The Northeast was simmering with discontent in Manipur against Armed Forces Special Act and Independence Day bomb blast in Assam which claimed 10 lives. Home Minister Shivraj Patil found no time to visit these two states for weeks. He did visit Assam and Nagaland promptly when violence erupted again, but his approach obviously lacked conviction.

The UPA Government's drawing a naught over the situation in the Northeast is a barometer of its apathy. But there is little surprising in the UPA Government's callous and casual approach to the problems in the Northeast. During the NDA rule, which for the first time instituted a department for Northeast, the region was on its way to normalcy. The Indian Army, by aiding the Royal Bhutanese Army, struck a death blow to ULFA. In the last general election, the Northeast recorded perhaps the highest voter turnout. But now the region appears to be sliding back into the days of insurgency.

If the UPA Government is casual about Northeast, it is only because the Congress has a history-sheet of indifference. The Congress, in the first two decades after Independence, supported Assamese hegemony over different hill tribes like the Nagas, Mizos, and Khasis in the name of integration with India. Unlike other states, the Congress Government did not reorganise Assam till 1972 (by creating Arunachal, Meghalaya and Mizoram; it had, however, created Nagaland in 1963).

Groups like Mizo Commoners Union and Naga National Council, or for that matter people in Manipur, a princely state, had distinct aspirations to find their future within the Indian Union. Modern education introduced by the British made them wary of lapsing into the repressive old order of tribal chiefs. They crossed swords with advocates of pre-colonial order and won. They had reposed their faith in Indian National Congress when it was a pan-Indian platform for attainment of Independence from British rule. But they were disillusioned by the Congress as the ruling establishment in New Delhi.

Most Northeastern states are heavily subsidised by Central funds. While the Centre was never parsimonious with its purse, it was never prudent enough to ensure whether its generosity reached the common man. It never did, but the breed of old tribal chiefs, which had entered politics under the new dispensation, was pocketing it as loot. There appeared a class of corrupt super riches with villas you might see in Switzerland, while the rest remained poverty-stricken. Missionary education in Northeast brought Western lifestyle and accompanying vices like drug abuse.

Congress harmed Assam in many different ways, but mostly by restricting its economic opportunities, which is the universal woe in the Northeast. The refinery for crude oil out of Digboi rig was established at Barauni (Begusarai, Bihar), which did not generate any employment in Assam. The tea and forest reserves of Assam, as in the British era, did not contribute to the development of the Assamese people.

Till the reorganisation of Assam in 1972, the Assamese elite found ready collusion in the Congress to resettle Bangladeshi infiltrators (ready to acknowledge Assamese as their mother tongue) on Assam's soil, a marriage of convenience through which the elite maintained their hegemony over non-Assamese like Bengalis, Mizos, Khasis. The Congress got the votes. When the cumulative effect of this longstanding policy resulted in the Assam agitation by the turn of 1980s, it was ruthlessly crushed by the Indira Government. Assam was saddled with an unpopular Government at the helm in 1983, even as massacres went on, and the IMDT Act made it virtually impossible to deport any Bangladeshi infiltrator.

Just how precarious the situation in Assam is, can be gauged from the expurgation of demographic statistic for the State in Census 2001. The trimming down of Muslim growth rate figures for entire India by eliminating Assam is like digging a hole to create a mound. That means the situation in Assam itself is so critical that the Government has seemingly given up. A State that does not appear in the census today will not appear on the map tomorrow.

The border province is sitting on a powder keg of two generations of infiltrators who are growing at a much faster rate than Hindu Assamese and Bengalis. The ISI, which at the same time props up sub-nationalist ULFA and pan-Islamist MULTA, has well and truly spread its tentacles in the Northeast. An isolationist geography seems to be the chief determinant of an alienist mindset in the Northeast. This impels some to look at the problems of their people with a centrifugal view. The latent instinct amongst tribal people to take to arms instead of dialogue can't be overlooked. People in the rest of the country don't seem to appreciate this problem.

But the Northeastern people themselves seem to overlook two things. If geography proposes alienation, it disposes it also in no time. The terrain of the region is hilly, landlocked, with little agricultural yield. Only Assam has oil and tea-plantation. The region has no outlet to sea to carry out commerce.

Second, within this small basket of Northeast, there is a kaleidoscopic diversity that any talks of 'sovereignty' or 'Independence' is bound to clash mutually when put face to face. NSCN (Isak Muivah) wants to create a Greater Nagaland that includes Naga inhabited areas of Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh with Nagaland. The Mizo National Front wants to see the Mizo inhabited areas of Manipur within the boundaries of Mizoram. However, the People's Liberation Army, a formidable secessionist group in Manipur, vehemently opposes conceding any territory of Manipur for either the Nagas or Mizos.

Better still, take for example ULFA and National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB), the two most virulent insurgency groups in Assam. NDFB's goal is to create a sovereign Bodoland in areas north of Brahmaputra river, while ULFA's is to create a 'Swadhin Ahom' (sovereign independent Assam) as per present borders of Assam with all its ethnic diversity. These two goals are mutually contradictory, though the two groups have a history of cooperation against the rest of the country. However, if Assam of ULFA comes into being, not only the Bodos but other ethnic groups (which find no participation in ULFA) will be forced to wage war against 'ULFA's colonialism'. How far will this game go? Some might think indefinitely, till the Northeast is subatomicised. But not quite. This game will proceed till Assam is incorporated in Bang-e-Islam as proposed by Fakruddin Ali Ahmed, or in the map of Mughlistan, a recent proposition advanced in Bangladesh, a state emerging as Eastern Taliban. All this is precisely along the lines of Zia-ul-Haq's plan, whose Operation Topac envisaged the breaking up India into a thousand bits, to be gobbled up one piece at a time. After that non-Muslims, according to his plan, will either have to accept Islam or face massacre or leave the place as it happened with Bangladesh.

ULFA is the rebel child of the Assam agitation, one of whose objective was to deport the 'foreigners' (euphemism for Bangladeshi infiltrators). But then ULFA became jihad's B-team and ended up advocating the menace it was formed to fight against. Since long its cadres are being trained by the ISI; and its camps are located in Bangladesh. ULFA encourages more infiltrators to settle in the Northeast, which will swamp the entire region.

This is a major problem which is making other insurgent groups in Northeast wary. The two shootout incidents in Dhubri conducted by NDFB is a nervous reaction to this. But they perhaps cannot win the battle in the end. For 10 Bangla Muslim killed in Assam, 200 are being born. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? I do not see any.

Courtesy: The Pioneer, October 08, 2004