substantially to feelings of alienation and marginalization among the Assamese (as with others). Could you discuss this?

On immigration from East Bengal, the situation only got worse in the post-colonial period. For apart from the continuation of the flow of economic immigrants – to which the emergence of an international boundary line (between India and East Pakistan, and subsequently India and Bangladesh) made little difference -- there was now a new flow of immigrants from the same region: political immigrants, i.e., Hindu Bengalis who came after the partition. When you consider how politically explosive the issue of immigration changing Assam's demographic balance had been in the 1940s and, would once again become in the 1980s, it is extraordinary that this was allowed to happen with utter nonchalance. The indigenous/non-indigenous issue in Assam is no less explosive an issue than, say, in Fiji or Malaysia. Yet the fact that in the Assam case, the question does not receive the sort of policy attention it deserves, I believe, is a function of the fact that since Assam is part of a larger polity, its concerns -- no matter how crucial for its political stability -- get lost in the larger pan-Indian noise.

Here the point you make about political centralization comes in. For, in theory, this is exactly what federalism is designed to stop. Federalism, after all, is a way of checking the tyranny of the majority (of countrywide populist majorities) by leaving constitutionally guaranteed autonomous realms of action for states. India may not be centralized in the way that say, China is. But for the kind of political entity we are – a multiethnic country with the world's second largest population – the kind of mess that has been created in Assam by inattention to the immigration issue illustrates that India needs a more decentralized political system than most countries.

How does the BJP being in power affect, if at all, Assamese nationalism? Regional parties have come to play an increasingly important role in politics at the national level. The AGP has in the past supported the BJP coalition. Could you discuss the importance of this?

It is possible that the AGP and the BJP may land up as electoral allies. The BJP has found similar regional allies in other states. AGP did very poorly in the last parliamentary election and is unlikely to win on its own. But to answer your question let me go beyond the BJP and bring in the allied phenomenon of what in India is referred to as the sangh parivaar: the larger "family" of Hindu organizations associated with Hindu assertionism. There is a danger that a BJP-AGP alliance might give fillip to Hindu assertionism and give a new Hinduist thrust to Assamese nationalism, which has historically been very inclusionary on the Hindu-Muslim question, thanks to the important place that indigenous Muslims have in the Assamese cultural formation.

How has your book been received in intellectual circles in India? And more specifically, among the intelligentsia in Assam?

Oxford University Press did a reprint for sale in South Asia and OUP tells me that the edition sold out quickly. Most major Indian newspapers and magazines have reviewed the book. In the northeast I have been invited to speak at major universities and colleges. I even gave a press conference in Guwahati last November.

But my book, while in the language of the publishing industry is a cross-over book, is still an academic book. It is probably not as accessible as it could have been. I would have been happier if Indian discussions of the book had taken on my major claim: that India's approach to the insurgencies in the northeast may be militarily successful, but it has high costs in terms of the quality of India's democracy. In the long run, neither the nation-in-crisis mind-set that shapes these policies, nor the economic determinism that leads the government to pump resources to the region can win the battle of hearts and minds. Only a radically decentralized constitutional design can bring all of the northeast firmly and voluntarily into the pan-Indian dispensation.

Sanjib Baruah was born in Shillong, a hill station in northeast India. He was educated in Cotton College in Guwahati, Assam, the University of Delhi and the University of Chicago. He is currently Professor of Political Studies at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, New York, where he teaches Comparative Politics and International Relations.

Interview conducted by Nermeen Shaikh of AsiaSource

Journey To Nowhere

Sanjiv Barua
TOI, January 16

One does not have to spare words to condemn the atrocities against Hindi-speaking migrant labourers by ULFA. But it is far from obvious that the politics of condemnation produces the best public policy. The government's knee-jerk response so far tougher counter-insurgency operations is not exactly a sign of thoughtful policy-making. There is hardly a word on why this approach would work this time, and how exactly it would pave the road to a peaceful Assam. One would have thought that after the failures of past policies our key decision-makers would be asked to provide some justification for why 'more of the same' would work this time. US president George Bush might wish that he were as lucky vis-'-vis his Iraq policy. There is little room in the Indian style of decision-making on the north-east for accountability and for learning from policy mistakes. Are the principal perpetrators the only ones responsible for the atrocity in Upper Assam? British philosopher Ted Honderich makes the case for apportioning responsibility for atrocities between those who supply the necessary conditions and the final agents. International jurisprudence on crimes against humanity is premised on this notion of accountability. But by concentrating on the perpetrators, the politics of condemnation lets every one else bureaucrats, politicians and military men off the hook and permits ostrich-like behaviour vis-a-vis policy failures.

Perhaps a domestic equivalent of a system to try crimes against humanity would produce more accountability in our north-east policy and a less knee-jerk style of decision-making. It is about time we acknowledge that there is something dreadfully wrong with our north-east policy and think beyond the crude carrot and stick approach blame insurgents and the ISI and on the carrot side, spend huge amounts of money in the name of development and complain about corruption. India has a dreadful record of resolving internal armed conflicts. Internal civil wars in South Asia are unusually protracted. Studies have found that a much larger percentage of such conflicts go on for more than 10 years in our part of the world than the global average. The nearly five-decades-old Naga war is one of the longest wars in the world. There is now a virtual revolution in the academic study of armed conflicts. But we have insulated ourselves from those insights by adopting a closed-door approach to foreign scholarship. Thus on north-east India on which some of the classics of anthropology were written before Independence, there is almost no major work by a foreign scholar since Independence.

