ALIEN CORN - The Northeast is likely to remain the outsider to the rest of India | ||
| Ashok Mitra | ||
A couple of weeks ago, Team India overpowered Sri Lanka and emerged at the top in the International Cricket Council's Test rankings. The joy of the country's emerging middle class knew no bounds. A splurge of intense patriotic emotion swept the media: India was on top of the world, the pride and glory of the achievement were to be shared by each and every countryman, this was what national integration was all about. Each member of the Test team was given an instant award of Rs 25 lakh by the Board of Control for Cricket in India. That was peanuts; the more important thing, the cognoscenti agreed, was the fact that the stupendous distinction was won on behalf of the nation, once more furnishing evidence that sare jahanse achchha Hindustan hamara. Happenstance, it also was the week when Bangladesh authorities, doing their own arithmetic, ended the sanctuary they had been providing to some of the top brass of the United Liberation Front of Asom. They were pushed back across the border to be gathered in by Indian military personnel. Within a day, the chief of the Ulfa and members of his retinue were produced, in handcuffs, before the designated court at Guwahati. Thousands of young men and women milled the court premises to have a glimpse of the Ulfa chief. They hailed him as if he was a conquering hero, and were incensed that handcuffs were clamped upon him. Ulfa slogans, demanding instant grant of sovereignty to Assam, rent the air; overt anti-India slogans were not missing either. Not much of national integration was visible in the neighbourhood. To refuse to admit the existence of this duality of the state of affairs will be self-deception. One can travel the expanse of Assam and talk to people at random. Quite a few of those talked to will betray an ambivalence of the mind. They are citizens of India, but there is a haziness about it in their psyche. They are a part of the Union of India, and yet it is as if they are not altogether integrated with the Indian nation. There is some sort of a curtain separating them from the national conclave. They are a part of India, nevertheless, India is a somewhat distant entity. India's problems are seemingly not theirs; thank you, they have their own problems to worry over. Up to a point, it is almost a re-run of the old Asom Gana Parishad theme. Their land, Assam, has its own persona which Indians do not apparently appreciate; Indians in general, the complaint is posted, are unable to grasp Assam's specific realities. The Ulfa, with all its cruelties and insensibilities, does not, therefore, fail to attract the clandestine admiration of some sections, particularly of the new generation. The handcuffs on the Ulfa leader were conceivably regarded by the assembled youngsters as an affront to Assam's dignity. The emotional pitch rose, and latent anti-India prejudices experienced a catharsis. Maybe the Assamese people, one will be told, share the same heritage, such as of Hindu epics, with other Indians; so what, one can come across the imprimatur of these classics in Thailand and Indonesia too. Yes, this much will be conceded, Assam is politically a part of India; it is nonetheless different. Why pick on Assam alone, it is more or less the same state of the mind over the entire stretch of the country's Northeast. This cluster of the so-called Seven Sisters constitutes a crucial flank of India's geography; India, nonetheless, by and large remains an alien land to the residents of these tracts. Their link with the rest of India is always a bit special. It is a loose kind of relationship, settled at the level of the superstructure, between this or that tribal chief and this or that top politician or civil servant in New Delhi. There is a hint of a suggestion that whatever the political arrangement, it is both tenuous and tentative. The people live their separate lives, they have their ethnicities and their own cultures and totems. True, India has a jurisdiction over them, their students go to Indian cities for higher education, but it is not always a comfortable journey, Indians allegedly tend to treat them as aliens. They too, therefore, have learnt to treat Indians as aliens. The situation is not helped when their daughters get raped in New Delhi or Mumbai, or when the shopkeepers enquire whether they are from Myanmar or Vietnam. The situation is not helped either when Indian army personnel, posted in Imphal or some place else in the region, under the protective umbrella of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, commit gross indiscretions. As one treks from one tract to the next, the ethnic composition changes a bit, the different tribes living next door to one another do not always gel along, occasionally they fight among themselves, Indian army and para-military forces have to step in to stop or arbitrate over these fights. Even so, almost all tribes and ethnic groups continue to nurse the same reservations about India, of which they are formal constituents. They are a part of India. India, however, is an alien entity. This is reality, reality that has persisted through the past six decades. And that is the most frightening part of it. The 'psychological' distance between the Indian nation and the people in the Northeast has not reduced at all in the course of this long stretch of time. The North-east has derived tangible infrastructural benefits from the astronomical rise in the country's defence expenditure. Accorded the status of special category states, they have been at the receiving end of special dispensations from both the Finance Commission and the Planning Commission. Roads, irrigation systems, power plants, telecommunications, and educational and health facilities have expanded in all parts of the region. Besides, under-the-table political deals, going on all the time, have filled the coffers of many tribal chiefs; their spin-off on local living conditions is of no negligible proportion. None of this, however, has brought the Northeast nearer to India. The stirring of national integration induced by Team India displacing South Africa at the top of the Test cricket country rankings hardly affects the Northeast. To the formally Indian citizens over there, it is only a news item. Alienation continues to be the eternal verity. In this milieu, it is relatively easy for both malcontents and ideologues to feel encouraged. Whatever economic progress has taken place in the region is anyway not that breathtaking, and certainly compare poorly with the pace at which states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Punjab are striding forward. While genuine ground exists for some grievances, some other grievances can be, and are, imagined. It is, therefore, no surprise that over much of the Northeast, peace and tranquillity have an altogether temporary character, insurgencies are dime a dozen. These spurts of rebellion often quieten down on their own, or perhaps simmer not too dangerously. There is no warranty though that a fresh insurgency will not rear its head in a place barely 20 or 40 kilometres of rugged terrain away. The geographical location is, on its own, an aggravating factor. At least half a dozen countries have their borders around this area — a rich hinterland for espionage agents of the type one comes across in the Graham Greene-Eric Ambler genre of fiction. Intrigues are second nature here. The flow of unaccounted money increases every day; so does cynicism concerning the purposes for which the money is spent by those who spend it. Such cynicism is the enemy of developing either a sense of loyalty or passion for any cause. Politicians in New Delhi have, at this moment, other things on their minds. The sub-nationalities or sub-sub-nationalities that make up the Indian nation are fighting it out for a greater share of the pelf triumphant capitalism has flooded the nation's superstructure with. This is, however, a temporary situation. The bickering bourgeois groups will settle it out among themselves. One or two new states will get created, one or two shuffles of political position will occur here and there, some deaths and some arson will leave a few scars, but, in the end, a new equilibrium will be reached, the capitalist system will see to that. The cricket bonanza will not be interrupted. As the country's cricketers reach higher pinnacles of glory and India maintains its super- power status in the arena, there will be no dearth of occasions for going through the thrill of patriotic emotions. The Northeast, though, is likely to remain the outsider. |
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Palash Biswas
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http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
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