Abstract
The book is a timely read not only because it narrates many ongoing incidents of violence and human right abuses in Northeast India but also because it sensitizes one to the fact that in India’s Northeast its grim past is still present and that present has even grimmer possibilities. With the proposed amendment to the nation’s citizenship law, it is feared that the region may once again be preparing for a fresh bout of turmoil. The bill, initiated by the central government, proposes to introduce a religious clause in the country’s citizenship act. If passed, virtually all non-Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan will be granted Indian citizenship. There has been opposition to the bill across entire Northeast; not because it challenges India’s secularism, but because, theoretically at least, it legitimizes all Bengali Hindu migrations to the region. Most liberal commentators who are gleeful at the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) discomfiture in this regard miss this point.
Read together with the on-going exercise of compiling a National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, the bill’s disruptive potential will be clearer. Subject to some revisions, the NRC has identified four million people as non-citizens. Whatever plans the government may have to manage the emergent situation, the idea has caught the imagination of all other Northeastern leaders. Against this backdrop, the book under review could not have been better timed. Edited by Preeti Gill and Samrat, this is an important book coming out of the region, and encompasses some of its most influential voices through a mix of genres which include seriously researched articles as well as personal narratives.
All the chapters that comprise the book underline the human concerns that must have driven its editors to compile it. The choice of essays, many of which deal with Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, is apt because it is probably the only city in India which has a curious history of evolving from a sleepy hill town into a cosmopolitan city and then sliding downhill to become one of the most parochial and violent places. Through several researched as well as personalized accounts, this collection of essays sharpens our perspectives on the socio-political cauldron that Northeast largely has become since Independence.
The essays by Sanjoy Hazarika and Suhas Chakma, both internationally acclaimed human rights scholars and activists, who also belong to the region, talk about the deeper problems that plague the region. Hazarika, in his article ‘Insiders, Outsiders and Those in Between’ drives his point forcefully when he writes about how simple it is in the region to brand anybody as an outsider/foreigner, regardless of their possession of citizen documents. What is more important is how in the accuser’s nazar (his conception) he is seen. In Nagaland’s business town of Dimapur, Syed Shafiuddin Khan was one such prey of this nazar. Syed Khan’s large family lived in Karimganj (Assam) and his sibling and father had served in the Indian Army. But those details were of little help when this rape accused was seen in the nazar of the locals as an Illegal Bangladeshi Immigrant (IBI). He was mercilessly lynched by the crowd. Hazarika tells us that the IBI is a new acronym to typify a Muslim of Bengali origin in the region (p. 176). As one Bengali Muslim (so-called miyah, as they are commonly referred to in the region) essayist laments that it is the constant refrain of his community that when they could not speak Assamese they were ridiculed for clinging on to their Bengali roots but if they can fluently speak the language they are accused of ‘putting on a show’, as if the heads the Assamese win and tails the miyahs lose (Hussain, p. 195). The same is true to the Chakmas, as Suhas Chakma argues in his essay titled ‘Outsiders in their Own Lands’, the difference is only with the contexts.
The experience of Shillong figures prominently in the book. Binayak Dutta in ‘Collapse of a Colonial Cosmopolity’ provides a fine historical sketch of the town. He tells how over the centuries the place became a popular destination for the aspirant youth who eventually transformed it into a cosmopolitan city. However, in due course, its cosmopolitanism gave way to narrow tribal parochialism once it became the capital of the newly created state of Meghalaya. In the shadow of Assam’s anti-foreigners agitation, Meghalaya’s anti-non-tribalism metamorphosed into an anti-outsider (dkhar) movement. Following the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985 the demands of the AASU became the demands of the Khasi Students Union (KSU) also whose slogan became ‘No detection, no election’. The state government succumbed to its pressure and the government of India responded by its silence. In 1987, the KSU intensified its demand saying that all foreigners (dkhars) should be deported. Interestingly, it called for the ethnic cleansing of non-tribals meaning it had no problem with other tribal communities from Northeast, including Meitis as they looked East Asian (Samrat, p. 154). Starting with Bengalis, the violence engulfed others like Nepalis, 10,000 of whom were evicted. Later even Biharis were not spared. Shillong’s cosmopolitanism was in tatters as the slogan ‘Refugees are foreign nationals’ resonated all over the place (Dutta, pp. 60–61).
Shillong’s ethnic problem had its origin in the Partition itself a subtext of which was the plebiscite in Sylhet in which the unsuspecting Hindus and Muslims had to cast their votes either for India or for Pakistan. As per the count, which was announced on 14 July 1947, a total of 239,619 voters preferred to join Pakistan while 184,041 voted for India. It was evident that Sylheti Muslims who were about 57 per cent of the population opted for Pakistan. This induced the Hindu Sylheti community to migrate to Shillong, then the capital of Assam, in droves. It appeared to be the best option then but things started changing as Shillong subsequently became Meghalaya’s capital. In the span of a few years, the same community was victimized twice for no fault of theirs. Anindita Dasgupta, whose family was one these twice displaced families, and Neeta Singh narrate this story of nostalgia in an essay titled ‘In Search of Lost Time’, a story not many Indians seem to be knowing.
