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India’s Northeast is an arena where a great tragedy
has been unfolding for over eight decades, three of these prior
to Independence. The original communities inhabiting the region
are facing a sustained cultural, political and religious assault,
largely as a result of the movement of disadvantaged communities
from contiguous areas, particularly Bangladesh, and also through
a process of large-scale conversions as a result of competitive
missionary activity. The imminence of a loss of identity engenders
emotional responses that have led to mass movements, widespread
civil disorders, secessionist insurgencies and terrorism. Despite
decades of turmoil, the region remains an area of general neglect
in the literature. Only occasional research has shed small pools
of light on the multiplicity of problems that plague it.
In July 2001, a national seminar
was organised by the Institute for Conflict Management at New
Delhi on the theme, "Addressing Conflicts in India’s Northeast",
with the primary objective of exploring new perspectives on the
multiplicity of conflicts in the region, and to assess the efficacy
of conventional wisdom and past policies that have been applied
to the resolution of various problems there. The intention of
this Seminar was also to project voices and perspectives from
the region, and to create a greater awareness in a psychologically
insular Delhi, of the divergences in perception that may exist.
The present Special Volume includes, among others, several papers
that arose out of presentations at this Seminar, and is a continuation
of the effort to focus on India’s neglected Northeast, and on
the discourse on insurgency and terrorism that have arisen out
of the apparently unending turmoil in the region.
The discourse on terrorism is
also a discourse on development – though not, as many armchair
theorists believe, in the sense that the supposed absence of development
is a ‘root cause’ of terrorism, a doctrine that has been regurgitated
endlessly and fruitlessly by the well intentioned, though there
is little empirical evidence to support it. Rather, it is the
absence of terror that is a pre-condition of development – and
the question whether peace or development comes first can, in
my opinion, be firmly answered in favour of the former. My experience
in Punjab led me to conclude that there is a peace dividend: there
was an absolute explosion of developmental energies – which may
have been undermined by political corruption, incompetence and
betrayal in later years – but that could not be doubted when the
shadow of the gun retreated. Such a ‘peace dividend’ can also
be reaped in India’s Northeast, but economic transformations will
elude the region so long as violence thrives and undermines, at
once, security, the sphere of developmental and entrepreneurial
activities, and of governance.
The pace of development in the
Northeast has also been undermined because both the bureaucracy
and the political leadership have been unable to address the basic
and in-built inefficiencies of the system. The region has been
witness to many a Premier announcing what are popularly referred
to as ‘Northeast packages’ – billions of rupees of Central largesse
that is intended to ‘kick start’ the processes of reconstruction
and growth. Available evidence, especially in the immediate aftermath
of such announcements, has indicated that such ‘packages’ have
had negligible impact on the ground. The provision of large sums
of money to the Northeast has not been accompanied by the construction
of an appropriate delivery mechanism that can actualise these
large sums of money – where they are actually disbursed, since
promises have not always been fulfilled – in terms of viable developmental
schemes. Another problem arises out of the fact that models of
development being followed – and that may have been successful
– in other regions have, in the past, been applied mechanically
in the Northeast. Such strategies have not secured their targets
and objectives primarily because they have failed to address the
unique characteristics and immense diversity of the region and
its people.
The monumental neglect of the
village in the Northeast – similar, but in many ways greater and
more damaging than the neglect of the rural sector throughout
the country – has been a crucial factor in its spiral into violence.
Violence, in turn, has created an even greater hiatus between
the dispersed communities of the Northeast and the agencies and
institutions of governance and development, with few effective
efforts to reverse the processes of neglect.
The primacy attached to partisan
political, as opposed to developmental, agendas has also had the
most unfortunate consequences, with the leadership potential of
many individuals lost in, or destroyed by, the political morass.
Given the nature of the electoral processes, short-term considerations
have dominated leadership perspectives, and the long-term interests
of each State and the region at large have not only been neglected,
but have been actively damaged, with petty disputes overshadowing
and undermining all progress. The substantial quantities of money
that have flowed into the region have been spent in a manner that
generates little of a positive nature, and signs of backwardness,
even of further regression, are visible everywhere.
These trends can be reversed only
through an appropriate indigenous response to the twin challenges
of conflict and development in the Northeast. These response mechanisms
will have to be initiated through a method of trial and error,
primarily through competent officers in the field learning and
unlearning their experiences. They will have to take into account
large volumes of feedback from the people inhabiting the areas
of conflict, wherever these are, and will have to accommodate
micro-variations within such areas, strengthening what is positive,
and confronting and countering the elements and forces that have
trapped the region in cycles of violence and poverty.
Nevertheless, lessons of both
success and failure in other parts of the country must also be
examined and assessed for their relevance to the unique circumstances
of each conflict in the Northeast. While there is no simple ‘formula’
that can simply be imported from, say, Punjab or Kashmir, or even
within the region, from Mizoram into, say Assam, or from Tripura
to Arunachal Pradesh, there are elements of strategy and tactic
that can usefully be identified from the various campaigns and
initiatives in different parts of the country.
