Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora
Most of us are adept at repeating axioms uncritically. Northeast India’s plurality, with its diverse ethnic groups, is one such axiom that is reproduced with regularity by tourist brochures and advertising agencies. The deaths of two students in Bangalore and Manesa, have reopened this debate in the media. Television anchors have rushed in to interview people from the Northeast, especially those involved in public affairs in order to find a simplified answer to the ferment resulting out of the two deaths. Yet again, we are forced to confront the stock images of isolation, integration and alienation of the region and its peoples. In doing so, we forget that in the last sixty years, the only kind of traffic into the Northeast has been one dominated by military personnel and bureaucrats eager to serve out their time in the frontier. Their accounts of the place and its people were important in creating lasting impressions in the minds of a temporally distanced audience. Their mission was to make sense of the inchoate murmurs and occasional shouts that emanated from this strange lands and its peoples. They were responsible for disciplining and tempering these voices in their narratives of the place, to a national audience and to national institutions that they represented. These accounts were commensurate with the powers that were wielded by the person narrating them. It is not difficult to see how stereotypes became more pronounced, as the need to explain the exceptional became more pressing.
Children would have asked their fathers about the frequency of their trips to the far-off Northeast at the end of every furlough. Like children everywhere, they would have wanted to know why their fathers were leaving and what they did when they went to the distant hills. No answer to such questions can be mundane, not when the father has had the power to kill children – like his own – and not be obliged to feel guilty about it. This sense of impunity travels up and down a chain of command and welds together a behemoth of frightening proportions. The answer to the child’s question would have defended this impunity, for there can be no other explanation to the extent to which it has found its commonsense justification in public life in India. Barring a few dissenting voices, all the institutions of the state and the vast multitudes, continue to rationalise this inhuman state of affairs. While the logic of militarisation might have begun with the promulgation of draconian security laws like the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), one can be sure that it will not end with its repeal.
If anything, the tragic but almost mundane frequency of violence against people from the Northeast shows that the logic of militarisation has percolated down and sprouted new branches. In more than five decades, violence against citizens of the Northeast have been normalised under the auspices of a security dispensation that defy democratic principles that are found elsewhere in the country. One only need to look at the political polarisation arising out of nation-wide laws such as Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (TADA), and contrast it to the lack of interest on the institutionalised state violence permitted under AFPSA. In localising the effects of AFSPA and its allied security laws to the Northeast and Kashmir, the government of India also ensures that there is a self-perpetuating myth for the need to maintain such exceptional measures within the country. The criminalisation, sexualisation and infantalisation of the Northeast and its peoples, are the blocks upon which the myth is able to stand. The soldier’s (or bureaucrat’s) children have grown up to inherit this disturbing, callous view of a part of the country and its peoples. The polemical apposite possibility of this condition means that landlords, employers, shopkeepers and others have begun to internalise the impunity that accompanies this country’s dealing with the Northeast.
These are difficult times for people from my region. Several decades of conflicts have cannibalised our public institutions and systems of local governance. Land, that used to be the basis of social cohesion and security, is being auctioned out to powerful persons and corporations. Despite the government of India’s constitutional safeguards for indigenous peoples in their homelands, there is a counter-intuitive out migration from the region. More people have left their homes in the Northeast to join the informal labour markets and in search of a better life in the last decade, than they have since India became independent. They carry with them personal histories that will shame votaries of India’s famed democratic and non-violent values. Pushed to the wall, many from the Northeast will also speak of their fantasies of revenge and retribution, but that is something that nobody wants to hear or believe. Personally, I feel that we have run through the gamut of collective responses that may be expected from commentators from the Northeast (including this writer), to the extent that our outrage is getting predictable. What would be infinitely more interesting is to see what the mirror – in the form of institutions that uphold probity in national life – has to say to us.
xonzoi (dot) barbora (at) gmail (dot) com
