If you have grown up watching Doordarshan you might remember the familiar term ‘North-Eastern States’. It was used to club together those extra states of the Indian Union, the useless appendages to the body, which only found mention anyway, when there was an insurgency or a land-slide.
A chance friendship in college altered my perception radically and I became more aware of the culture and the people of at least Manipur. Over the years I have made an honest attempt to not disregard these fellow Indians like many amongst us. It is a shame the way they are excluded from the mainstream. In the last 50 years of independence there has been little or no development, no job creation, not much government support. The alienation is so complete that they refer to what we would call the Central Government, as the ‘Indian Government’! And it is just too easy to blame them for their plight – “What with their insurgencies and all… they deserve it”, as a friend of mine had proclaimed once. But no sane human being can ever claim that the whole populace is involved in such extremism wherever it happens. When we look at Kashmir we talk of the ‘Healing Touch’, we talk of development to fight back extremism. We do not shoot the entire population for a few bad elements. We do not forget about the problem and let the military handle it in their own violent way. So why is the North-East so different?
A couple of years back I remember a youth from Nagaland livid on NDTV describing his colleagues in Delhi calling him ‘Gurkha’, ‘Bahadur’ and other such choicest names. But what appeared to irk him most was being called a ‘Nepali’. It was an affront to his right to be an Indian. It is precisely this attitude which is probably the root reason why we treat the North-Eastern states of our country so differently. It is probably because they are alien to us in terms of their racial features. Is this disguised racism practised by the entire Indian nation?
The 1958 Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act is another affront to the right of these people to be Indian. Living in the ‘largest democracy in the world’, millions of people face daily humiliation, arbitrary arrests, rapes, and custodial murders by branches of the Indian armed forces, without any possibility of redress. Under this Act a non-commissioned army officer of the lowest rank has the power to shoot to kill anybody, to enter and destroy any building and to arrest anyone without a warrant. The officer needs no permission from a superior, is not answerable to anyone, and does not have to justify his action to anyone. Under this Act the affected people have no right to approach the court for redress.
The demand for this Act to be repealed and her non-violent methods in support would do the Mahatma proud. But Irom Chanu Sharmila has earned another distinction – she has been recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records! According to the Guinness Book, it is the longest protest on a social cause by a single individual anywhere in the world. Sharmila, now 33, has completed four and half years of a fast-unto-death that she started immediately after the Malom massacre of November 2, 2000 in which security personnel killed ten innocent by-standers. A frail Sharmila is kept in a well-guarded ward of the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital, Imphal. She is force-fed with a nasal tube. The prolonged nasal feeding has caused severe complications to her health. Her condition is said to have deteriorated in the recent months. But she refuses to give up until the Act is repealed. (An article about her…)
Manmohan Singh has made a small beginning by handing over the historic Kangla fort in Imphal to the Manipuri people – a long-standing demand. He has also promised to review the draconian act. And most significantly for the first time he has made economy the prime focus. All the North-Eastern states combined has tremendous tourism potential with their rich flora and fauna and indigenous art, culture and heritage. But currently there is a plethora of official barriers that a foreigner has to cross to get a permission to visit. In the long run, there is maybe even a possibility of an Information Technology Hub which requires the least in terms of infrastructure (except maybe good air connectivity and a communication network).
More than fifty years of neglect and discrimination cannot be wished away in an instant and there are no miracle solutions. But a beginning has to be made, a chance has to be given – a chance for the millions of Indians living in the North-Eastern States, to feel what it is to be an Indian, to feel proud of being an Indian. Like the rest of us.