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India’s hegemony unmasked: The case of Northeast India
(To be published in the International Socialist Review at the end of 2008)
Sriram Ananthanarayanan (sriram.inqilab@gmail.com)
The Indian state with all its attempts at portraying itself to be a peace-loving democracy, whose economy valiantly rockets upwards, foreign company takeovers and all, pushing the country into one of the elite league of superpowers in the 21st century often finds acceptance with mainstream international media houses. However the seemingly benign nature of the Indian establishment would nevertheless find it hard to cover up its sub-imperialist hegemonic nature within South Asia and sometimes parts of Southeast Asia. A parallel drawn to Israeli militarism in West Asia is certainly not unwarranted, and indeed the historic proximity of one and the new bonhomie of the other towards the US and its own imperialist program are not altogether coincidental.
Contrary to its own self-perception and the one attempted to be broadcast internationally, a mainstream viewpoint of India found in all other countries in South Asia, including ones with huge militaries themselves like Pakistan, is one of a regional bully. Bangladesh often finds itself on the receiving end of Indian development projects utilizing the numerous rivers that flow through the country apart from the constructing of Indian fences along the Bangladeshi border to placate Indian xenophobia resulting in ruined commerce interactions and livelihood for villagers on either side of the border. Sri Lankans, both Sinhalese and Tamils, have for long spoken of Indian imperialism, alternatively supporting both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military, including the brutal Indian Peace Keeping Force sent to the tiny island nation in the 1980s. Indian monopoly capital has made huge inroads into all neighbouring countries in South Asia, resulting in immense resource usurpation. Tinier nations like Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan are essentially forced to act as Indian client states with the Indian military expanding and conducting operations in them as they please. Pakistan has often complained of Indian arm-twisting in international forums on the much-debated Kashmir issue, and this regional hegemony has resulted in even huge imperialist states like the US and UK lavishly courting India, while giving the cold shoulder to Pakistan, a country which has been greatly exploited by Western imperialists in their farcical “war on terror”.
While the Indian military presence and ensuing human rights abuses in Kashmir is well known, primarily due to claims on the region by Pakistan, one of the foremost examples of India’s regional hegemony is its oppressive military presence in Northeast India, a region not very well known outside of South Asia, and a hotbed of state militarism and numerous armed insurgencies.
Northeast India and its history of oppression: Northeast India comprises eight small states (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura) in the northeast part of the country and is particularly well known for its raw greenery and multiple tribal cultures, often of a historically egalitarian nature. The region itself is tiny, comprising barely 7.5% of India’s landmass and 3.5% of India’s population, but extremely diverse, and home to more than 70 major population groups speaking nearly 400 different languages and dialects. Most native people of the region have strong cultural and social similarities with the people of East and Southeast Asia. The term “Northeast India” itself is very much a post-colonial construct, coming into existence only after Indian Independence in 1947, and the region has suffered for a long time under extremely oppressive Indian state hegemony as well as spatial discrimination in comparison to the rest of India. While the region is extremely rich in terms of mineral and natural resources, including tea, oil, limestone, coal as well as bamboo for papermaking, much of this has been usurped by national and private capital without any benefit to the local population. Development in the region is often never accorded the priority it merits and the Indian government maintains an extremely oppressive hold over the entire region. Indeed while education levels and other Human Development Indices are on par with the far better developed South Indian States, economic development levels languish at levels comparable to poorer Central and North Indian states. The hegemonic treatment meted out to the region has resulted in numerous armed nationalist and sub-nationalist insurgent movements, causing multiple conflicts with the Indian state as well as internecine battles with each other. This has resulted in harsh material conditions for the people, including human rights abuses, insecure livelihood, difficult working conditions as well as exploitation of the conflict by capital.
There is of course a history to the oppressive circumstances faced by the people of the region, and while impossible to cover in a couple of paragraphs, still merits a brief examination. As mentioned earlier, Northeast India was a political part of the Indian state only over the last 60 years or so, post-independence, and previously consisted of numerous tribal kingdoms, fairly self-sufficient and generally of little interest to the colonizers. Assam (which at that time included present-day Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya) slowly found its place in the colonial state from the 1820s onwards, with the British usurping the territory due to it’s potential for producing tea and breaking Chinese monopoly on the trade (indeed Assam is now the largest tea-producing region in the world). And while Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim weren’t even within the boundaries of British colonial India, Tripura and Manipur were princely states within the territory, but of hardly any political significance. However, what did happen under the British was an effective severing of the region from it’s traditional trading partners, including Burma and other parts of Indo-China, and it was the British who came up with the geographical and political term “Northeast Frontier” to act as a buffer between their Indian dominion and what is now known as Southeast Asia. The region played a particularly vital role in the victory of the Allied Forces during World War II, especially in the numerous battle theatres of Indo-China.
Thus under British colonialism, Northeast India was, in a sense, largely isolated from the rest of colonial India and from their traditional Southeast Asian trading partners.
After Indian Independence in 1947, the region effectively became landlocked, sharing borders with Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma and China, further increasing its isolation and resulting in increased spatial discrimination at the hands of the newly formed Indian state. It was natural for the numerous tribes within the region to ponder their own future in the face of Indian Independence and the bloody partition of the land. The discrimination meted out by the Indian state also spawned massive cultural hegemony, and soon many movements, mostly of a cultural-nationalist nature, sprung up in order to counter Indian state-hegemony, as well as to ensure their own rights towards effective self-determination.
While initially non-violent in the 1940s and 50s, from the 1960s onwards many of these movements soon went on to becoming full-blown armed insurgencies, the most prominent ones being ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), Manipur Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), NSCN (National Socialist Council of Nagalim) and many others. The region counts around 30 major insurgent outfits along with numerous smaller ones. This has resulted in the longstanding, massive and extremely oppressive presence of the Indian military, in the name of curtailing numerous armed nationalist movements either fighting for independence or greater autonomy. The history of Indian hegemony over the last 50 years or so in the region might not be one of classical occupation compared to say, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, but the effects towards the people as well as exploitation of the situation by capital and the ensuing arm-twisting of neighbouring countries remains the same. A brief examination of each of these fallouts is done below.
