:: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 ::

The Naga Conflict:

There is an excellent article in this week's EPW on the current Naga peace talks that seem to be offering a good chance for peace in the troubled region. The Naga insurgency launched in the 1950s is India's oldest irredentist movement and probably amongst the most intractable. Many times have I come across the rather rosy view of the Indian state that many Indians especially with an urban and middle class background seem to have; this is the fond belief in a pacific Indian foreign policy in the Nehru years guided by the Panchseel doctrine of Non-Alignment and the Gandhian legacy of non-violence and peaceful co-existence. In this self-serving narrative India perpetually offers the olive branch of peace to its South Asian neighbours only to be rebuffed and deceitfully stabbed in the back. Similarly on the Conservative wing there seems to be a perception that our security policy was excessively weak or accommodating to various elements that challenged the National security aspects of the State. The reality could not be more different; there is a peculiar historical amnesia at work here, which forgets the forcible integration of Junagadh and Hyderabad as well as the military action in Goa. Many times also have I entered into debates over State terrorism and the role of counter-insurgency operations carried out by the Security arm of the state in Human Rights violations and civilian atrocities; generally speaking I have found it relatively easy to defend the Indian state against these criticisms with the exception of Kashmir, yet the ambiguous and the shifting nature of so many of these conflicts make them hard to hold a good case of accusing the Indian state of practising its own form of State Terrorism. With one exception and that is the North-eastern insurgency movements (excluding Assam). The conduct of the State here has been nothing less that savage; mass internment of civilian populations, systemised torture, carpet bombing of settlements, unauthorised detainment and interrogation along with destruction of property and indiscriminate reprisals have been the norm for some time now. The cynic in me suggests the low visibility in the media and the general awareness amongst the Indian population outside the region is due to the ethnic "otherness" of the people involved as well as the historically weaker geographic links, slight economic ties and the lack of diaspora from the ethnic groups being targeted as well as the religion of the local population. The Naga insurgency has set the pattern for the other irredentist ethno-nationalists in the region in the way the conflict developed; in particular the repression by the Indian state even during the 1950s was severe in order to deprive the Naga militants from taking advantage of the decentralised village hutments that characterised Naga society and the cover of the hilly jungle terrain the Central government forcibly introduced a Hamlestisation programme that concentrated the previously dispersed Nagas into easily controllable and clearly demarcated fortified villages created by the army with the weeding out of the potential or suspected Naga nationalists and their sympathisers - prefiguring the notorious Phoenix Hamletisation programme carried out under American auspices in the Mekong Delta in Viet Nam. Of course the effort backfired spectacularly as the concentration of a previously disparate and dis-jointed population increased a Naga consciousness from what were previously isolated and distinct tribes that did not think f themselves as one people; it also undermined traditional tribal structures of authority based on groups of elders, giving more space to educated but disconnected youth to mount resistance and of course the feeling of being under the eye of an army of occupation added to the sense of being singled out and the objects of government by an external state rather than as citizen subjects in a representative democratic one. Needless to say the forcible collectivisation programme while destroying the old colonial era Naga society laid the basis for a modern one that proved even more antagonistic to the overtures of the Indian state. One paragraph in the EPW article struck me as very perceptive:

In the course of over 50 years of insurgent politics, both parties to the conflict have been made wiser by the actualities of the ground situation. While the Indian state seems to have realised that it would be suicidal to try to steamroll the wishes and aspirations of even the smallest nationalities which make up this multi-national country, those involved in the struggle to achieve an independent Nagalim seem to have accepted the need for a negotiated settlement of the issue. Much of the human tragedy that has occurred in the northeastern region may be said to have stemmed from the centre’s initial inability to comprehend the complex relationships and equations which mark the different nationalities which fill up the northeastern mosaic. Without going into the oft-repeated facts about the Naga struggle, it may be said that a little effort on the part of the government of India to understand the Naga mindset during the initial years of the problem could perhaps have led to a completely different situation. The NNC’s demand for the protection of the Naga way of life within an autonomous framework (the NNC was never clear on what it actually meant by self-determination) was viewed by the centre almost solely from one single angle – that of secession from India. It failed to see that the Naga issue raised some very central questions about the future of small nationalities in the Indian nation-state. This was a case of the centre’s inability to see the other viewpoint because of certain in-built prejudices and assumptions about small nationalities which seemed to be somewhat outside of the ‘mainstream’ of Indian politics and culture. And, as far as the insurgents were concerned, their initial response to state repression was marked by a general suspicion and hatred of everything that was related to the Indian subcontinent.

This captures so well, the traditional cycle of ethno-nationalist movements in the Sub-continent. With regards to India, it galls me just how easily so many of these conflicts could have been avoided with some accommodation and a limited measure of autonomy - in many ways a lot of the secessionist movements were actually created by the Central state like the Khalistani movement (bolstered by the Indira Gandhi govt to undermine the dominant Akali Dal in the Punjab) or the covert aid given to Tamil separatist Nationalists in Sri Lanka leading to the IPKF fiasco. In the end none of these movements were ever solved by purely military means and political accommodation which was loudly decried by the Central government at the inception of such movements were invariably the basis on which a peaceful resolution was pursued. This is the "u-turn" path, which so many of these political movements follow; One wonders as to why the State and the policymakers don't seem to learn from their mistakes.

:: Conrad Barwa 6:50 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Of Poetry & Partition:

Like many intellectuals, I have been disillusioned with Christopher Hitchens in this season of war. However he has written a nice article in The Atlantic magazine on "The Perils of Partition." I believe that he has misunderstood the political context of partition in the Subcontinent. Nevertheless, his article is worth reading if for no other reason than that it contains some rather nice poetry on partition. For example, Hitchens cites W. H. Auden's poem "Partition":

Unbiased at least he was
when he arrived on his mission,

Having never set eyes on this
land he was called to partition

Between two peoples fanatically
at odds,

With their different diets and
incompatible gods.

"Time," they had briefed him in
London, "is short. It's too late

For mutual reconciliation or
rational debate:

The only solution now lies in
separation ..."

:: Vikash Yadav 8:48 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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