[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

legitimized or unnecessarily placated because such actions
encourage other rebel groups to surface.
6. Once displacement has taken place, it is important to provide
security to the affected population and organize their return
to ancestral villages as soon as possible. Delay may turn the
camps into recruiting grounds for militant groups.
7. Security operations should be further humanized and draco-
nian acts like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act should
be scrapped. Greater emphasis should be on strengthening
intelligence so that only genuine insurgents are targeted and
no police or military unit should be allowed to go ahead with
Manipur or Assam-type secret killings in which relatives of
insurgents, innocent civilians, are targeted.
8. Saturation deployment of security forces should be avoided,
force levels should be decided after meticulous calculations
of actual requirement because efficient and coordinated hand-
ling of forces under Unified Commands reduces the need for
too many men in uniform on ground and that can ease tensions
even in the worst of insurgency theatres.
Into the first decade of the new millennium, India s North East stands
at the edge of a new reality. Return of peace and imaginative plan-
ning can ensure a turnaround for the economy. Restoration of pre-
Partition links with neighbouring countries can work wonders for
trade and business. Resolution of the conflicts that have festered can
set the stage for the creation of better transport and communication
infrastructure. Multiplicity of identity is acceptable as long as it does
not become a source of continuing conflict that saps the vitality of an
otherwise vibrant region. Identity-management and development of
a political culture of tolerance are needed in the North East.
The Road Ahead 279
Ethnic identity is highly contextual. Donald Horowitz points
out that  in what was the eastern region of Nigeria, an Ibo may,
for example, be an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo, but in Lagos,
he may simply be an Ibo and in London, he is a Nigerian .7 Much
like an Angami in Nagaland will become a Naga in Delhi and an
Indian in London. Even rebel leaders who fought India s state-centric
nationalism for several decades, like Muivah, now travel on Indian
passports. Horowitz details many situations where battling ethnicities
realized the futility of perpetuating the conflict and decided to manage
it. northeast India is one region that desperately needs an agenda
of ethnic reconciliation that can be implemented both from the top
and at the grassroots because if the ethnic conflicts intensify and
there are indications that this could happen in states like Manipur,
Tripura and Assam the drug lords will step in to take advantage
of the disturbed conditions, forcing the region to remain a troubled
periphery with no light at the end of the tunnel.
LOOK EAST VAGARIES
The essential logic of a  Look East foreign policy and the way the
North East is seen as fitting into it is not difficult to see. India s efforts
to use the North East as bridgehead to link up with the tiger economies
of South East Asia and China is in keeping with the emerging dynamics
of Asia s geo-politics and geo-economics. But if that becomes a
justifi cation for Delhi s growing bonhomie with the xenophobic
Burmese military junta at the expense of India s natural allies in the
pro-democracy movement, it would adversely affect both India and
its North East. Burma will never attain its pre-independence economic
pre-eminence unless it can get rid of the military junta and become
a democracy. The military junta is in China s interest Burma will
remain a Chinese backyard so long as the generals run the country
and its resources will be freely available for Chinese exploitation. But
only if Burma becomes a democracy can it attract huge Western and
Asian investments that will help its economy grow like neighbouring
Thailand. And if Burma remains a basket case, India s  Look East
will bump into the Great Wall called Myanmar (as Burma is now
called) and go no further. All the grandiose transport links through
Burma will remain ineffective.
280 Troubled Periphery
At the moment, India is only playing a catch-up game with China
in Burma. So it is placating the military junta. This will not help. The
generals have not obliged India by attacking the North Eastern rebels
in its territory; they are sending the Arakan gas to China through
a pipeline now under construction; they are doing nothing to stop
the flow of deadly drugs to India. India also enjoys an adverse trade
balance with Burma. In the last decade or so that India has tried to
play footsie with the Burmese generals, Delhi has achieved very little.
So as the Pagoda Nation heads for its first elections in two decades,
India should join the West in decisively supporting the pro-democracy
movement and National League for Democracy headed by Nobel
Laureate Aung Sang Suu Kyi.
India not only has to overcome the democracy deficit in its North
Eastern region. It has to play a decisive role in overcoming the
democracy deficit in the immediate neighbourhood. Bangladesh has
voted the Awami League back to power with a decisive and sweeping
mandate. But as the February 25 Bangladesh Rifl es mutiny shows,
the Awami League regime is always in danger of being subverted by
Islamic fundamentalists who enjoy access to huge petrodollar funding
from the Middle East. Much as it is important for India to have the
secular-democratic Awami League-led alliance in power to sort out
the North East s problems of trans-border insurgency and for restoration
of the region s pre-Partition transport links, it is equally important
to have a democratic regime in Burma to address India s security
concerns emanating from the insurgencies, from the growing illegal
trade of drugs and weapons and to counteract China s growing in-
fluence in the Pagoda Nation. Supporting the cause of democracy
in the neighbourhood is not wasteful luxury for India it is a sound
investment in securing its own position in the North East.
Basic structural changes in the polity to accommodate the aspir-
ations of the battling ethnicities of the North East will nicely fit in with
efforts to turn the region into a trans-national economic space linking
India with the economies of South East Asia but this will work
only if the neighbourhood is freed from the pernicious influences
of military rule or fundamentalist control. So a democratic Burma
and a secular-democratic Bangladesh is essential for a trouble-free
North East.
The Road Ahead 281
For early four decades, people in India s North East have lived
in the shadow of the gun. The literature of the region reflects this
unfortunate reality. Indira Goswami s The Journey, Arupa Patangia
Kalita s powerful novel Felanee and short stories like  Someday,
Sometime Numoli , Manoj Goswami s Samiran Barva is Coming,
Sebastian Zumvu s story  Son of the Soil , Temsula Ao s  These Hills
Called Home: Stories from a War Zone , Binabati Thiyam Ongvi s
story,  He s Still Alive , Dhrubajyoti Vrora s trilogy on the insurgency,
Rita Choudhury s novel Ai Samay, Sai Samay (These times, Those
Times), to name a few, have dealt with these themes in much detail.
Aruni Kashyap s first novel, The House with a Thousand Novels
explores why so many young people in the region have taken up
arms to fi ght the Indian State. This is something that Delhi needs
to seriously ponder about before it works out a coherent policy for
the North East.
NOTES
1. Sanjib Baruah, 2002.
2. Sanjib Baruah, 2003b. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • alwayshope.keep.pl

    •