Atrocities on the People: As can be expected in most situations of occupation or state hegemony, the brunt is borne by the working poor. Stories of disappearances, custody killings, encounter killings all conducted by the security forces as well as people caught in the midst of the conflict are all too easy to find.
Huge chunks of the region come under draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Protection Act or the Disturbed Areas Act, which have been in place in Manipur, Nagaland and many parts of Assam, thereby covering a significant geographical chunk of Northeast India for more than two decades. These Acts essentially give the security forces a free hand in doing what they please as long as it’s under the guise of “fighting terror”. Needless to say that this has resulted in numerous human rights violations and atrocities on many sections of the population for decades. One of the most famous cases of these atrocities that shot to the national limelight in 2004 and forced a vigorous debate by the Indian establishment with respect to these laws was that of the custodial death of Thangjam Manorama in Manipur, where the AFSPA had been enforced for over 25 years. Witnesses say Manorama was picked up on July 11th 2004 by soldiers of the paramilitary Assam Rifles from her home on alleged charges of links with separatist rebels. The next day, her dead body was reportedly found four kilometres away from her home in the state capital Imphal, with multiple bullet wounds and signs of torture. The entire state came to a standstill under the backlash of huge protests following the brutal and tragic death.
Cases like Manorama are certainly not hard to find. Indeed while research was being done for this article, this author ran across numerous accounts of such atrocities…someone’s uncle being held and tortured under false pretexts, a cousin who had been in jail without trial for over 6 years or a brother who had been shot in the leg by security forces.
One of the most moving stories was of a man, Nilikesh Gogoi, who was not associated with any insurgent movement, but simply a very kind man, who was, in the words of his friend “a coal trader, a poet, a farmer, a collectivist, an oral historian and a man who resolved conflicts that arose between hill people and authorities”. Nilikesh and two of his business associates were returning from a trip to the hills in Upper Assam on Jan 23rd 2007. Enroute, they overtook a slow-moving jeep of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), which is not even a counter-insurgency force but merely meant to protect industrial outlets. Just when they were about to clear the vehicle in front on them, they were shot at, without rhyme or reason, killing Nilikesh and one other friend, while critically injuring the other. The fact that the CISF troops felt empowered enough to take these lives in this manner, and expected to get away with it, is testament to the hegemonic and oppressive circumstances that much of Northeast India’s rural and working poor deal with on a daily basis.
Tragic as they are, cold-blooded atrocities like those faced by Manorama and Nilikesh still do not encompass in totality the real harsh conditions imposed upon the people of Northeast India. State hegemony has resulted in extreme hard material conditions for workers and those reliant on rural pre-capitalist livelihoods.
Exploitation by Capital, Labour Deregulation and Effects on Rural Livelihood: It is amply evident that post-liberalisation in India, labour has taken a real beating with the state often kowtowing to capital’s demands for further deregulation. Due to this free hand being given to private capital by the state, many senior union leaders in the area point to a dangerous trend developing over the last few years in conflict-ridden regions like Northeast India. Often large private companies demand further deregulation or cheaper land prices citing the supposed violent scenario in the region as a cause for making the place more attractive for private investment. Threats are then carried out of taking investment elsewhere or pulling out existing investment which gets the state governments to meekly capitulate, wilfully overlooking harsh labour violations.
Discussions with progressive union activists and labour department officials also reveal the oppressive network of lumpen elements (usually surrendered insurgents), ruling-class party folk and traders who run the businesses like their own personal fiefdoms without any concern for labour rights or workers welfare. The exploitation is harsh with extremely hazardous working conditions, especially in highly deregulated sectors like stone quarries and extraction industries, comprising of the most informal and unorganised labour. The dangerous network ensures that the oppressive web remains firmly in place with any attempts at unionising viciously thwarted down. Furthermore, a corrupt nexus between state officials and business owners was mentioned by numerous labour activists as one of the critical issues contributing to harsh labour conditions. And while these are not necessarily directly related to militaristic state hegemony, the environment of state-led violence in Northeast India (unlike many other parts of India) has caused immense labour deregulation, and exploitation by capital making it very difficult for workers and activists to struggle for their rights. This has resulted in the extraction of enormous surplus labour by managers and owners through the harsh system, the complete lack of workers benefits, and extremely informal, unorganised nature of work forcing all members of a typical poor family to toil simply in order to survive.
Outside of formal and informal labour that is some way or the other connected to the market, Indian state hegemony in the region has a hugely deleterious effect on rural livelihoods and sustenance that are not connected to the larger national or global market. One of the most widespread modes of sustenance is the practice of shifting cultivation, usually along hill slopes, which ensures that there is enough grains and vegetables for the entire year. Along the lines of the egalitarian functioning of most tribes in Northeast India, this form of cultivation has men and women playing equally large roles.
Now, anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is hard work. Then, imagine chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (uphill) back to your village in the evening for cooking fire. This gives an idea of how, by sheer dint of hard labour, the rural poor find sustenance in the region. The produce is harvested at the end of the season, and the practice is done along one tract of land for no more than 3 or 4 years, allowing the soil to regenerate as people move on and cultivate another tract. Locals and friends familiar with the process mentioned that this form of cultivation is a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest, completely devoid of feudal fetters. It however is starting to get brutally affected in many parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.
Thus the hegemony of the Indian state in the region does not just have implications along the lines of direct violence and human rights abuses, but also extremely harsh material conditions for the labouring masses as well as the rural poor.
Arm-twisting neighbouring countries: The conflict in Northeast India has some significant trans-national fallouts as well, since the region borders so many states. Many insurgent outfits have had or continue to have training camps or bases in neighbouring countries like Bhutan, Burma, Bangladesh and Nepal.
