In 1997, the largest and most powerful insurgent group of the Northeast signed a suspension of operations agreement with the Indian government. With the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) (NSCN-IM) agreeing to come to the negotiating table, many saw it as the beginning of the end for conflict in the region. They had reasons to believe so. For one, it was the NSCN(IM) which held sway over the many other smaller militant-secessionist groups of the region, which it had willy-nilly patronised or spawned. Second, peer pressure works in the Northeast.
Fifteen years later, conflict apparently seems dead in more ways than one.
One by one, many other militant groups either willingly started smoking the peace pipe with the Union and respective state governments (like the other Naga factions), or they were militarily pushed into a corner from where they could not wriggle out (like the United Liberation Front of Asom, or ULFA). Though there have not been any negotiated settlements yet, insurgency as we knew it in the Northeast is a vestige of the past. People have moved on, and the romance of insurrectionism has been given a bitter burial.
There are many reasons why conflict as-it-was is unlikely to resurrect itself. Unless, of course, the Indian government makes the region much messier than it had earlier been. It certainly has a dubious track record of political gerrymandering. Many insurgent groups are wooing the people they claimed to have been fighting for, while shoving for a political bargain. It would now be a Gargantuan task for them to retract and fall back on an armed struggle again.
All this, however, does not mean that insurgency has been junked into the dustbin of history and that conflict has ended. Trouble, in fact, is brewing, one that will whip itself into a frenzy with time; and ethnic undercurrents are simmering all over. It would take only an ostrich to miss the obvious. Those who fail to discern the palpable today are essentially people who fail to see what is it that constitutes identity in the Northeast — land and language, not religion.
When people, who identify themselves with “their” land, see that their homelands are being gobbled up, they react — often, violently so. Today, the threat to land (and also, natural resources) comes from two quarters — illegal Bangladeshi migrants and Indian industry.
Most, especially the self-righteous bleeding heart liberals and glib-mouthed alternative media, fail to see a threat in the Bangladeshi issue. By shamelessly transforming the Bodo-Bangladeshi conflagration into a Muslim vs non-Muslim conflict, they have communalised a situation which wasn’t so in the first place. The exodus of Northeasterners, especially from Bangalore, drove the wedge further, and has to quite an extent galvanised groups into taking a hardline stand on the illegal migrants issue. Sooner or later, the assertion over their own lands will take a violent turn. Those without foresight will never see it coming.
It is, however, the unbridled lust for the natural resources of the Northeast that should be a scarier proposition. A growth-obsessed political-industrial combine that has already ravaged the heartland and aggravated the Maoist situation, now has the Northeast at its mercy. The tenuous but obvious peace in the region makes it ready for the picking. Close to 200 dams have been planned in the region to feed an energy-hungry, consumption-driven economy. Cautions about environmental costs have been thrown to the winds. The plunder is about to begin.
Just as it was with Afghanistan which all suicidal invaders failed to assess, it is so with the Northeast too — you can loot the region only at your own peril. Unfortunately, it will be the people of the Northeast who will pay the eventual price.
