Archives: 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 and a bunch of thorny issues at hand. Do talks between the Centre, the Assam government...

Personnel of the special task force (STF) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) shot at and injured nine students, including a girl, during the Durga Puja celebration in Roing town of Arunachal Pradesh on Wednesday. The injured were rushed to Roing Hospital where the condition of all was said to be critical. Most of the injured were rushed to Dibrugarh hospital later that night. The forces first entered the puja premises and roughed up the students. Later, the youngsters were chased around Roing Bazaar and fired at. Subsequently, jawans from the STF, CRPF and also India Reserve...

This has taken a long time – but would be more than welcome for people of the Northeast. The government has announced that it will set up separate High Courts for each of the Northeast states. Setting up of separate High Courts would be subject to creation of necessary infrastructural facilities by the respective state governments. Announcing this in the Lok Sabha on Friday, Salman Khursheed, Union Minister for Law and Justice, said that at present the governments of Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura have created the necessary infrastructural facilities for establishment of separate...

[Wrote this originally in June 2002. Worth a re-look] 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 elsewhere in the country. ...

[I wrote this in June 2002. Not much has changed. Sigh.] 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 from meeting strategic...

When you speak of the Northeast, the noun or verb 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. This is a government that does not give a damn about what people think of its acts of...

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 infiltrators and wants Bangladeshi Hindus to be registered as voters in the state. The...

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. ...

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 in Manipur have resorted to this extreme form of protest a number of times in the...

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. And their discomfiture lies in the fact that the two keep changing all the time....