India has continuously arm-twisted these nations into providing space and support for the Indian military to enter and conduct operations in flushing out insurgents without any concern for local people within those neighbouring countries. Numerous joint military operations have been conducted on India’s behest in each of the nations mentioned, including particularly brutal ones launched in Burmese and Bhutanese territory to kill ULFA militants that also resulted in massive displacement and human rights abuses upon locals in the two countries. This has resulted in not just oppression within political boundaries but the wilful subjugation of people outside Indian territory, adding to their discontent and giving India the afore-mentioned moniker of “regional bully”.
It is neither wise to have this many disgruntled neighbours within the sub-continent, nor is it within the ambit of a supposedly peace-loving democracy. While colonial nation-states of the West conducted and continue to conduct mass human rights violations outside of their borders, the Indian government and elite is gleefully following suit within its own backyard and region of South Asia, while further pushing its agenda forward in other regions of the Global South like Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. India can build for itself, a reputation as a large and important member of the Global South and typically one that can carry cudgels in solidarity with smaller nations facing the brute end of imperialism. Instead it chooses to replicate the very imperialistic behaviour it once so eloquently raged against rather than address righteous grievances in an egalitarian manner that takes into account historical oppression as well as fundamental human rights including that of self-determination. Foaming discontent with alarming brutality within and outside of ones borders has never resulted in anything other than mass upheaval, and if that’s the path that the Indian establishment chooses to trod on, then the ruling elite best be prepared at some time or the other for a conflagration that will take them down.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Jhum: Rural Sustenance under Conflict in Northeast India
[To be published in India Together http://www.indiatogether.org/ in June 2008]
Due to its intimate integration with rural society in Northeast India, it is important to understand jhum, a form of slash-and-burn shifting cultivation, as well as the salient issues surrounding this practice. It is primarily a pre-capitalist livelihood generation activity for food sustenance, and constitutes a large chunk of the labour performed by rural folk in the hilly regions of Northeast India. The system has also been affected by the numerous ongoing conflicts between the Indian state and various insurgencies in the region, causing immense hardship to those people dependent on it. In addition there are certain negative viewpoints on the impacts of the practice on the local ecology, which need a brief examination as the vested interests behind some of those arguments need to be exposed.
Introduction: Unlike many other parts of India, where even villages are in some way or the other connected to the capital market, albeit through informal means, people in the rural hills of Northeast India for the most part engage in pre-capitalist sustenance activities, with surplus produce sold in nearby bazaars. The most important and widespread activity is shifting cultivation, of primarily the slash-and-burn variety along the hill slopes. This practice usually ensures enough grains and vegetables for the entire year. Along the lines of the egalitarian functioning of most tribes in the region, this form of cultivation has men and women playing equally large roles, with women often even playing a dominant role especially in deciding the distribution of the produce and the selling of the surplus.
Now, anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is tough work. Jhum requires far more hardiness and consists of chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (often uphill) back to ones village in the evening for cooking fire. This gives an idea of how, by sheer dint of hard physical labour, the rural poor find sustenance in the region. It’s a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest, completely devoid of feudal fetters.
The timeframe for jhum is fairly strict, especially keeping in mind the heavy rainfall in the area, requiring the land to be cleared and seeds sowed in time for the monsoons. The forest land is usually cleared in December and January by slashing at shrubs, and cutting trees, while leaving tree stumps and roots. The slashed vegetation is then allowed to dry for a month or two before burning the tract of land in March. In addition to clearing the land, the burning of the leftover vegetation returns nutrients to the soil through ash and the killing of microbes allowing relatively higher yields. Seeds are then sowed, which mainly consist of cereals, vegetables and oil seeds.
The practice is usually driven by sustainability and the village or group of villages practicing jhum on one particular tract of land continue until the soil is depleted of nutrients and then move on to another allowing the former tract of land to regenerate. In earlier times, with lower population numbers, the land would be cultivated on for 10-20 years, but now it rarely goes beyond 3-5 years, due to greater pressures on the land for food. The acute time-sensitivity of the cycle is important to note as it’s the feature of the practice that is most affected by the various ongoing conflicts in the region.
Effects of the Conflict: Large sections of rural Northeast India, and their modes of commerce, now function under the sway of Indian military cantonments, which have usurped expansive tracts of land and harshly affected rural livelihood activities. Furthermore the villagers often find themselves caught in between the military and the insurgencies. Thus the practice of jhum has started getting badly affected in many parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.
Mokokchung in Nagaland is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in the town, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.
Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would practice jhum on are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.
Indian state hegemony hampering rural modes of sustenance can also be witnessed in numerous rural areas in Manipur, Upper Assam as well as regions like the Garo and Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. Rural areas in these states also often face the brunt of the extraction industry which, again, usurps or completely destroys land previously used for sustainable cultivation systems like jhum.
Intellectuals and activists in the region point out that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland and other states in the Northeast is the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, states like Nagaland, Assam and Meghalaya, become critical as gateways to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. But as a result local modes of sustenance such as jhum get affected in a very negative manner.
Interestingly, the present disruption of rural modes of production in Northeast India has just been a continuation of pre-independence British policies. This form of agricultural production and organic rural commerce has faced a history of upheaval from colonial times onwards, when British colonisers effectively severed the region from its traditional trading partners, including present-day Burma and other parts of Indo-China. With the creation of the Northeast Frontier by the British in order to protect their Indian dominion, it effectively cleaved what was once an organic commercial pre-capitalist trading region, resulting in the loss of a bazaar-type commerce, and hampering cultivation practices; something which has continued till date under Indian state-hegemony.
Impact on ecology and differing viewpoints: Ecologically, the practice of jhum has had certain experts convinced that it has a deleterious effect on the local environment, while others have often thwarted those arguments and proved that jhum in fact is a sustainable form of agricultural production best suited for the specific ecology of the hill regions.