To take an instance, terrorism
in Kashmir has little in common with the insurgencies of the Northeast.
The former is clearly in the nature of a proxy war sustained,
today, almost entirely by Pakistan’s territorial ambitions. Increasingly,
however, evidence has been surfacing with disturbing regularity
of the expanding role and intervention of Pakistan’s covert agency,
the Inter Services Intelligence, in the Northeast, and of a widening
network of subversion and support for all manner of extremist
causes. Not only are there evolving linkages with the terrorists
in J&K, there are commonalties of method in the mobilisation,
support, training, arming and funding of groups in both regions,
with safe havens and camps located across international borders
in areas often sympathetic to, or dominated by, pro-Pakistan agencies,
populations and governments. Paresh Barua, for instance, today
controls the operations of the ULFA from the safety of quasi-official
hospitality at Dhaka – earlier under a regime that was deemed
‘friendly’ to India, and currently under one thought to be less
so.
The insecurities, ambitions and
machinations of our neighbours, consequently, are and will remain
a persistent problem. The greatest danger to security in the region,
however, is the incessant influx of foreigners into the Northeast.
And it is a problem that appears to defy all solutions, thus far,
though this substantially – though not entirely – is the consequence
of an abysmal failure of political will, rather than of objective
constraings. It is a problem, moreover, that will bedevil security
in the entire South Asian region in the years to come.
Assam, in many ways, constitutes
the key to peace in the entire region. If there is peace in Assam,
it can be extended to the other States as well. But the conflict
in Assam is not a military problem – and has never been one. Assam
is a settled society, with a strong civil society component that
was established centuries ago. Conflicts in such a society should
never be handled by the military until they go beyond a certain
very high threshold – and it is my belief that this threshold
was never reached in Assam. They must be resolved through the
instruments of civil society itself, and the police is one such
instrument.
Some decisions provoke a disaster
because they are fundamentally wrong; others because they are
inappropriately timed or implemented, and both these patterns
have been recurrent in the Northeast. Last year’s so-called ‘territorial
extension’ of the cease-fire agreement with the NSCN-IM is an
example of a failure on both these counts, though it was the latter
category of error that was overwhelmingly responsible for the
chaos that followed in Manipur, and the grave dangers of further
destabilisation throughout the Northeast that emerged as a result.
One of the basic reasons why the
government was totally ‘blind-sided’ on this issue is the inordinate
focus on the ‘peace process’ in Nagaland over the past years,
at the expense of other conflicts and problems in the region.
The fact is, in recent years, Manipur has been far more the ‘killing
field’ of the Northeast, and in the year 2001, for instance, violence
in the State claimed nearly 256 lives, as against 103 in Nagaland.
There has, moreover, been a complete collapse of the political
leadership in Manipur. Yet, like a machine with its central mechanism
broken, the engines of the ‘peace process’ continue to flay uncontrollably
about, contributing, instead, to an escalation in both overt violence,
and a far greater magnification of the potential for further conflict
and instability. As with much of governmental activity, the critical
link between the act, its intent and objectives, and the actual
consequences it secures, is disrupted as a result of the insensitivity
and myopia of key official players.
While it is not possible to go
into detail here, it is important to note that the basic premises
of the ‘peace processes’ in Nagaland, as in various other theatres
of conflict both within the region and in the rest of the country
are seriously flawed. While the government has announced that
it will ‘talk to‘ all shades of political opinion, it is clear
that the only groups who secure the Centre’s attention with any
measure of seriousness, are the ones who kill in substantial numbers,
or retain significant capabilities to kill. The greater their
violence or potential for violence, the more urgent and attentive
are the Centre’s efforts for a negotiated settlement. This sends
out various rather unfortunate messages: that India’s government
only negotiates on its knees; that groups that kill larger numbers
of people are in some sense more ‘representative’ of the aspirations
and desires of the same people; that terrorism and violence will
be rewarded by government recognition and endorsement of this
‘representative’ status; that democratically elected governments
can be short-circuited out of the loop as the Centre reaches out
directly to the insurgent leadership; and that extremist violence
is an acceptable ‘short cut’ to political power. These premises
produce distortions that undermine the utility of the peace processes
themselves.
It is important to note in this
context that, the secessionist fiction notwithstanding, the ‘Nagas’
are not a single, politically and culturally homogenous group,
with correspondingly homogenous political ambitions and aspirations.
