Some ‘unusual’ things have been happening in Nagaland lately. On January 29, eleven political parties vowed to boycott the upcoming Assembly polls in support of ‘Solution before Election’, or a resolution to the Naga issue before a date with democracy. They included the ruling Naga People’s Front and — shockingly — the State Congress and BJP. It took sustained intervention by the high commands of the two national parties to rein in the State units and get them to reverse their stance. The situation, as things stand now, has been ‘managed’, but there’s still many a slip left before Nagaland goes to polls on February 27.
Like in Kohima over the past fortnight, the Indian state has been ‘managing’ the States of the Northeast ever since Independence. Sanjoy Hazarika drives home the point in Strangers No More , even as he illustrates how Central apathy and north-eastern alienation are joined at the hip. Part lamentation and part assertion, the journalist-academic-civil rights activist’s book details the uniqueness of a region that shares only 4% of its border with India and yet whose people grow more and more familiar with the idea of India and mainstream mores. Such an effort, however, isn’t matched from the other side, with the result that business as usual often translates into unusual in the mainland gaze.
Hazarika reveals a telling episode. On a visit, Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy, otherwise deeply empathetic about the iniquities visited upon the region, was shocked to read about Naga forces celebrating their national day with march-pasts and salutes in an open field. His words, “How can this be?”, are an eerie eureka moment for what has been a long-lived experience of the Nagas — where the official apparatus maintains a peaceful uneasy coexistence with parallel structures of state of the underground groups.
Hazarika is now India head of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, but has had a long career of reportage, activism, and peacemaking in the Northeast. Even allowing for the smokes and mirrors of back-channel diplomacy, he seems to have had an instrumental role to play in bringing NSCN chiefs Isak Chisi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah to the negotiating table over casual coffees in Bangkok. He was part of the five-member committee led by Justice Reddy that eventually recommended the scrapping of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, a report that caught the establishment by surprise and prompted former National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan to informally tell Hazarika, “Governments may come and governments may go, but AFSPA will remain.”
As one of the most prominent faces from the Northeast in Delhi, governments at the Centre have often turned to him for counsel. Long years of dealing with Delhi have offered limited success and not a little frustration for the author, and at the heart of his new book is an appeal to the powers that be to shed some insensitivity and acknowledge if not apologise for its excesses in the region.
Colonial influence
Hazarika does trace a lot of what ails India’s equation with its north-eastern frontier to colonial bequest: “… It is on the cusp of that irresolution (of precise territoriality) that many of the Northeast’s internal problems lie.” Also geography has historically dictated that the region look anywhere but westward. But seven decades of constitutional cohabitation ought to have yielded a mutually acceptable resolution. As the postcolonial experience shows, it’s easier said than done. The continuance of AFSPA across swathes of the region flies in the face of all logic, with declining levels of violence and most of the insurgents’ outfits a pale shadow of their past or in a truce with the Centre. Yet the Indian state has stood steadfast despite being shamed repeatedly, be it the iconic bare-breasted protest of elderly Meitei women at Kangla Fort in 2004 or Irom Sharmila’s 16-year-fast demanding the repeal of the draconian Act. Delhi’s implicit and explicit message is this: we will wear you down, by force and with indifference.
That message isn’t lost on its intended constituency. Mizoram is firmly in the Indian nation-state fold (which leads Hazarika to strip Laldenga off his revolutionary halo and ask if the Mizos deserved to be put through an air bombing of Aizawl and more for one man’s lust for power); Sikkim has all but forgotten its forced embrace in 1975; Assam, with a BJP-majority government in place for the first time, is perhaps more mainstream today than the mainstream itself; and the Nagas, for all their protestations, know in their heart of hearts that let alone an independent nation, they won’t even be allowed a Greater Nagalim incorporating Naga-majority areas from neighbouring States.
The fatalism of it all is well-trodden territory. What’s new in Hazarika’s ‘new narratives from the Northeast’ is the willingness of its people to go beyond stoicism and confront realities. A quarter of a century ago, the author surveyed a fractured landscape in Strangers in the Mist .
In Strangers No More he picks up from where he had left off, and the difference in the two titles is a measure of the distance the land beyond the Chicken’s Neck has traversed. Northeast circa 2018 is healing — never mind rapacious political leaderships, deep dissensions and ecological ravaging. And the people Hazarika calls the New Indians are striking back, not so much through confronting the state as by holding a mirror to the Everyman Indian.
Strangers No More: New Narratives from India’s Northeast ; Sanjoy Hazarika, Aleph, ₹799.