This is not because of a lack of interest, but our restrictive policy on research visas. It is hard to avoid the impression that the fear about the 'foreign hand' causing trouble is only an excuse. A desire to avoid an unfavourable comparison of our record of conflict resolution in the north-east may better explain this paranoia. On those rare occasions when foreign observers have looked at north-east India's predicament, their diagnosis and policy prescriptions have been radically different from those of our security and development establish-ments. Consider a report done last year by the World Bank not exactly a bastion of radicalism. It describes the region as "a victim of a low-level equilibrium where poverty and lack of development (compared with the remainder of India and other South East Asian nations), lead to civil conflict, lack of belief in political leadership and government, and, therefore, to a politically unstable situation. This in turn leads to further barriers to poverty reduction, accelerated development and growth". The report does not say that spending more money for development or greater militarisation are the answers to this condition. Instead it sees institutional arrangements as the major obstacle to utilising the region's vast water resources for sustainable development. Our highly centralised approach, it finds, suffers from "the paternalism of central-level bureaucrats, coercive top-down planning, and little support or feedback from locals".

Local stakeholders in north-east India have such distrust of these centralised structures that no one believes that developmental initiatives are actually meant for bringing about real benefits. So deep is the mistrust that the study team found to its astonishment that even an embankment project designed to benefit the people of an area, is opposed by its intended beneficiaries. This is the cumulative legacy of five decades of bad policy. The World Bank study was done in collaboration with government's Department of Development of North Eastern Region. Yet there is little interest in focusing on this aspect of the report on the part of our bureaucrats. The report warns of the dangers of path dependency of being locked into bad choices even when better alternatives are quite obvious. It calls for "strong political will to counteract the tendency of a society to follow the path it has already taken due to the political or financial costs of changing it". This applies not just to managing water resources: but to our entire approach to the north-east. We need to ask some hard questions about how we have come to this point, recognise errors in old policy and begin the process of rectifying those mistakes.

The politics of condemnation currently shaping the response to ULFA's atrocities is only the latest illustration of a dysfunctional policy process that stands in the way of a radical course reversal needed to bring about peace and prosperity to the north-east.

The writer is currently at IIT, Guwahati.

ULFA violence continues unabated, toll rises to 68

TOI, January 8

GUWAHATI: Violence by the ULFA in Assam continued unabated on as the banned group gunned down two migrant workers, taking the toll in attacks on non-Assamese people to 68, and carried out two bomb blasts even as additional army and paramilitary forces were deployed for counter-insurgency operations.

After targeting Hindi-speaking people in Dibrugarh, Tinsukia and Sibsagar since Friday, heavily armed ULFA cadres raided a village in Golaghat district -- hitherto not affected by the violence -- and killed two labourers and injured another person. At least seven persons, including two CRPF personnel, were injured when two bombs concealed by the ULFA in bicycles exploded near an army cantonment at Satgaon, police said.

The Centre rushed 2,000 additional paramilitary personnel to Assam and the army intensified operations against the ULFA by deploying over 10,000 troops in upper Assam, where most of the attacks were carried out.

State government spokesman and Minister Himanta Biswas Sarma said district administrations had been asked to provide security to migrant labourers, who would be taken to a designated place after the day's work. The Assam government also took measures to ensure that events did not take a communal turn, especially in the wake of a SMS campaign carried out in Tinsukia by "vested interests".

Panic-stricken migrants headed for railway stations in Dibrugarh, Tinsukia and Sibsagar to return to their home states though the administration denied there was an exodus.

The fleeing migrants, mostly women, children and old men who sold milk or worked as daily wage labourers, told reporters they were waiting to board the next available train for Bihar.

Earlier in the day, two brick kiln labourers succumbed to injuries sustained in an ULFA attack in the Assam Medical College Hospital in Dibrugarh. Curfew was clamped in Dibrugarh town from 1:40 pm to prevent migrant workers from taking out a procession with bodies of six persons killed in the district, officials said.

Curfew was also in force in Tinsukia subdivision and Tinsukia town of neighbouring Tinsukia district. Governor Lt Gen (retired) Ajai Singh accused ULFA's self-styled "commander-in-chief" Paresh Baruah of trying to engineer a "movement against non-Assamese people".

Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi said people should register their protest "against such madness and the message should go out loud and clear that violence is alien to our culture".

Railway Minister Lalu Prasad, who visited Dibrugarh and Tinsukia to meet victims of the violence, said the ULFA had resorted to violence to make its presence felt as it had become a "dead organisation". All precautionary measures had been taken to ensure that passengers in trains to and from Assam passing through Bihar did not face any retaliatory attacks, he said.