The negative arguments against jhum have included projecting it as an unsustainable practice that depletes the soil of nutrients, reducing the forest cover, causing landslides etc. They’ve tended to come from a few specific parties, which also showcase a clear vested interest. Arguments against jhum have come from state forestry departments, development ministries like DONER (Development Of North East Region) or trade promoting entities like the NEC or the World Bank who would like to usurp forest resources of the region for the benefit of national and private capital. In addition, private entities wishing to utilise the land for specific profit-making ventures, like extraction industries, utilise these arguments to push the state to wean away local villagers from practicing jhum in order to lease the land. This has happened in the hill regions of Meghalaya and Assam where corrupt or gullible village councils leased out land to private and national corporations for extraction industries including coal, limestone, and uranium in the future. In addition, the paper industry has pushed for the growth of bamboo by villagers as a cash crop replacing an egalitarian cultivation system with one that has created a small mercantilist class controlling all bamboo production.
Apart from the obvious vested interests at play, these arguments have further been thwarted by many scientists, including studies by organisations like the Indian Institute of Science, Tata Energy Research Institute and UNESCO who have proved in different ways that jhum is indeed a sustainable form of agriculture best suited to the rainy hill regions of Northeast India, over other forms of agriculture such as valley or terrace cultivation. Studies have further proved that, contrary to arguments of soil infertility, the practice of jhum ensures that fallowness in the soil is not compromised on, and often rapid regeneration of the vegetation takes place once a tract of land is abandoned after cultivation. The connection between forest loss and jhum is tenuous at best as there are numerous other factors at play including areas where jhum is practiced, the type of vegetation regrowth and fallowness of the land. The soil erosion argument too has been disproved as soil erosion would happen with any cultivation along hill tracts, and if anything is minimised with jhum due to the retention of strong roots when the land is cleared.
This is not to completely discount the actual arguments being made against jhum. There has indeed been a small reduction in the forest cover, and certainly the food pressures have increased in the region due to greater population. However it is the source of these arguments, their vested interests and the lack of viable alternatives provided that cause eyebrows to be raised. There is no guarantee that if jhum were to be stopped, there would be an increase in forest cover and soil fertility or a decrease in soil erosion. If anything, all these problems are likely to continue with even more intensity along with the added food insecurity of the local population due to the wrenching away of their primary mode of sustenance. The arguments are all the more problematic because the region still continues to have one of the highest per-capita forest covers in the world, and its people are for the most part not found wanting for food, primarily due to practices like jhum.
If the arguments are being made mainly for legitimising the usurpation forest land for national and private capital, then those arguments need to be seriously questioned. Furthermore, it would be prudent to ensure the continuance of the basic level of food sustenance that the people in these regions have created for themselves through cooperative cultivation without any feudal fetters, rather than force the capital market upon them via land leases and cash crops, placing them in the precarious position many farmers in other parts of India often find themselves in.
Looking Ahead: As mentioned before, the practice of jhum is intimately integrated with the socioeconomic fabric of rural society in Northeast India. It’s sustainable and generally accepted as a rather egalitarian mode of production, with women playing an important economic role, and almost completely lacking in feudal fetters (unlike many other pre-capitalist modes of production). The practice plays a central role in uniting villages and clans, as well as integrating the people with local modes of commerce. Furthermore it provides food sustenance for the people, and prevents them from being subject to the whims of the larger capital market.
Ideally the state would need to work with local populations on jhum to mitigate the potential deleterious effects to the ecology rather than prevent shifting cultivation per say. This seems to be the increasingly accepted viewpoint by state governments in Northeast India and other countries where the practice is widespread, and is certainly a positive trend. The Shillong Declaration on shifting agriculture in 2004 was extensive in its coverage of jhum agriculture and several governments in the participating countries placed it on their agenda then. The governments of Nagaland, Meghalaya, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam have indicated at different levels that they would not like to suppress shifting cultivation, but rather work on ways in which it can be integrated with ecological and conservation concerns. Among the more prominent of these initiatives has been the government of Nagaland pursuing a policy from 2006 onwards of procuring horticulture produce from people practicing jhum and training government extension staff in participatory mapping, the Meghalaya government stating in 2004 that it would examine ways in which jhum can be integrated with soil and water conservation measures, and the Tripura government initiating shifting cultivation development projects from 2007 onwards. Even the central Ministry of Environment and Forests set up a task force on “Rehabilitation of Shifting Cultivation (Jhum) Fallows”.
These are positive trends, and need to continue considering the importance of jhum to rural populations in Northeast India, as well as the central role it plays in ensuring food sustenance through an egalitarian cooperative mode of agricultural production.
Due to its intimate integration with rural society in Northeast India, it is important to understand jhum, a form of slash-and-burn shifting cultivation, as well as the salient issues surrounding this practice. It is primarily a pre-capitalist livelihood generation activity for food sustenance, and constitutes a large chunk of the labour performed by rural folk in the hilly regions of Northeast India. The system has also been affected by the numerous ongoing conflicts between the Indian state and various insurgencies in the region, causing immense hardship to those people dependent on it. In addition there are certain negative viewpoints on the impacts of the practice on the local ecology, which need a brief examination as the vested interests behind some of those arguments need to be exposed.
Introduction: Unlike many other parts of India, where even villages are in some way or the other connected to the capital market, albeit through informal means, people in the rural hills of Northeast India for the most part engage in pre-capitalist sustenance activities, with surplus produce sold in nearby bazaars. The most important and widespread activity is shifting cultivation, of primarily the slash-and-burn variety along the hill slopes. This practice usually ensures enough grains and vegetables for the entire year. Along the lines of the egalitarian functioning of most tribes in the region, this form of cultivation has men and women playing equally large roles, with women often even playing a dominant role especially in deciding the distribution of the produce and the selling of the surplus.
Now, anyone who has ever done some real hiking would confirm that trekking up a steep hill slope, even for fairly fit individuals, is tough work. Jhum requires far more hardiness and consists of chopping firewood along a tract of hill-land, clearing that tract through controlled fires for cultivation, cultivating on the land as per a tight seasonal schedule, and then carrying large bundles of firewood (often uphill) back to ones village in the evening for cooking fire. This gives an idea of how, by sheer dint of hard physical labour, the rural poor find sustenance in the region. It’s a cooperative system of production with a village or many villages cultivating one tract of land and then sharing the produce at the end of the harvest, completely devoid of feudal fetters.