Indeed, there are approximately 40 major tribes and sub-tribes
among the people categorised as Nagas, each of which speaks a
different language (though all these belong to the Tibeto-Burmese
group of languages), and many of whom have unrelenting histories
of internecine conflict. The NSCN split into the Isak-Muivah and
Khaplang factions precisely on issues relating to tribal rivalries,
and are substantially aligned on the basis of such identities
even today. There have, moreover, been ‘conclusive’ peace agreements
in the past as well. In 1975, the Naga National Council (NNC)
agreed to accept the Indian Constitution and abjure violence,
but a breakaway group created the NSCN in 1980. Today, with the
complex incentives and massive profits involved in the criminal
activities associated with insurgency, and with complex inter-State
linkages and consequences, negotiated agreements with one or other
local faction are far from a viable strategy to secure a permanent
peace in the region.
The core of the crisis in the
Northeast is, in fact, the inability of the States to develop,
equip and maintain a viable apparatus to execute their own law
and order responsibilities. This weakness is exacerbated by changes
in political dispensation and continuous politicisation of the
police, which undermine discipline and effectiveness. The result
is that the law and order apparatus is virtually run by the Centre
through para-military forces and the Army deployed in these States.
There is a de facto abdication of the State’s duties under
the Constitution with regard to matters concerning internal security.
Unless these trends are reversed, crude and imprudent interventions
by a distant, insensitive and often uncomprehending Central authority
will continue to provide unending fuel to the fires that burn
across India’s Northeast.
Much if not most of what happens
in India’s Northeast is seldom noticed outside the limited confines
of the region itself. There has been an election in Assam in the
year 2001 and a new government is in place – and of course, these
events were widely reported, as was the violence that preceded
these elections. Since then, however, the State has receded once
again into the shadowy netherworld of national consciousness.
There is little sense or awareness of the fervency of expectation
among the people who believed that the new regime may be more
faithful to its electoral promise than its predecessor was seen
to be; or of the increasing feeling of alarm among a people who
fear the possibilities of a new tide of violence in the succession
of attacks launched by the ULFA and the National Democratic Front
of Bodoland (NDFB) in areas that had, for some time now, been
more or less quiescent; or of the sweeping changes in counter-terrorism
strategy that the new regime spoke of in its first weeks in office;
or, indeed, of the administrative and economic vision that is
currently being articulated, and that needs to be assessed in
great detail, lest it result in continued failures that the State
can ill afford.
This is a time at which the State’s
efforts will need the greatest of support, irrespective of narrow
party affiliations and interests. In this, the Centre would do
well to remember that the key to peace in Assam is the defeat
or political neutralisation of the ULFA. It is also important
to notice that, though there has been a wild proliferation of
militant organisations in the State over the past years – there
are as many as 34 currently identified – it is the ULFA that is
the backbone of the insurgency in Assam, and most of the important
groups, including many that have apparently conflicting goals
and ideologies from those of the ULFA, are in fact, trained, armed
and supported by, and sometimes co-ordinate their activities with,
the ULFA.
The sense of loss of control in
Assam (and in the Northeast in general), notwithstanding, there
are tangible, achievable, goals within sight, and significant
advances have been made over recent years. Operations under the
Unified Command structure have virtually brought the ULFA and
its affiliates to their knees – though this was at a rising cost
in lives. An overwhelming proportion of recent casualties have
been among the ranks of the militants themselves, and their activities
have been contained within small corners of the State, where they
can still strike and manage to flee to safe havens across international
borders. That is why much of the militant violence in the past
year has taken a particularly aimless and brutal character, such
as the repeated incidents of mass killing of poor villagers and
woodcutters in forest areas in the Kokrajhar district along the
Bhutan border. What is needed now are strong, narrowly targeted
intelligence-based operations, within the ambit of the State police,
to bring substantially criminalised movements which lost their
political and ideological moorings years ago, to their logical
conclusion.
Along with these, however, the
Government will have to go a very long way to ensure the restoration
of the integrity of the administration, to plug the ‘leakages’
that have consumed virtually the entire pool of developmental
resources available to the State in the past, and to establish
a measure of administrative competence and efficiency demonstrably
superior to that of predecessor regimes. The administrative incompetence
of the Centre and the State must not be allowed to waste away
critical opportunities for peace which have been created out of
the blood and sacrifice of hundreds of security personnel, but
are destroyed by the crude and inaccurate picture Delhi has of
events and ground realities on the country’s periphery, and by
the partisan blindness of the local political leadership.
A great deal has been written
about the need for ‘new directions’, for a ‘creative’ vision,
and for the exploration of ‘radical alternatives’ in policy, to
address the crises of India’s Northeast. While such explorations
and an open and experimental orientation are essential to the
enterprise of democratic governance in such a complex, pluralistic
society, the fact is, the restoration of peace and order in the
Northeast demands much less. If even the minimal requirements
of good governance are met by a leadership that displays a modicum
of sagacity in dealing with the conflicting aspirations of different
ethnic and communal groups – entirely within the ambit of the
existing constitutional and legal order – the remnants of ‘legitimacy’
and presumed ‘public’ sanction for violent resistance that the
various insurgent groups currently benefit from, will vanish without
a trace. And in their wake, so will the terrorists and their leaders.
K.P.S. Gill
January 16, 2002
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