The influential All Assam Students Union and Purvottar Hindustani Sanmelan issued a joint call to people to maintain calm in the wake of the massacre of Hindi-speaking people and their exodus to other states.

Defence Minister A K Antony, who chaired a meeting of the three service chiefs and defence secretary to take stock of the situation in Assam, will travel to Tezpur on Tuesday with army chief Gen J J Singh.

India / Manipur: Beyond The Protest

The statesman, December16

By Pradip Phanjoubam

Manipur is on the boil again. There is a blockade on the state’s two lifelines, National Highway 39 and 53, in protest against the move to implement the Tipaimukh High Dam, and there is the renewed agitation for the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, AFSPA, given new vim by Irom Chanu Sharmila shifting the venue of her six-year epic hunger strike in protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act to New Delhi.

But then when was the state ever not on a boil, it is hard to remember. There never seemed to have been any shortage of issue worth a bandh or blockade or other forms of violent street protest, and these have indeed become a culture of sort. The next predictable one will be when the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh comes visiting, probably on December 2, to lay the foundation stone to the Tipaimukh Project. Although there is still a tentative element about the dates of his arrival, advance security cover for him has already arrived from New Delhi.

It seems that Manipur has forgotten to celebrate. It only knows how to observe days of gloom. If there is anything as a dark era, this must be it for the State. While this tells of a somewhat omnipresent oppressive atmosphere, it also speaks volumes of the mindset of its people.

It is as if the place has never seen anything as victory, or any other occasion to celebrate in its recent history. The coincidence is uncanny, but even in areas where victory and defeat are juxtaposed in close proximity of each other, the place has picked out the defeat to make it an occasion to observe and neglect the victory.

Hence, the dark annals the Chahi Taret Khuntakpa (Seven Years of Devastation 1819-1826) under the Ava Kingdom, (Burmese) is observed but not the victory of Maharaja Gambhir Singh and his cousin Nara Singh (who succeed him in later years), which ended the Burmese oppression and paved way for the Treaty of Yandaboo.

There are some celebrations, but these have more to do with religious beliefs and myths, and practically none of these events are from the real world of recorded history. To make it worse, this oppressive mindset is being preached with vehemence and sometimes even brutally enforced.

There is an element of the “hegemony of ideas” in this. It would appear that as much as the missionaries of cultures and religions were guilty of this when they set about conquering the “uncharted” world of the uninitiated “natives”, aggressive revivalism born as resistance to these forces cannot claim innocence either.

In Manipur, while the former has mellowed with age and maturity, it is the revivalist movements that have acquired all the characteristics and fundamentalist zeal of new converts. This cannot be good either for the revivalist movements themselves or for the society at large.

There is tremendous energy and passion in Manipur. But unfortunately, the sense at the moment is one of an impending implosion, rather than of this energy finding creative outlets. It is for this reason that that society must remember its triumphal moments too, and celebrate them with as much fervour as it recalls religiously its moments of defeats and tragedies.

Its intelligentsia must help create the intellectual atmosphere where the state’s children can grow up to be outward looking and positive, rather that be grudging, embittered, angry, negative thinking denizens of the future.

They need to make it their mission to defuse at least some of the suffocating implosive energy that envelops the state, bringing its triumphant marches out of the social cupboard. Both are part and parcel of any given society, but the difference is in how each manages to cope and sublimate them.

The agrarian society had harvests and the first rains of April heralding spring, among others to celebrate. Surely, the modern Manipur society must also have its springs and autumns, apart from its winters and scorching summers of discontent. Let not the cherished fight against oppression become an instrument of oppression itself.

Consider in this light the protest against the Tipaimukh Dam, the pitch which has reached a crescendo. Unfazed, the state government is preparing for a high profile launch of the project with none other than the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh. In all likelihood, the Government will push the project through despite whatever the nature of the protest, as it had done in the case of the Narmada mega project, but this remains to be seen.

To be honest, lay observers are unsure whom to support.

The arguments of those opposed to the dam are powerful, but it must also be acknowledged that there are people who would be directly affected by the dam, who want the project implemented, although their voices are much less heard. And as Manipur is well aware in these troubled times, decibel power is not always a reliable scale of truth and justice.

What is absolutely certain is that it is a very high stake game that both the proponents and the opponents of the dam are playing. Ironically, both sides very elaborately have spelled out what the other party is bargaining away, but never given much thought to what they themselves may end up bargaining away.

If either side were to take full cognizance of the responsibility they will have to bear for what may be irreparably destroyed or opportunities irretrievably lost, the debate on the controversial dam would have been much more sane, and in equal measure, responsible. At this juncture, responsibility sits lightly on the shoulders of the debaters.

Everything must come with a price, including development, and the real issue ought to have been to work out a balance sheet to find out if the price being paid for the project is worth the benefits to be reaped from it. On the basis of such a balance sheet should the people have been called upon to make their own independent assessments, and not be coerced or browbeaten into accepting or rejecting the proposition.

In the meantime, Manipur must tone down the pitch of its protest culture, and see that there are many bright sides of the state – despite all its dark causes for protest.

The author is Editor, The Imphal Free Press, Manipur