Stranger to the Land

Strangers of the Mist: Tales of War and Peace from India's North East

by Sanjoy Hazarika

Viking, Penguin

Books India New Delhi, 1994 ISBN 0 670 85909

The subtitle of the book promises tales of war and peace from the Northeast of India. Yet, more than 130 irrelevant pages are devoted to Bangladesh and Bhutan. The chapters on Bangladesh—three in the beginning and one at the end—do not have much connection with insurgency in the Northeast. A fetish with lebensraum has led Hazarika to waste many pages on Bangladesh when a couple of paragraphs would have been sufficient. Despite this prolixity, he is not convincing. Assam being swamped by Bangladeshis may have been the immediate reason for some dissatisfied youths to combine as ULFA, but this was just one of the many experiences that had convinced Assam of the Centre´s indifference. His account about Bhutan isdasho-sided. Even for a dilettante liberal that Sanjoy Hazarika is, his comments on the Lhotshampa´s predicament show lack of sympathy, research and objectivity. Why should people desert the house of their forefathers unless forced to do so? Would anyone voluntarily opt for the squalor of a refugee camp?

Hazarika is gentle towards the insurgents, ignoring their indiscriminate extortions and assaults on innocents, and more than considerate towards the armed forces, commenting generally on their tactless excesses. Only from the safety of the Annexure does he include a litany of their human rights violations. Otherwise, he suffers from amnesia as far as the uniformed forces are concerned. In his anxiety not to offend the powers that were, he has not given a credible explanation for the rise of insurgents in Na gal and, Manipur and Mizoram.

In Nagaland, it was the wanton killing, by some trigger happy army soldiers, of an aged and deaf Dr. Harallu who was taking a walk with his six-year-old grand-daughter one morning in 1956 that revulsed many young Nagas and convinced them that arms were the only way to seek justice against unsympa¬thetic authority. Till then, the situation was not hostile to India and with some forbearance (such as not increas¬ing armed forces, which was not done till now and has only helped heighten the alienation) the damage could have been limited.

Similarly, Hazarika has avoided mentioning that the sole reason for insurgency in Mizoram was not the outbreak of famine, the 1960 mautam, as he would like us to believe. It was instead the Government´s indifference to the mautam rs precisely predicted approach that upset the Mizo. In Mizoram, mautam occurs every 50 years or so, and in 1910 the British had prepared for it even though they had been there for only two decades. The Assam Government reacted only after the famine had gripped the entire state. This callousness was what caused the youth to revolt. What embittered Mizos most was that in 1947 their young had welcomed the union with India as they saw in the merger an end to the autocracy of their chiefs. Of all the 200 or so tribes in the Northeast, the Mizo were the least democratic. Another opportunity lost-Only in his description of insurgency in Assam, including the Bodo, is Hazarika accurate, but then it was closer to his time and he seems to have preserved his news-clippings. However, he does not say anything more than has already appeared in the press. He does not do the required research. He has ignored most incidents of brutality inflicted by ´the insurgents, each of which diminished the number of their sympathizers. And as to when uniformed forces of the Indian Army (who are trained to be disciplined) went berserk during the Bajrang and Rhino operations, Strangers of the Mist avoids mentioning even one incident. The author tends to ignore the suffering of ordinary people.

From- the book, Hazarika emerges as a person who is anti-communal and anti-racist, but timid. He writes about the Northeast insurgency without bothering to understand the causes and conditions that supported it. He repeats the usual platitudes of exploitation and indifference, but is more impressed with the spit and polish of army brass and the power that flows from the gun. The fact that Hazarika treats all authority tenderly and has a sneaking admiration for those in "power sticks out like an obelix over the landscape. He comes across as very pro-establishment, respectful of money-power, and incapable of understanding the desire to change Centre-state relations. This reading is reinforced when he glowingly describes a shady industrialist from Bombay setting up a synthetic yarn plant at Sipajhar near Tezpur, but nowhere in the book mentions the sole reason for Sipajhar´s notoriety in the Assamese mind—the brutal and unprovoked killing by the Army of two Guwahati veterinary surgeons and a child (all unarmed) one night in April 1992 when they were accompanying a wedding party. This selectiveness recurs throughout Hazarika´s book, and each time the lapses are to the benefit of the authority.

It is incidents like these in which innocents suffered that fed the insurgency and attracted converts. This is the nexus that Hazarika ignores or fails to detect. He is so confused about its origins that in pg. 120 he credits the need for ethnic identity as being behind the insurgency, and by pg. 283 he is claiming that hunger for land is what caused it all. Also, he could have dealt more informatively with the history of Assamese and Naga student politics. Since 1920, the students in these two regions have been in the forefront of a 11 struggles, and it is not surprising that students still provide the main support for insurgency in the Northeast. When the best and the brightest prefer a life in the jungles, there must be something wrong in our system of governance.

