Aheli Moitra
On the evening of February 4 this year, a few good men walked into our office. They were youth activists here to tell a story of an unlucky young man on a regular day.
He was to take a train to Guwahati on the night of February 3. The Indian Railway Protection Force (RPF) at the Dimapur railway station beat the youth up so mercilessly that he has not yet woken up from coma at a hospital in Guwahati.
Preliminary reports suggest that the youth was trying to charge a phone from one of the sockets at the railway station which the RPF personnel objected to. Whatever the counter version of the RPF may be, do they have the right to beat someone to a coma? And is the offence of putting a fellow human being through emotional and physical damage of this kind bailable, as the justice system has allowed for in this case? It raises a question on the system itself that lets public security officers assault civilians and then lets them free.
But the man with a gun on the streets of Nagaland has become more powerful than the minions of peace.
A businesswoman was shot dead in the heart of Dimapur town in December 2015. This was the second, this time successful, attempt on her life. In January 2016, another man was shot dead in Dimapur. On February 2, a civilian in his late 30s was shot dead, in Dimapur again. On February 6, a young couple, on their way from one home to another, were shot dead using multiple rounds with sophisticated weapons. On February 7, the dead body of a man was found strung up, by the neck, to the goalpost of a school playground.
This is just a part of the violence meted out every day to marginalised and oppressed communities. The local print media, and the sub-continental media, is unable to reach or report most of these stories. And even as a State Government media advisory exists to be careful on coverage from the peripheries, the social media brings horrors, as in the case of the last two killings, to multiple screens around us—have we even forsaken ethics that respect the dead?
Where institutions have been unable to bring about reasonable methods to resolve local conflicts, or even a just society in general, militarisation is the easiest way out. And that is what the State and Central governments have done. Problem? Let’s beef up the police. Or better still, the paramilitary forces. Kiphire and Tuensang did not boil over the day before yesterday. On March 5 last year, even these flimsy arrangements were not bothered with. By the time the State woke up, made lethargic comments and some arrests, it was already time to bail the culprits out.
Ad-hoc responses to deep-rooted problems have imperilled the lives of all citizens. The State has become a threat to the population it is to be the caretaker of—it has put into coma the youth it is to ensure a future to. They have reduced survival to a matter of luck, or the lack thereof.
The Hindu mythological character Kumbhakarn comes to mind. The giant held an accidental curse of sleeping for six months before being woken up for six more during which he ate, ate and ate. Once, when urgently woken up by a thousand elephants walking over him, he fought a war he had little assessment of. The rampage he let loose led to his own beheading. The Government may want to look that story up.
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