In his essay ‘I, Dkhar’, Paramjit Bakhshi notes the overall national ignorance about this Bengali trauma. He laments how the Delhi-based TV channels seem to be so much concerned about small incidents of injustice against the Northeasterners in Delhi yet close their eyes to the atrocities perpetrated against the plain people in Northeast. ‘Do you all know that the murders of non-tribals have never been solved and not one person has ever been convicted for them? All cases against all communal troublemakers are routinely withdrawn by whichever government is in power (p. 146).’ Similarly, how many Indians know, as another contributor writes, about the tragic story of Gauri Dey (the pregnant wife of a Bengali college professor) who was gang-raped in front of her husband against all his efforts not to watch the gory incident? (Sen, p. 109). In a country like India, ‘minority and majority status’ are not a national standard as they are conveniently made to be but a stable variable. It is a dangerous oversimplification that overlooks the nuances that exist in a mixed populace, regionally. In situations where an apparently majoritarian population finds itself in a tight spot as a minority in a state, it is basically left to fend for itself’, notes Mahua Sen in ‘Chronicles of a Death Untold’.
The story of Manipur is quite similar; the only difference is that there the Indian state with all its commitment to national security and territorial integrity had nearly negated its other commitment which is equally important, that is, protection of human rights and dignity. Not many Indians are aware of the dubious tactics through which the constitutional monarchy of Manipur was integrated into the Indian Union (pp. 65–66). In ‘Phenomenon of Impunity’ Thounoujam Brinda who tells this story in detail refers to a selected high profile human rights violations that have dotted the political history of Manipur in recent times, namely, the Heirangoithong massacre, 1984; the Operation Bluebird of 10 July 1987 during which ‘a woman was forced to deliver her baby in the open field in full public view while the troops jeered’; the RMC and the Ukhrul massacres of 1995; and the Churachandpur massacre of 1999. The most tragic and well-documented case was, of course, that of Miss Thangjam Manorama, whose naked body was found with multiple bullet wounds in her private parts. The incident shook the conscience of the nation particularly after the nude protest that Meira Paibi (female torch bearers) put up in front of the Kangla fort in which the mothers stripped in front of the army personnel daring them to rape them (pp. 70–72).
Sonal Jain’s essay, appropriately titled as ‘Chronicle of Forgetting’ talks about the deeper question of how much one remembers or considers necessary to remember, of a tragedy. Is it not an in-built in human defense mechanism to selectively remember and forget for one’s own peace of mind and it happens often without one’s consciously doing so? In some other context, when this reviewer was addressing this question of memory he came across studies to show how memory research generally concentrated on unpleasant memories of individual victims of traumatic experiences which because of historical and other circumstances took the shape of collective memory over the years. The central theoretical question was: Does historical amnesia lead to reconciliation? Or, is the acknowledgment of past error a means to inter-ethnic, inter-religious or inter-state conflict resolution? Therefore, if reconciliation is the goal, is ‘the truth’ at all germane to that goal? The focus of the memory discourse all over the world is on collective memories: Who remembers what-what is selected, highlighted, amplified, modified or just not mentioned. Against this background, historical truth has often the chance of getting distorted; thereby the memories themselves get subjected to manipulation. In the context of historical encounters between peoples, cultures and nation-states, memory recollections range freely over unrestrained time and space. At times they can be cohesive, at other points in time, disruptive.
Academic research on societal conflicts is never-ending. So much has been written still so much is yet to be written, and more importantly, so much will never be written. Can all human feelings of all violence victims be ever recorded? During the tragedy of India’s Partition, a social worker called Gulab Pandit had noted: Itihas mein sirf naam aur tarikh sahi hoti hai, baaqi nahin (in Hindi, meaning: ‘in history books, only the names and dates are correct, not the rest’). Morton-Jack wrote recently in The Hindu (2018) that what the Indian soldiers wrote home was just a fraction of what they wanted to write. This was revealed in the seventies to a team of the American historians who interviewed all those who still survived. It was clear how much they had withheld for the fear of British censors. Still, it is quite possible that they did not say everything to the American team partly because of loss of memory or other mundane reasons.
In conclusion, let it be said that the book raises a serious challenge to India’s boast about its ‘unity in diversity’. Experience suggests that it should be rephrased as ‘Diversity in Search of Unity’. Drawing from our historical sense, the one thing that is constant in human history is inter-communal hate. But is there not yet another constant, which is equally powerful, and that is Hope. Is India not being constantly constructed and deconstructed and again reconstructed? Nation-building is a tortuous process, and there is no short-cut.