The timeframe for jhum is fairly strict, especially keeping in mind the heavy rainfall in the area, requiring the land to be cleared and seeds sowed in time for the monsoons. The forest land is usually cleared in December and January by slashing at shrubs, and cutting trees, while leaving tree stumps and roots. The slashed vegetation is then allowed to dry for a month or two before burning the tract of land in March. In addition to clearing the land, the burning of the leftover vegetation returns nutrients to the soil through ash and the killing of microbes allowing relatively higher yields. Seeds are then sowed, which mainly consist of cereals, vegetables and oil seeds.
The practice is usually driven by sustainability and the village or group of villages practicing jhum on one particular tract of land continue until the soil is depleted of nutrients and then move on to another allowing the former tract of land to regenerate. In earlier times, with lower population numbers, the land would be cultivated on for 10-20 years, but now it rarely goes beyond 3-5 years, due to greater pressures on the land for food. The acute time-sensitivity of the cycle is important to note as it’s the feature of the practice that is most affected by the various ongoing conflicts in the region.
Effects of the Conflict: Large sections of rural Northeast India, and their modes of commerce, now function under the sway of Indian military cantonments, which have usurped expansive tracts of land and harshly affected rural livelihood activities. Furthermore the villagers often find themselves caught in between the military and the insurgencies. Thus the practice of jhum has started getting badly affected in many parts of the region due to the presence of the Indian army and the resulting conflict, which causes disruption in the cultivation cycle resulting in harsh insecurities for people depending on the produce to feed themselves.
Mokokchung in Nagaland is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in the town, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.
Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would practice jhum on are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.
Indian state hegemony hampering rural modes of sustenance can also be witnessed in numerous rural areas in Manipur, Upper Assam as well as regions like the Garo and Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. Rural areas in these states also often face the brunt of the extraction industry which, again, usurps or completely destroys land previously used for sustainable cultivation systems like jhum.
Intellectuals and activists in the region point out that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland and other states in the Northeast is the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, states like Nagaland, Assam and Meghalaya, become critical as gateways to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. But as a result local modes of sustenance such as jhum get affected in a very negative manner.
Interestingly, the present disruption of rural modes of production in Northeast India has just been a continuation of pre-independence British policies. This form of agricultural production and organic rural commerce has faced a history of upheaval from colonial times onwards, when British colonisers effectively severed the region from its traditional trading partners, including present-day Burma and other parts of Indo-China. With the creation of the Northeast Frontier by the British in order to protect their Indian dominion, it effectively cleaved what was once an organic commercial pre-capitalist trading region, resulting in the loss of a bazaar-type commerce, and hampering cultivation practices; something which has continued till date under Indian state-hegemony.
Impact on ecology and differing viewpoints: Ecologically, the practice of jhum has had certain experts convinced that it has a deleterious effect on the local environment, while others have often thwarted those arguments and proved that jhum in fact is a sustainable form of agricultural production best suited for the specific ecology of the hill regions.
The negative arguments against jhum have included projecting it as an unsustainable practice that depletes the soil of nutrients, reducing the forest cover, causing landslides etc. They’ve tended to come from a few specific parties, which also showcase a clear vested interest. Arguments against jhum have come from state forestry departments, development ministries like DONER (Development Of North East Region) or trade promoting entities like the NEC or the World Bank who would like to usurp forest resources of the region for the benefit of national and private capital. In addition, private entities wishing to utilise the land for specific profit-making ventures, like extraction industries, utilise these arguments to push the state to wean away local villagers from practicing jhum in order to lease the land. This has happened in the hill regions of Meghalaya and Assam where corrupt or gullible village councils leased out land to private and national corporations for extraction industries including coal, limestone, and uranium in the future. In addition, the paper industry has pushed for the growth of bamboo by villagers as a cash crop replacing an egalitarian cultivation system with one that has created a small mercantilist class controlling all bamboo production.
Apart from the obvious vested interests at play, these arguments have further been thwarted by many scientists, including studies by organisations like the Indian Institute of Science, Tata Energy Research Institute and UNESCO who have proved in different ways that jhum is indeed a sustainable form of agriculture best suited to the rainy hill regions of Northeast India, over other forms of agriculture such as valley or terrace cultivation. Studies have further proved that, contrary to arguments of soil infertility, the practice of jhum ensures that fallowness in the soil is not compromised on, and often rapid regeneration of the vegetation takes place once a tract of land is abandoned after cultivation. The connection between forest loss and jhum is tenuous at best as there are numerous other factors at play including areas where jhum is practiced, the type of vegetation regrowth and fallowness of the land. The soil erosion argument too has been disproved as soil erosion would happen with any cultivation along hill tracts, and if anything is minimised with jhum due to the retention of strong roots when the land is cleared.
This is not to completely discount the actual arguments being made against jhum. There has indeed been a small reduction in the forest cover, and certainly the food pressures have increased in the region due to greater population. However it is the source of these arguments, their vested interests and the lack of viable alternatives provided that cause eyebrows to be raised. There is no guarantee that if jhum were to be stopped, there would be an increase in forest cover and soil fertility or a decrease in soil erosion. If anything, all these problems are likely to continue with even more intensity along with the added food insecurity of the local population due to the wrenching away of their primary mode of sustenance. The arguments are all the more problematic because the region still continues to have one of the highest per-capita forest covers in the world, and its people are for the most part not found wanting for food, primarily due to practices like jhum.
If the arguments are being made mainly for legitimising the usurpation forest land for national and private capital, then those arguments need to be seriously questioned. Furthermore, it would be prudent to ensure the continuance of the basic level of food sustenance that the people in these regions have created for themselves through cooperative cultivation without any feudal fetters, rather than force the capital market upon them via land leases and cash crops, placing them in the precarious position many farmers in other parts of India often find themselves in.
