Knots by Northeast

It made for a wonderful keepsake photo opportunity when leaders of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) visited New Delhi for preliminary tripartite peace talks in August. There were smiles all around, and word was that peace was soon going to return to Assam. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends as of now. If you go beyond the headlines and hark a little into the past, you will find that things will progressively appear worse. That would be because there are many talking points...

When you speak of the Northeast, the noun or verb that comes to your mind is ‘neglect’. This word has been used so often to explain the state of underdevelopment in the region that you cannot even called it a clichéd vindication. But when you resurrect the debate in the light of the present Union government being the most corrupt ever and Manmohan Singh unabashedly defending its actions all through, you will know why this man chose not to vote in the elections to the Assam legislative assembly...

You can trust the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to foment trouble anywhere. You can trust the Hindutva party to communalise any situation. It can create a Hindu-Muslim situation out of nothing. And that's the last thing that Northeast needs at this time. The comments of Vijay Goel, the party's in-charge of political affairs in Assam, ought to be seen in this light. Goel, who led a delegation of party leaders and MPs from Assam to the Election Commission Monday, wants to see Bangladeshi Muslims as...

In less than a week, as many as three ceasefire agreements have been extended in the Northeast. Technically, these are not called ceasefires; they are dubbed Suspension of Operations (SoO) agreements. Without going into the semantical or technical differences between the two, we know there's one thing that ought to be at the core of these agreements — to bring about peace and stability. On December 29, came an official statement saying that the SoO Agreement with the Dima Halam Daogah (Nunisa)...

No journalist worth his or her salt can ever want to see a day without one's paper. But journalists in Manipur, time and again, are pushed so much against the wall, that they are left with no other choice. It's happened once again in the state — this time, it signalling a wrong start to the New Year. Newspapers failed to hit the stands on January 1, and as reports last came in, the stand of the beleaguered scribes has failed to make any impression on the callous rulers of the state. Journalists...

North Cachar Hills always had its share of problems ― from the politics of insurgencies to that of underdevelopment. But these have become increasingly internecine and debilitating since this district of Assam was renamed Dima Hasao earlier this year. For the uninitiated, NC Hills is to Assam what Assam is to India ― a vibrant melting pot of cultures. What the rechristening has decidedly done is make things worse for the people living in the area. They are now caught between Scylla and Charybdis...

We have seen two, virtually spontaneous, bandhs in the Northeast in the days just gone by. One was a relatively-short 12-hour Assam bandh called in protest against the letting off of the accused in the botched-up Parag Das murder case. The other was a much more gruelling 48-hour bandh called in Manipur over the cold-blooded, fake encounter of a former militant. Bandhs have been so rampant in the Northeast in the last 20 or so years that people have become inured to them. And bandhs, more often...

The Northeast, environmentally speaking, is singular in a number of ways. The richness of biodiversity is high, and the percentage of endemism - at 33 per cent - is quite high as well. The region, on the whole, merits high priority for conservation. This may not sound good enough in what would merit the region to have its own forest policy, but there is more to it here than meets the eye. The forests and the biodiversity are the life support systems for local communities here much more than...

It is fine to talk of development. It would be, perhaps, be better to talk of some preconditions – transport and communications, for instance. Those living in “mainland India”, cut off by the Chicken Neck Corridor as it were would have the faintest idea about connectivity in the Northeast, is all about. Some four years back, the Shukla Commission had mentioned, “Few realise that the Indian Air Force even today operates what must be the largest civil air supply mission anywhere in the world apart...