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HVK Archives: The seven about-to-vanish sisters

The seven about-to-vanish sisters - The Pioneer

Ashok Mitra ()
17 October 1996

Title : The Seven about-to-vanish Sisters
Author : Ashok Mitra
Publication : The Pioneer
Date : October 17, 1996

Elections, some sort of, have taken place in Jammu &
Kashmir. Few even amongst the devoutly patriotic minded
will have the taste or inclination to offer an affirma-
tive response to the query whether these elections have
been either "free" or "fair". Nothing is fair in love
and war. And if Kashmir was passion for Jawaharlal Nehru
half-a-century ago, it now connotes war to considerable
groups of countrymen. And war has its own codes.

But, then, Kashmir at least possesses a certain charisma.
It has made the agenda of the United Nations, on and off,
during these five decades. In contrast, the Seven
Sisters, in the North-East-Assam, Arunachal Pradesh,
Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura-do not
make even domestic headlines. The rest of the country
have only absentminded curiosity for the Seven Sisters;
perhaps not even that. The compliments are duly re-
turned; overwhelming sections in the North-East do not
feel to be any part of this nation. At most, they will
concede as being sullen, reluctant, discontented subal-
terns of the hegemony functioning in the Indo-Gangetic
Valley. The discontent inside is no longer in an in-
choate state. Determined young men and women are on the
rampage; they have been more or less on the rampage for
several decades now. There has been little variation in
the storyline during these decades. If insurgency abates
a bit in Nagaland, it rears its grisly head in Meghalaya.
Or in Manipur. Or in Tripura. Or in Mizoram. The
largest of the Seven Sisters, Assam, has, for all practi-
cal purposes, been a no man's land for the past few
years.

Out of sight is out of mind. The North-East is away from
the nation's mainstream of consciousness. A kind of vague
awareness did seep into the corridors of power in New
Delhi by the sixties that this sensitive border region
needed to be given some special attention. The operation-
al approach has however been consistently paternalistic.
A North-Easter Council, in which all the Seven Sisters
are represented, have met in perfunctory sessions every
now and then; under the Council, direction, well-meaning
essays have been written on the strategy or strategies
for transforming the economic conditions and at the same
time protect the ethnic and culture all persona of the
people inhabiting the region. The essays have remained
just that. The basic problem has been the failure to
identify the factors which have alienated the citizenry
here from citizenry in the other parts of the country. At
one end, any discussion on the issues of ethnicity or
languages has been purposely discouraged, but targeting
for comprehensive economic development has not made the
agenda either. To pick just one example, if only the
waters of the great Brahmaputra, one of the world's most
magnified rivers, were harnessed property, the plains in
the North-East would have been awash with irrigation and
capable of raising five to six crops annually instead of
the measly monoculture which is its current fate; the
production of power too would have soared. You however
need great minds to chart and execute great visions. A
certain petty-mindedness, instead, clouded the picture.

Mobilising the immense creative potential latent in the
Brahmaputra would conceivably entail inter-country nego-
tiations, involving Bangladesh and, who knows, perhaps
Nepal and China as well. The mandarins in New Delhi have
been undeviating in their resolve: The economic develop-
ment of the North-East could wait, Brahmaputra is our
property, no intruders are to be allowed any meddling
under any pretext.

The Army's role

The cynicism is not confined to the passive response to
the challenge of the Brahmaputra alone. Immaculate
sylvan surroundings have been left undisturbed, hardly
any railway network, few roads, sparse infrastructural
activity of all kinds, a couple of oil refineries, a
couple of mini-steel plants more as sops than as serious
industrial ventures, handicrafts and sericulture and such
like, adding up to a frame-work of low level equilibrium.
Meanwhile, the population has grown, unemployed youth
have swelled in numbers, the invocation of the theme of
national integrity has received a decisive response from
them. Once the season of breaking into expletives has
been over, they have drifted toward the insurgency road.
New Delhi has had other preoccupations, the North-East
has all along occupied a much lower order of priority
than Kashmir. What, after all, was the problem? Has not
the Planning Commission been asked to give the region the
pride of place among so-called Special Category States,
has not one-half or thereabouts of the Commission's over-
all Plan assistance been earmarked for it? But the issue
is not simply one of the quantum of funds dispensed. The
choice of personnel charged with the responsibility of
actually dispensing these funds could not have been more
disastrous. The deep calls to the deep; crooks discover
a commonality of interests with other crooks. The party
ruling long time at the Centre considered the north-
eastern states as its private territory. Chieftains were
picked who were keen to serve the ruling party's cause.
On paper, per capita plan and non-plan allocations for
the north-eastern states were higher than for the non-
Special Category States. It was a huge private racket
most of the money disappearing in shady deals.

As disturbing news of rising insurgency activity have
reached New Delhi, the standard riposte has been to
despatch additional regiments of Army and paramilitary
forces. These contingents have generally behaved hi the
manner of a conquering army in a vanquished foreign land;
every now and then raping a school girl, every now and
then bayoneting a schoolboy, every now and then snatching
the hooch an old woman was trying to sell to make a
living. The consequences are that more of the citizenry
have had their allegiance shifted to the insurgents.

Far harder days are now ahead. At least in the past the
Planning Commission could be goaded into making special
allocations for the north-eastern states: That these
allocations were not adequate or horrendously misused is
a different matter. We have now entered the era of full-
scale economic liberalisation. The Planning Commission's
role is henceforth expected to dwindle into insignifi-
cance; Plan allocations for development are supposed to
be phased out. This, the zealots will say, is as it
should be, private initiative will now take over, and
everything will be sorted out nicely. Just check with the

statisticians how much private capital has flown into the
north-cast since 1991 despite the most comprehensive tax
holiday dispensation declared for such investments. A
crore of rupees? A couple of crore? Conceivably not
even that. Private investors are not armchair academics.
They know which side their bread is buttered.

If, in the course of the next quarter of a century the
Seven Sisters get detached from India, part of the reason
will be the excesses committed by the marauding military
and paramilitary personnel. The other major reason win
be the excesses of economic liberalisation, which have
choked whatever possibilities that were there for public
sector growth.


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