Looking Ahead: As mentioned before, the practice of jhum is intimately integrated with the socioeconomic fabric of rural society in Northeast India. It’s sustainable and generally accepted as a rather egalitarian mode of production, with women playing an important economic role, and almost completely lacking in feudal fetters (unlike many other pre-capitalist modes of production). The practice plays a central role in uniting villages and clans, as well as integrating the people with local modes of commerce. Furthermore it provides food sustenance for the people, and prevents them from being subject to the whims of the larger capital market.
Ideally the state would need to work with local populations on jhum to mitigate the potential deleterious effects to the ecology rather than prevent shifting cultivation per say. This seems to be the increasingly accepted viewpoint by state governments in Northeast India and other countries where the practice is widespread, and is certainly a positive trend. The Shillong Declaration on shifting agriculture in 2004 was extensive in its coverage of jhum agriculture and several governments in the participating countries placed it on their agenda then. The governments of Nagaland, Meghalaya, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam have indicated at different levels that they would not like to suppress shifting cultivation, but rather work on ways in which it can be integrated with ecological and conservation concerns. Among the more prominent of these initiatives has been the government of Nagaland pursuing a policy from 2006 onwards of procuring horticulture produce from people practicing jhum and training government extension staff in participatory mapping, the Meghalaya government stating in 2004 that it would examine ways in which jhum can be integrated with soil and water conservation measures, and the Tripura government initiating shifting cultivation development projects from 2007 onwards. Even the central Ministry of Environment and Forests set up a task force on “Rehabilitation of Shifting Cultivation (Jhum) Fallows”.
These are positive trends, and need to continue considering the importance of jhum to rural populations in Northeast India, as well as the central role it plays in ensuring food sustenance through an egalitarian cooperative mode of agricultural production.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Revisiting Palestine in Mokokchung and Understanding the Naga Struggle
I had been to Palestine in 2005 as part of a solidarity delegation, and saw life under occupation for the first time. The Israeli military state, occupying the whole of historic Palestine since 1948, could be witnessed taking over the best land in many cities in the West Bank and Gaza, subjecting the local people to humiliating checkpoints and blockades, denying them access to grow olives on soil, which they had been cultivating on for centuries, usurping resources and sovereignty, and of course, brutally suppressing any resistance.
I never realised that I would see much of the same in a region that’s not too far away from my own homeland in South India.
Militarism in Mokokchung: Mokokchung is in the Naga Nation, as a friend told me, and it must strenuously be clarified that the Naga Nation is different from Nagaland, a state within the federal union of India...part of India’s Northeast region. The Naga Nation doesn’t have any sovereignty or realisation of an honest national aspiration…a struggle that many intellectuals and activists call the longest standing international conflict of modern times. The Indian state has ensured the complete oppression of the Naga people through what can only be termed as an occupationary presence.
Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in Mokokchung, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains of the park is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.
Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would often practice cultivation on for their sustenance, are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.
My friend said that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland was the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, Nagaland, especially the frontier town of Dimapur, becomes critical as a gateway to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. Indeed in Northeast India, the region’s first two Special Economic Zones (which are separate deregulated enclaves started by the Indian Government for promoting private company-led exports) have come up in Dimapur. Thus there are strong economic and commercial overtones to the occupationary presence of the Indian state.
Mokokchung itself is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. My friend said that last year, locals in Mokokchung agitated for land usurped by the Assam Rifles to be given back to the civic administration of Nagaland. A sympathetic and well-liked Indian Civil Service officer, Abhishek Singh, who was the District Commissioner at that time, was apparently very supportive of the cause and even went lengths to prevent further land acquisition.
He was transferred out of the region soon after.
The sights in Mokokchung gave me a strong feeling of déjà vu with my trip to Palestine in 2005. Replace the Indian military with the Israeli one, and Nagas with Palestinians; add in some desert land with olive trees, and I could well have been in Bethlehem or Hebron. The historical similarities between the Naga struggle and the occupation of Palestine are also eerily analogous, with British colonisers playing an instrumental role in the subjugation of both populations, laying the groundwork for the oppression to continue under the newly formed nation-states of India and Israel, who now play the role of regional imperialists.
Mokokchung is however, but a small manifestation of the larger Naga struggle and their quest for realising a national identity.
The Naga Struggle: The Naga Nation has been in a perennial state of war ever since the early part of the 19th century when the Nagas valorously fought and lost against the infinitely better-armed British who then soon created the North East Frontier to protect their Indian dominion. This effectively cleaved the Naga Nation in two with the creation of an artificial boundary between Burma and then colonial India. This state of war continued into the 20th century, and was particularly acute during World War II, where the region became a critical battle theatre for Allied success in the Indo-China region, with the Nagas placed at the center of the Japanese invasion.
Following the Nagas’ uprising against the British and their soldiering in someone else’s war, they continued to engage in the national struggle with the formation of the Naga National Council by the legendary AZ Phizo, and declared independence on August 14th 1947, a day before India did, with the declaration sent to Delhi, London and the UNO.
Niketu Iralu, convener of the Naga Hoho (Assembly) Coordination Committee, the apex body of the Naga peoples' struggle, in a finely written article states that:
India was about to celebrate her historic achievement of freedom the next day, in addition to being preoccupied with the trauma of the partition and the massive bloodshed that followed. It was not surprising that Delhi was not aware of what the Nagas had declared. But to the Nagas, the legal, historical and political validity of their case stands on the fact that they had clearly made known their position before India became independent. They have fought with heroism to defend their position with a free conscience, not hampered by any sense of being treasonous towards India, because theirs is not a secessionist, separatist or anti-India movement. Nagas maintain that they are not trying to secede or separate themselves from a union they had given their consent to earlier. They are clear that they are not anti-India. This is at the heart of the Naga problem. Nagas cannot be expected to just give up all that they have sacrificed and achieved, small as it may seem in real terms, for a settlement that will not recognize the facts of their history and the honour and dignity of their struggle. Yet we too know that India is not in a position to recognize Naga independence and leave Nagaland.