Hazarika´s book may be useful for a non-Northeastener to consult, but for those who know the region and its peoples he has nothing new to say. Insurgencies do not begin in a year or five. They simmer for years before the flashpoint is reached. In all cases, except that of Assam, the author has been blinded by flashes and fails to search out the origins.

I often wonder how altered the history of India´s Northeast would have been had we had more honest and humane administrators, such as Nari Rustomji, up and down the line, and less Army presence. Our present-day bureaucrats and politicians can learn from the restraint displayed by the then Governor J.D. Daulatram after the August 1953 Aching Mori incident in Upper Subansiri in Arunachal. Some Tagins, a fiercely proud and intractable tribe, on a misapprehension, attacked an Army escort column, killing45 soldiers. Predictably, the Army wanted to retaliate forcefully, but the Governor prevented it and a flashpoint was avoided. Today the Tagins seem to be a well-adjusted community.

Unfortunately, no lessons were learnt from this and other examples of restraint by those who came later to the Northeast. Violence is answered by excessive brutality, usually on innocents, and the people of the Northeast are left with faded dreams of economic justice, clean government and, simply, peace.

.If corruption, inequity and prejudice were reduced in the Northeast, insurgency could be contained. Despite so much provocation, exploitation and indifference, it is surprising that not one of the insurgencies in the Northeast has become a people´s movement. Only sporadically have they attained that status, whenever there are blatant violations of human rights by the uniformed forces. Without these violations, the angry youth would be isolated. The people in all seven states want peace, and an end to military-raj and insurgents´ writ. A sympathetic administration could use this latent yearning for law and order constructively. But so far, it is only the Rambos who dominate the policy chambers. This is another aspect that Hazarika has ignored.

Another amazing deficiency is Hazarika´s lack of knowledge of the topography of the area. He says that most Assamese homes have pukhris (ponds), whereas the ratio would be more like 1:50. Akhaura is not 150 km from Giittagong but more like 300 km, and Digboi is not 1000 km from Delhi, but 2500. Lakhipathar forest is close to Digboi but very far from Dibrugarh. These are minor errors, but when they are so numerous the fact is inescapable that Hazarika does not know the land well. And if an author does not know the land he cannot write convincingly about the insurgency. This seems to be the reason why he has missed many significant factors. ULFA survived for so long because Assam is predominantly rural. More important tactically, its villages blend into one another, with very few blank stretches on the roads, in the South Bank at least. This significant Assamese feature enabled the "the boys" to flit from one village to another, escaping detection till the Army adroitly neutralised this sanctuary by conducting a house-to-house survey based on land records, voters lists and ration cards.

Hazarika prefers not to go by significant dates and locations. Lungshim Shaiza´s killing in Ukhrul inl990andChah´eKevichusa´smorethanadecade earlier were milestones, and their mention was mandatory. And then, for a region that is as unknown to the rest of South Asia as is the Indian Northeast, Hazarika does not provide useful maps. The only one included is practically blank, and is aptly sourced to the Ministry of Home Affairs.

In the chapter "A Security Doctrine for the East" at the end of the book, Hazarika suggests fatuously that Indian forces should invade Burma to destroy the "drug factories" there. Is he ignorant of the fact that heroin can be produced with kitchen utensils and that these labs´ can be moved about a t will? Besides, most of these establishments are on the far (eastern) side of that country, which would mean traversing 1000 km of Burmese territory to begin the adventure. The rest of this chapter is similarly pointless and unfocussed.

What is also shocking is that even though the book was published in 1994, Hazarika has completely ignored the terrorism of the SULFA (surrendered ULFA), which by then was two years old. They extort and they kill, and they strut about as if they have been subsidised by the Government. This officially condoned reign of terror in Assam has not yet ended, but, unforgivably in a book that seeks to study insurgencies, it has been ignored completely.

Hazarika is fawning when he quotes KFS Gill about insurgents leaving behind "residual criminality". This might have been true for Punjab, which was afflicted not by insurgency (which has some cause) but by terrorism (which is unprincipled and brutal), but does not apply to the Northeast, where, additionally, the armed forces are equally guilty of this charge.

An author of a book on insurgency who can thank Gill in his acknowledgement will not have any startling tales to tell. The bottom line is that the truth is not yet out on the Northeast of India. We will have to wait for a braver person to do that.