Turmoil in the North-East

FRONTIER TRAVAILS -- North-East -- The Politics of a Mess: Subir Ghosh; Macmillan India Ltd., 2/10, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 345.

IT WILL perhaps not be very ``patriotic'' to throw up even for a discussion the question whether the people of the North-Eastern States are ethnically Indian, though any visitor to this region will notice immediately how strikingly different their looks are from the rest of the Indian stock, suggesting a closeness to the Mongol races. This may be a reason for China's refusal to acknowledge Arunachal Pradesh -- previously known as NEFA (North Eastern Frontier Agency) -- as part of India. The book under notice also mentions that Manipur which is one of the States it covers was not part of the rest of the country when India became independent on August 15, 1947 and it was until then ruled as a British crown colony. It acceded to India only after a year.

With the British Indian Empire having emerged more as a conglomeration brought about by conquests and accessions spread over nearly two centuries than from any naturally evolving unification, it will not be fair and it may even be unrealistic to expect the people of these distant lands and with a very different ethos to be emotionally drawn to the concept of India in the same manner as the people in the rest of the country. If even the imperialistic British found it difficult to govern this part of their empire, it should not have been surprising if the Government of India after Independence not having much of an understanding or empathy with the people of these States was confronted with a recurring turmoil in the region. It would look as though the region is living through a perpetual civil war and it is this scene, which Mr. Subir Ghosh, who is a journalist, presents in this book.

The "seven sisters" of the North-East, which Mr. Ghosh had chosen for study, are Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur and Tripura. He writes about how the enormity of the assignment which he had given himself struck him when he says right at the beginning that it looked like a ``jigsaw puzzle'' with nothing seeming to fit anywhere. Right at the beginning he was warned by a fellow journalist about the occupational hazards he was exposing himself to by correcting ``militants and insurgents'' mentioned in a news report into ``extremists and terrorists'' and the instant reprisals they would provoke. If the contents of the book make for tedious reading, it is, apart from the confusing mess into which the seven States have drifted into, due to the abbreviations for the innumerable parties resulting from political fissions in the North-East sounding ``like a melange of acronyms''.

He makes a heavy demand on his readers with his description of the turbulent political scene in the North-East and the successive efforts by New Delhi to tame them and persuade the militants to give up and join the national mainstream. The most frightening and almost an unsolvable problem, which Meghalaya and the other North-Eastern States are grappling with, is the continuing influx of Bangladeshis which they have failed to stop. Though he does not mention this because of the futility of drawing attention to it at this point of time, the influx is the result of Bangladesh having emerged as a separate and a poverty- ridden state having neither the resources nor the will to control its exploding population from spilling over into the neighbouring Indian states and bringing about an ``ethnic polarisation'' about which he gives a chilling picture. ``Meghalaya witnessed a 300 per cent rise in the number of illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators between 1995 and 1999.'' This should recall the devilry of Adolph Hitler before the outbreak of the Second World War for acquiring ``lebensraum'' (living room) for his growing German population with his annexation of central European countries. In view of such a large-scale penetration from Bangladesh it should have been quite an achievement for the Governments of the States to push back 14,294 infiltrators during 1995-99.

The description of the activities of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) is very exhaustive though it is extremely painful to be told about the bloodshed to which both the security forces and the extremists have been resorting to. His accounts of the mindless beastliness to which the security forces have been reduced by killing innocent people while trying to put down the terrorists make dreadful reading. The justification of the brutality to which the security forces have stuck to is that there is no other way of dealing with terrorists since they have to be killed to stop them from killing. Hopes of peace returning to the North-East would continue to recede as long as the ``security force-narcotic mafia-politician nexus'' is scripting the scene. He, however, points out that the ULFA extremists have won support for themselves because of their record as Robin hoods of which he gives a few striking examples.

Will the scene in the North-East become brighter and will the security forces and the terrorists bid farewell to arms and usher in peace? He does not seem to have an answer and he ends his book very vaguely by saying: ``Take care of the Frontier peoples, the travails will take care of themselves.'' He has written his book almost entirely on the basis of the media reports mentioned in the footnotes.

CVG

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