In an indication of the then Indian nationalists’ willingness to validate the Naga national cause, Iralu further goes on to state:
Here the story of the memorable meeting between Mahatma Gandhi and some Naga leaders should be added. A delegation of the NNC called on Gandhi at his Bhangi colony ashram a few weeks before India’s independence day. When the Nagas said that they had come to get India to recognize their freedom and independence, Gandhi said, "You must become free. I became free long ago." To their point that the British were still ruling in Delhi, he said, "My freedom has nothing to do with whether the British are in Delhi or London." He said he envisioned the new India to be like the garden outside his ashram with flowers, where diversity gave attractiveness and strength, instead of producing division and harm. He said that he considered the Nagas to be a part of the Indian household. But if they thought they were not, India would be the good neighbour the Nagas could depend on. When he was told that the Governor of Assam had threatened to use military force to control the Nagas if they refused to fall in line, Gandhi, according to the report the Nagas brought back, replied with passion that he would come all the way and be the first to be killed before any Indian bullet killed the Nagas. Our leaders returned and told our people that under Gandhi’s leadership our problems could be solved satisfactorily. Soon after their meeting with him, Gandhi was assassinated. Gandhi knew how to talk to the Nagas. He made a bid to stretch their thinking beyond political freedom with sensitivity.
Further validating this, Adinho Phizo, president of a much weakened present-day NNC, in an interview with the Sangai Express, said:
The Naga leader AZ Phizo led numerous Naga delegations to meet with emerging independent Indian leaders for bilateral talks with the aim of establishing mutual understanding and respect between the two peoples. In none of the many talks with the Indian leaders, Mahatma Gandhi, C Rajagopalachari, Ali Jinah, Gopinath Bordoloi etc. was there any suggestion of Indian political ambition to deny Nagaland independence.
It thus becomes of paramount importance to view the Naga struggle from a historic lens going beyond the post-colonial construct of the Indian nation-state. The Naga people continue to be subjected to Indian state hegemony with its obdurate constructs of nationhood and boundaries. With an even more repressive military regime in Burma, the historic oppression of the Nagas has spanned the colonial era and continues to exist in the post-colonial environment of the South Asian region. India continues to insist on nationalising space, sometimes brutally, without even considering slightly more progressive forms of federalism.
The National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaak-Muivah), the most comprehensive Naga Nationalist movement at present, gave a proposal to the Indian state that included genuinely progressive alternatives to the present standoff. This included suggestions of shared sovereignty, and the sharing of defense with India, while still maintaining India’s political boundaries and national space in international forums like the United Nations. Such initiatives, were they to be met with less pig-headedness by the Indian state, would be historic leaps in the idea of nation building along egalitarian lines. More than any other party, it is the Indian state that stands to gain, both politically as well as in socioeconomic terms. India and the Naga people would be path breakers in developing potential solutions to other conflicts of occupation and hegemony such as that of the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the Basque people in Spain. It is difficult for an oppressed people to take further strides in attempting to meet a hegemonic state mid-way, and it is important that the Indian state makes efforts along the same lines, else the current conflict stands to only serve the deleterious purpose of naked hegemony. Hegemony has never won and foaming discontent with alarming brutality without stepping back and understanding historical oppressions has never resulted in anything other than mass upheaval, and if that’s the path that the Indian establishment chooses to trod on, then the ruling elite best be prepared at some time or the other for another conflagration, one that might go greater lengths in taking them down.
I never realised that I would see much of the same in a region that’s not too far away from my own homeland in South India.
Militarism in Mokokchung: Mokokchung is in the Naga Nation, as a friend told me, and it must strenuously be clarified that the Naga Nation is different from Nagaland, a state within the federal union of India...part of India’s Northeast region. The Naga Nation doesn’t have any sovereignty or realisation of an honest national aspiration…a struggle that many intellectuals and activists call the longest standing international conflict of modern times. The Indian state has ensured the complete oppression of the Naga people through what can only be termed as an occupationary presence.
Traveling with a senior academic and Naga human rights activist in Mokokchung, one witnessed the overwhelming presence of the Indian military. Central Reserve Police Force barracks built over beautiful forestland, and vast army campuses sprawled over the landscape were everywhere, cordoned off from the rest of the population. My friend spoke of a huge green commons where he and his buddies used to play in when they were children. Now all that remains of the park is a tiny gazebo-like structure, where young couples come and stargaze, surrounded by military buildings and soldiers. Youngsters, especially young men, are often harassed and detained by the military, and last year the entire town went off the boil upon learning that a young woman was sexually harassed by a soldier.
Many old structures in Mokokchung were torn down and now serve as official military offices. Vast tracts of hilly forestland that villagers would often practice cultivation on for their sustenance, are now completely off limits…taken over, rather occupied, by the armed Indian state. Army-men, obviously from outside the region can be spotted everywhere, either armed and on patrol or unarmed and walking around in civvies.
My friend said that one of the primary reasons for such a huge Indian military presence in Nagaland was the usurpation of forest resources, of which the region is very rich in. Furthermore, with the Indian Government’s new “Look East” policy with respect to trade and commerce, Nagaland, especially the frontier town of Dimapur, becomes critical as a gateway to expanding trade-relations with Southeast and East Asian countries. Indeed in Northeast India, the region’s first two Special Economic Zones (which are separate deregulated enclaves started by the Indian Government for promoting private company-led exports) have come up in Dimapur. Thus there are strong economic and commercial overtones to the occupationary presence of the Indian state.
Mokokchung itself is a classic example of military cantonments taking over prime land across Northeast India. My friend said that last year, locals in Mokokchung agitated for land usurped by the Assam Rifles to be given back to the civic administration of Nagaland. A sympathetic and well-liked Indian Civil Service officer, Abhishek Singh, who was the District Commissioner at that time, was apparently very supportive of the cause and even went lengths to prevent further land acquisition.
He was transferred out of the region soon after.
