Tirap: Is it a which, what, who or where? Or is it simply remote?

My fellow journalist Shiv Aroor posted on FaceBook today:

“You probably didn't hear about this today. Too remote for anyone to care either. 3 Army jawans ambushed, killed by NSCN terrorists in (Tirap district of) Arunachal Pradesh today:
Havildar Sanjiv Kumar
Havildar Parmal Singh Gujar
Havildar Charan Singh”

PS: Parenthesis mine.

Dear Aroor:

Eating Momos in Delhi doesn’t make one a lover of the north-east. Just as consciously refraining from using certain pejorative terms to describe people from the north-east doesn’t make one secular or bring one closer to them. Terming some of these people as terrorists displays the inherent elitism in us, belonging to the Indian “mainland”.

No wonder the north-east is “too remote for anyone to care either”.

Tirap is not too remote. It is around 100 kms from Dibrugarh. On the map it looks dauntingly distant, though. Tirap is a lovely place. Greenery all over, the woods so thick with underbrush and foliage hiding the sky, little streams meandering all over. Smalls hills undulate for miles, the cleavages so thick with vegetation the valleys beneath remain hidden.

Not an easy job to be there when all woods and forests look the same, the villages are not dissimilar, and it is difficult to distinguish between a Nocte or a Wancho. It is this remarkably indistinguishable nature of the habitation and the inhabitants that is both the boon and bane of the people of Tirap and nearby areas, whether neighbouring Assam, Nagaland or Myanmar.

It is an old Naga political thought that the tribes the people of Tirap belong to are essentially Naga in origin and therefore Tirap and its adjoining areas in India and Myanmar should rightfully belong to a Greater Nagaland called Nagalim.

They have been at it, using non-violent and of-late violent methods, for nearly a century now. We have the British to thank for identifying scores of tribes in this region by the umbrella term “Naga”. The British were not original. They merely borrowed the name from the Buranjis – documented chronicles – left by the Ahoms, who came from northern Myanmar and entered Assam via Tirap where they had to clash with the local tribals – the “Nagas” – for a very long time.

As the Ahom rule weakened and the British replaced them as new rulers, the “Nagas” faced a new threat. They were wary of the white-skinned people who were impatient to subjugate the tribals and brooked no indiscipline from them. This led to unrest and skirmishes became routine.

Things took a turn for the worse in 1857. On February 1 that year a British party reached a Wancho village of Ninu in Tirap. Their objective was to survey the region. But their high-handed attitude turned the exercise into a bloody confrontation. The British soldiers were contemptuous of the tribals. They made no attempt to talk to the village elders or understand local customs. It so happened that the village chief had just died and was being mourned. A haughty British soldier came close to the body of the dead chief and apparently hit the body.

The Wanchos went livid. On the morrow, they fell upon the survey party and killed 80 British surveyors and soldiers. A few managed to escape. The British thought nothing of the soldier’s indiscretion which led to the killings and instead plotted on retaliation. They came back weeks later and burnt Ninu and two other villages, killing Wanchos at will. When they returned a year later to find Ninu rebuilt, they burnt it down again. This was the turning point. The Wanchos would never be allowed into the plains till India became independent and they never forgot their isolation.

In mainland India, just around the time of the British retaliation in “remote” Ninu, Mangal Pandey had been hung to death in Barrackpore. This was followed by Indian sepoys in the British army turning mutinous in Meerut. The din in Meerut reached Delhi, 40 kms away, faster than the din in Tirap’s Ninu, around 2300 km away.   

The British could never completely subjugate the “Nagas” of Tirap, but the lack of development in the region began to tell on the tribals and the end of the British rule saw attempts by the by-then-educated Naga leadership to claim a separate nation for themselves. That happened in 1951, barely four years after India gained independence.

Seven years later, the Armed Forces (Assam and Manipur) Special Powers Ordinance 1958 was promulgated by then President Rajendra Prasad on 22 May 1958. It was replaced by Armed Forces (Assam and Manipur) special Powers Act, 1958 on 11 September 1958. I think the Act is in still in force over there. All these years. Should check with the government of India how much progress has the Tirap region made thanks to this Act. No need, of course, to ask the government of India if the enforcement of the Act has solved the problem forever and whether peace reins in the region. It’s perhaps okay to ask if the Act has permanently replaced a socio-political approach to the problem (an approach which was perhaps never considered as a tool for reconciliation).

The NSCN stopped eschewing violence a long time ago. Just like the Maoists in India’s Red Corridor. They are as much a burden on the state as they are on the very people whose support they thrive on. It’s a violence-begets-violence concept that reins supreme over there now. And it is so ingrained in the pulse of the region, its people and its rulers over decades that the original reasons for the confrontation are blurred by the constant worry that things may have reached a point of no return. “Resolution” is a “remote” concept. “Containment” connects.

I am not here to either vindicate or denigrate the cause of the “Naga” movement or that of the State. I am only worried we are so “remote” from Tirap and its region. Unitarism over pluralism never works. Even remotely.

Post Script: Kamlesh Joshi, the Deputy Commissioner of Tirap, is continuing to find out which of the NSCN factions killed the three army jawans. Joshi is considered in Delhi’s power circles as an able administrative officer. True to his image, he took a positive step to reduce the “remoteness” between Tirap and Delhi by launching an official website, tirap.nic.in. Understandably, the news of the violence did not figure on the website. Joshi, in his message on the website, says: “It is a matter of great pleasure for me to be able to communicate to you through the medium of this online portal for District Tirap. This website is a genuine attempt on the part of the District Administration to connect with the people of Tirap, and at the same time, disseminate information about the District outside.” Perhaps Joshi failed to notice that the five heads under the “Latest News” link on the website have not been updated for years.