THE growing ethnic consciousness and insecurity among various ethnic groups in Northeast India on the eve of independence led to various demands for autonomy. These movements did not start as a militant one at the outset. When the grievances of the ethnic communities were not redressed, this discontentment manifested in the form of unrest. In the words of Subir Ghosh, “either frustration or sheer conviction that might is right pave the way for violence”. Ethnic consciousness and insecurity and the menace of migration, among several factors, were the major roots that led to the spurt of enormous insurgent groups in the Northeast during the initial period of independence.

In Assam, illegal migration was, in the words of Myron Weiner, “the prime contributory factor behind the outbreak of insurgency in the State. There is a tendency to view illegal migration into Assam as a regional matter, affecting only the people of Assam. Its more dangerous dimension of greatly undermining our national security is ignored.” On the eve of Indian independence, there were two opposite forces operating in the region — one, a pan Indian sentiment seeking to integrate and be a part of a single Indian nation state; two, another regional, religious or ethnicity based sentiment which sought to secede from the prospective Indian nation state and seek its national destiny independently.

The Naga insurgency was the first to rise and be followed by similar movements in Manipur and the then Lushai Hills district. From the late 1980s, almost every ethnic group in the region formed their own insurgent group. In the Naga Hills, the unsatisfactory responses of the British and post independence Indian government to the autonomy demand of the Naga National Council paved the way to Naga insurgency. Though the Indian government tried to accommodate the aspirations of the Nagas in the subsequent years, the Naga insurgency already had diversified ideologies among its leaders and negotiations always produced dissenters, continuing the movement. Paul R Brass views that the state governments in India often pursued assimilative and discriminatory policies in relation to minority groups within their jurisdiction. In the undivided Assam, the Assamese political elites played vital roles in the integration of various hill areas in the post independence period, and they wanted to assert dominance in the form of language in the region. Girin Phukon made a succinct observation:

“Strange enough it may seem, while the Assamese elite wanted to protect themselves from Bengali dominance, they at the same time wanted to see the emergence of the whole North Eastern Zone as a single political unit having a common culture. Somehow, they did not see that their idea of Assamese becoming the language of the whole of the North Eastern region was in some ways similar to the Bengali idea of enforcing the legitimacy of Bengali as the language of this area.”

This language chauvinism was mainly responsible in instilling a sense of insecurity among the Mizos and other tribal communities of Assam. The failure of the Indian government to tackle the outbreak of famine in the Lushai Hills, subsequently, resulted in the outbreak of insurgency in the Lushai Hills district of Assam. The Mizo insurgency ended with the signing of Mizo Accord in 1986, which created the present Mizoram from the Lushai Hills district of Assam.

In the princely state of Manipur, the Indian state adopted different tactics of coercion to integrate Manipur with the Indian Union, which had left deep scars in the minds of a section of the Meiteis. On 21 September 1949, the maharaja of Manipur was forced to sign the Merger Agreement in Shillong, which merged Manipur as Part C State of the Union and the democratically elected state assembly was dissolved. Following the dissolution of the Assembly, Hijam Irabot, a member of the dissolved council, went underground. Although Irabot died six years later, in 1955, the seeds of protest that he had shown germinated into a full blown militancy by the early 1960s.

Many Meitei revolutionary groups were formed later, seeking a pan Mongoloid movement against what they termed as ‘Indian colonial rule’. The Kuki communities in the hills of Manipur also protested against the integration of Kuki areas in Manipur, emphasising the independent existence of the Kukis in the pre colonial period and even during the British rule till 1919. They demanded a separate state for the Kukis within the Indian Union. In this regard, the Kuki National Assembly had submitted several memoranda to the central government since 1961, and stated that they were accidentally brought under the territory of Manipur by the British and that they have the right for a separate territory.

Insurgency in Tripura is mainly the offshoot of massive migration of Bengali Hindus from the then East Bengal, which was driven by the fear of religious persecution in the wake of the Partition of Bengal in 1947, and later by the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. As a result of this large scale migration, the state witnessed a major demographic change, reducing the tribals into a minority. The unabated influx from Bangladesh, increasing marginalisation of tribals in their own land and the dependence of New Delhi almost wholly on the Bengali dominated bureaucracy alienated them. Subir Bhaumik pointed out that the tribals had good reasons to feel marginalised as foreigners in their own land, as the successive Congress governments showed little concern for tribal sensitivities. Thus, insurgency in Tripura, adds Bhaumik, is the inevitable manifestation of a socio psychological paranoia of outsiders, resulting from a process of marginalisation that saw the tribal peoples of Tripura deprived of the bulk of their lands and excluded from the state’s economic and political decision making.

Since its formation, the Tripura National Volunteers has been engaged in attacking non tribals. The Bengalis had struck back by forming the United Bengal Liberation Front and engaged in anti tribal violent activities. This ethnic conflict between the Bengali settlers and the indigenous tribals has only intensified over the years. Due to the constant engagement of the Tripura government to bring insurgent groups to a negotiating table and their efforts to reduce discontentment among the tribals through developmental programmes and other public policies, insurgent activities have now reduced to a minimal level.

The above is an excerpt taken from the chapter ‘Political Impact of the Look East Policy’ by Thongkholal Haokip

Excerpted with permission from India’s Look East Policy and the Northeast

By Thongkholal Haokip Department of Political Science, Presidency University, Kolkata

SAGE Publications, India

ISBN 978-9351501015

212pp.

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