The sights in Mokokchung gave me a strong feeling of déjà vu with my trip to Palestine in 2005. Replace the Indian military with the Israeli one, and Nagas with Palestinians; add in some desert land with olive trees, and I could well have been in Bethlehem or Hebron. The historical similarities between the Naga struggle and the occupation of Palestine are also eerily analogous, with British colonisers playing an instrumental role in the subjugation of both populations, laying the groundwork for the oppression to continue under the newly formed nation-states of India and Israel, who now play the role of regional imperialists.
Mokokchung is however, but a small manifestation of the larger Naga struggle and their quest for realising a national identity.
The Naga Struggle: The Naga Nation has been in a perennial state of war ever since the early part of the 19th century when the Nagas valorously fought and lost against the infinitely better-armed British who then soon created the North East Frontier to protect their Indian dominion. This effectively cleaved the Naga Nation in two with the creation of an artificial boundary between Burma and then colonial India. This state of war continued into the 20th century, and was particularly acute during World War II, where the region became a critical battle theatre for Allied success in the Indo-China region, with the Nagas placed at the center of the Japanese invasion.
Following the Nagas’ uprising against the British and their soldiering in someone else’s war, they continued to engage in the national struggle with the formation of the Naga National Council by the legendary AZ Phizo, and declared independence on August 14th 1947, a day before India did, with the declaration sent to Delhi, London and the UNO.
Niketu Iralu, convener of the Naga Hoho (Assembly) Coordination Committee, the apex body of the Naga peoples' struggle, in a finely written article states that:
India was about to celebrate her historic achievement of freedom the next day, in addition to being preoccupied with the trauma of the partition and the massive bloodshed that followed. It was not surprising that Delhi was not aware of what the Nagas had declared. But to the Nagas, the legal, historical and political validity of their case stands on the fact that they had clearly made known their position before India became independent. They have fought with heroism to defend their position with a free conscience, not hampered by any sense of being treasonous towards India, because theirs is not a secessionist, separatist or anti-India movement. Nagas maintain that they are not trying to secede or separate themselves from a union they had given their consent to earlier. They are clear that they are not anti-India. This is at the heart of the Naga problem. Nagas cannot be expected to just give up all that they have sacrificed and achieved, small as it may seem in real terms, for a settlement that will not recognize the facts of their history and the honour and dignity of their struggle. Yet we too know that India is not in a position to recognize Naga independence and leave Nagaland.
In an indication of the then Indian nationalists’ willingness to validate the Naga national cause, Iralu further goes on to state:
Here the story of the memorable meeting between Mahatma Gandhi and some Naga leaders should be added. A delegation of the NNC called on Gandhi at his Bhangi colony ashram a few weeks before India’s independence day. When the Nagas said that they had come to get India to recognize their freedom and independence, Gandhi said, "You must become free. I became free long ago." To their point that the British were still ruling in Delhi, he said, "My freedom has nothing to do with whether the British are in Delhi or London." He said he envisioned the new India to be like the garden outside his ashram with flowers, where diversity gave attractiveness and strength, instead of producing division and harm. He said that he considered the Nagas to be a part of the Indian household. But if they thought they were not, India would be the good neighbour the Nagas could depend on. When he was told that the Governor of Assam had threatened to use military force to control the Nagas if they refused to fall in line, Gandhi, according to the report the Nagas brought back, replied with passion that he would come all the way and be the first to be killed before any Indian bullet killed the Nagas. Our leaders returned and told our people that under Gandhi’s leadership our problems could be solved satisfactorily. Soon after their meeting with him, Gandhi was assassinated. Gandhi knew how to talk to the Nagas. He made a bid to stretch their thinking beyond political freedom with sensitivity.
Further validating this, Adinho Phizo, president of a much weakened present-day NNC, in an interview with the Sangai Express, said:
The Naga leader AZ Phizo led numerous Naga delegations to meet with emerging independent Indian leaders for bilateral talks with the aim of establishing mutual understanding and respect between the two peoples. In none of the many talks with the Indian leaders, Mahatma Gandhi, C Rajagopalachari, Ali Jinah, Gopinath Bordoloi etc. was there any suggestion of Indian political ambition to deny Nagaland independence.
It thus becomes of paramount importance to view the Naga struggle from a historic lens going beyond the post-colonial construct of the Indian nation-state. The Naga people continue to be subjected to Indian state hegemony with its obdurate constructs of nationhood and boundaries. With an even more repressive military regime in Burma, the historic oppression of the Nagas has spanned the colonial era and continues to exist in the post-colonial environment of the South Asian region. India continues to insist on nationalising space, sometimes brutally, without even considering slightly more progressive forms of federalism.
The National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaak-Muivah), the most comprehensive Naga Nationalist movement at present, gave a proposal to the Indian state that included genuinely progressive alternatives to the present standoff. This included suggestions of shared sovereignty, and the sharing of defense with India, while still maintaining India’s political boundaries and national space in international forums like the United Nations. Such initiatives, were they to be met with less pig-headedness by the Indian state, would be historic leaps in the idea of nation building along egalitarian lines. More than any other party, it is the Indian state that stands to gain, both politically as well as in socioeconomic terms. India and the Naga people would be path breakers in developing potential solutions to other conflicts of occupation and hegemony such as that of the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the Basque people in Spain. It is difficult for an oppressed people to take further strides in attempting to meet a hegemonic state mid-way, and it is important that the Indian state makes efforts along the same lines, else the current conflict stands to only serve the deleterious purpose of naked hegemony. Hegemony has never won and foaming discontent with alarming brutality without stepping back and understanding historical oppressions has never resulted in anything other than mass upheaval, and if that’s the path that the Indian establishment chooses to trod on, then the ruling elite best be prepared at some time or the other for another conflagration, one that might go greater lengths in taking them down.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Quarry Workers in Assam
The quarries in Assam represent possibly the most exploitative sector in the state, with hazardous labour conditions and complete lack of unionisation to fight for greater benefits. In addition there is rampant use of child labour, paltry wages and no facilities for drinking water, creches, sanitation or shelter. Harsh material conditions force villagers to come to work in the quarries.
Please read article below for further details.
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