Playing with fire in the Northeast

Furthering vested local and political interests has a multitude of implications for the Northeast. How has this impacted peace, autonomy and identity in the region?

The ethnic conflagration in Manipur is showing no signs of abetting, raising questions about both the government's competence and its lack of intent to respond effectively and efficiently to the crisis. It also leads to questions on whether the Manipur and federal governments are not responding effectively because they are pandering to vested interests.

Secondly, why has it taken more than 45 days for the Home Ministry to call for a comprehensive dialogue on Manipur?

Lastly, can a solution to the crisis be achieved within Manipur's existing territorial framework by granting extensive tribal autonomy and simultaneously addressing the Meitei people's crisis of living space? But if the Modi government just wants to let the state government hang on because it is a "double engine government", the crisis can engulf other neighbouring states.

In 1988, as the Congress, under a young leader Rajiv Gandhi, decided to oust the Left Front in Tripura to end a string of electoral reverses, it entrusted an aggressive Northeastern leader Santosh Mohan Deb to lead the charge. Playing the majoritarian Bengali card, Deb accused the communists of links to the tribal underground, latching on to Chief Minister Nripen Chakraborty's push for tribal autonomy and his determination to find a political solution to the state's tribal insurgency problem. Chakraborty refused to seek a military solution to avoid alienating tribal youth and said, "The army can only come over my dead body."

Also Read | NPP stressed on need for healing touch: Conrad Sangma after attending all-party meet on Manipur

The Tribal National Volunteers (TNV), a Tripuri nationalist militant group, unleashed an orgy of violence in the run-up to the 1988 elections. The Bengali settlers, who constituted 73% of Tripura's population, voted with their feet to oust the decade-old Left government. But within three months of a Congress-led coalition coming to power, the TNV signed an accord with the Centre for peanuts.

It was later alleged that the rebel group had a secret understanding with Mizoram's Congress Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla who, in tandem with Deb, used the rebels to discredit the Left and cash in on the majoritarian sentiments. That, if the allegations were true, was as Machiavellian as it could get.

Similar efforts by the Congress government at the Centre to oust the Left in West Bengal by secretly backing the Gorkha agitation in Darjeeling backfired when Jyoti Basu played the Bengali majoritarian card and raised the slogan of "not another partition" of Bengal in 1987. But the Congress succeeded in ousting the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government in Assam by secretly backing the Bodo-armed movement for a separate state to be carved out of several districts in western Assam.

When the AGP government led by young student leaders Prafulla Mahanta and Bhrigu Kumar Phukan failed to handle the Bodo violence alongside the United Liberation Front of Asom’s violent campaign, the Centre imposed President's rule in 1990 and brought in the army to save Assam from terrorism.

When PM Narasimha Rao's man Friday Rajesh Pilot led the 1993 Bodo accord, Chief Minister Hiteswar Saikia torpedoed it by challenging the proposed boundaries of the Bodoland Autonomous Council on the grounds that more than 50% of the villages in that area did not have a Bodo majority. The Saikia-Pilot tussle cost Assam the peace it was desperate for and the Bodo angst snowballed into a huge conflagration in 1996, with ethnic violence resembling the present imbroglio in Manipur — lakhs rendered homeless, dozens killed and scores more injured.

Track records

The Congress' track record in the Northeast has many bright spots like Lal Thanhawla stepping down as chief minister to pave the way for a final settlement in Mizoram in 1986 — but it also has as many dark spots like the 1988 Tripura conspiracy or the one in Assam.

The BJP began its innings in the Northeast by playing the honest broker — the Bodo problem was resolved during its tenure in 2003 but after years of pussyfooting. The Naga talks that started during the Devegowda government in 1997 are yet to lead to a final settlement. This is despite the much-publicised 2015 Framework Agreement that generated hopes of a lasting solution to India's oldest ethnic rebellion. The Vajpayee government's naivete in extending the Naga ceasefire to the whole of the Northeast provoked massive mayhem in the Imphal valley in 2001 before it was hastily withdrawn.

But the recent conflagration in Manipur, spiralling out of sporadic clashes between the majority Meiteis and the minority Kuki tribespeople, has driven home three realities that both Delhi and the Northeastern states can overlook only at their own peril.

Firstly, majoritarianism makes sense in electoral politics and may have helped the BJP attain power in Assam, Manipur and Tripura, but it fuels conflicts which India can ill afford in the sensitive Northeast. This is especially so in Manipur, which is the country's land gateway to Southeast Asia.

The Northeastern region, especially Manipur, is key to India’s Look East or Act East policy by land — to bring in Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar into India’s embrace. But with the failure to find solutions to issues such as the Naga imbroglio and now, this ethnic conflagration in Manipur, our internal troubles in the region will hurt our foreign policy outreach to Southeast and East Asia. Such an ambitious outreach cannot work out if the region is so disturbed.

Second, the tribal aspirations for autonomy and self-rule, if ignored, can create high levels of alienation that lead to armed movements with secessionist overtones and may lead to further vivisection of states too small and unviable in terms of resources.

Thirdly, the politics of identity, unless deftly managed, can spin out of control and lead to what political scientist Sanjib Baruah describes as a "durable disorder".

There is a fourth lesson specific to BJP with its penchant for Hindutva politics — layering a complicated ethnic conflict as in Manipur with religious overtones (turning the Meitei-Kuki conflict into a Hindu-Christian one) is fraught with severe consequences because it can spill over into neighbouring states like Mizoram and Assam, engulfing the whole region.

Double-decker failure

The present crisis in Manipur has led to a revival of demands for a separate Kukiland and even the integration of Kuki areas of Manipur with Mizoram because the Mizos and Kukis are ethnic cousins, as much as the Indian Nagas and Burmese Nagas are. The Meiteis, though a clear 53% majority in Manipur, are under the pressure of the powerful homeland demands of two large trans-border battling ethnicities — the Nagas and the Kuki-Chins. Without careful handling, this can spin out of control. One needs real political imagination in Delhi and the Northeast to handle the evolving crisis, not imaginative political slogans like "double engine sarkar" in the midst of a double-decker failure to handle the crisis in a timely manner.

The withering away of the Manipur police from being a professional force which has successfully fought multiple insurgencies over the decades and the collaboration of many personnel with troublemakers from their own communities also raises the uncomfortable spectre of how vested political interests can undermine institutions critical to efficient state functioning. The comic spectre of dropboxes put up for the collection of weapons given out to troublemakers by the police has another lesson for the whole region — if local politics is divisive and fails to promote a multi-ethnic state identity, it can ruin the institutions that hold a state together.

Those in the BJP seeking to hype Modi's popularity and his many travels to the Northeast should realise that casual tourism at official expenses is no guarantee for an effective policy response to the crisis that now engulfs Manipur. Amit Shah's five days in Manipur are yet to lead to control over violence, let alone kickstart a dialogue for peacemaking and resolution of thorny issues like tribal autonomy and living space for the majority Meiteis.

(Subir Bhaumik is a veteran BBC-Reuters journalist and author of acclaimed books on India's Northeast like ‘Insurgent Crossfire’ and ‘Troubled Periphery’)