Fault lines come to haunt

Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior Journalist

History’s caprices have a way of catching up with the present times in the least expected ways. The shadow of the Partition has dogged and reshaped the history of three countries at all times but less seen and felt are the ramifications of a similar redrawing of borders demarcating the seven states of India’s Northeast that burst forth violently just when the troubled region seems to have made peace with itself. The irony could not have been starker when Assam and Mizoram went to ‘war’ recently. In ordinary circumstances, the use of the word ‘war’ to describe an intra-nation conflict might be unwarranted. But the sequence of events which erupted on the inter-state border between Vairengte (Mizoram) and Lailapur (Assam) last week reinforced the fragility of an entity that the BJP, like its predecessors, hoped would hang together largely through forced State agency and interventions. That’s not the way the seven ‘siblings’ will respond because unlike the Delhi establishment, regardless of which party is ruling, they do not perceive themselves as vassal states, even if they have accepted the terms of engagement set by the union government.

The violence on the border was not without precedent. In 1985, when Assam and Nagaland were ruled by the Congress, a 400-km-long battlefield was created around Merapani, a small village in Doyang reserve forest along the disputed border areas between Assam and Nagaland. Merapani, a village in Assam, was besieged by the Naga Armed Police, equipped with medium machine-guns, three-inch mortars and rocket launchers which flattened out the swath of land, killing 40 people, of who 30 were Assam policemen, and displacing close to 30,000 villagers. Nagaland maintained that the provocation came when the Assam forest department constructed a check- post a little ahead of the Merapani police station close to a habitation that was home to the Lotha Nagas. Assam’s version was that the assault was the culmination of a series of uncalled for attacks on civilians for over a month. The clash is chronicled in history as the 1985 war of Merapani. There was another intense combat in 1979, days after the Assam and Nagaland chief ministers, Golap Borbora and Vizol Angami, ratified a peace accord. Both were from non-Congress parties, Borbora from the Janata Party and Vizol from the United Democratic Front. Naga villagers, helped by the police, swooped down on the Chungajan Junction area, killed over 50 Assamese villagers and permanently converted the places around seven reserve forests into conflict zones, undaunted by the CRPF and the Assam Reserve Police’s vigil.

At the heart of the intra-states’ discord was a historical circumstance, going back to the colonial times: barring Tripura and Manipur, the other states, Meghalaya, Manipur and Nagaland, were carved out of Assam. Arunachal Pradesh, the largest north-eastern state, was birthed by a 1912-13 pact entered by the British India government with the indigenous tribes. NEFA was re-christened as Arunachal Pradesh in 1972, became a union territory, and attained statehood in 1987.

The borders were etched in a ‘hurry’, which is unsurprising, considering it took just seven days for Cyril Radcliffe to map the western and eastern frontiers and divide the subcontinent. Nagaland was founded as an autonomous state within Assam in 1957 and conferred statehood in 1963. In 1972, when Assam’s Lushai Hills were separated as the union territory of Mizoram (it became a full state in 1987), Delhi used the legacy boundaries drawn by the British in 1933, instead of revisiting the exercise and viewing it with an open mind. There was a catch. In 1875, the British used another boundary to give some territory to the Mizos under a law, Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873. This was overturned in 1933. The Mizos accepted the original 1873 one because they maintained it was done in consultation with their tribal leaders. By 1933, it was apparent that the colonial rulers had invested in the tea gardens on sloped land next to the Lushai Hills and developed commercial interests that turned their approach casual. Mizoram was like a palimpsest, whose borders were written and rewritten over and again, making it ripe for waging conflicts with its neighbour.

The breach between Delhi and the Northeast was caused as much by geography and history as cultural misinterpretations. With the BJP, the last factor is enacted through the Sangh’s familiar and insular tropes: bashing Christian missionaries, religious evangelism, meat as the favoured food, and the adoption of a Western lifestyle, perceptions which melded with the ‘parivar’s advocacy of nationalism (fuelled by insurgency) and pan-Hindutva. Assam is the only state that sits comfortably with the Sangh’s ideology.

While parts of Assam had serious reservations with the amended citizenship law that promised granting citizenship rights to all immigrants from Bangladesh, barring Muslims, the other states opposed it lock, stock and barrel, fearing that an influx of Bengali-speaking people would set off a demographic upheaval. Mariangela Mihai, an anthropology PhD candidate at Cornell University researching identity and ethnicity in Mizoram, recently wrote, ‘Thus, while the anti-CAA protests are discussed in terms of citizenship, identity and minority politics at a national scale, in Mizoram they highlight the invisibility of divergent indigenous politics at the margins of the state...Invisible as it may be, the long-term vision of Mizo resistance has powerful political consequences.’

There are signs of an Assam-Mizoram rapprochement. However, the temptation to politicise the strife from both sides, with Meghalaya politicians leaning on Mizoram, does not augur well in the quest for a long-term solution. The disturbing assertions of political leaders, notably the Assam and Mizoram CMs, has shaken the bedrock of the six-year-old North East Democratic Alliance, formed as a regional equivalent of the NDA and helmed by Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Assam CM.