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Agenda for re-colonisation?

The May 2006 referendum in Montenegro that led to its emergence as an independent republic had some interesting resonances among the leaders and supporters of the separatist and secessionist insurgencies in Assam and its neighbourhood. The idea of a referendum under international supervision on these sovereignty struggles has always held an appeal to these. Indeed, in the wake of the Montenegro referendum, civil society organisations in Manipur revived the plebiscite call in a public meeting held in Imphal. The meeting was addressed among others by the titular king of Manipur, a former Lok Sabha member from the State, a former human rights commissioner, the president of the Journalists’ Union, leaders of political parties and women leaders – the latter, always a potent force in Manipur, though no programmatic action followed.

The more recent declaration of independence by Kosovo, and the prompt announcement of its recognition by President George Bush, also has had a similar resonance. With equal promptitude, Isak Swu, Chairman of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN-IM), the dominant faction of the Naga insurgency which is holding talks with the Government of India since June 1997, wrote to Fatmir Sejdiu congratulating the people of Kosovo on the “historic independence declaration on February 17, 2008.”

The statement, as reported on the NSCN website, reads thus: “The bold decision of Kosovo and its victory is a clear message sent to all over the world that the rights of the nation, big or small, weak or strong must be acknowledged. As one among the co-constituent members of the Parliamentarians for National Self-Determination (PNSD) and as a struggling nation, Nagalim fully supports the newly achieved status of Kosovo and feels overwhelmed at the triumph of the people’s will.” [ http://www.nscnonline.org and http://naganation.com/archives/62]

Further, the PNSD statement signed by its Chair and Vice-Chair, Lord Ahmed and Elfyn Llwyd, has this interesting passage with a message to India: “We have been asked to convey to the Kosova people the congratulations and best wishes of all of PNSD’s Advisory Panels — Kurdish, Naga, Kashmir and Sikh. The destiny of those and many other peoples and nations who also aspire to self-determination [in whatever form they freely decide] will rest upon the will of the international community to live up to its moral and legal obligations.”

There is little doubt that the Kosovo development will spur the ideologues of these struggles in India to further refine the foundational and theoretical framework of separatism.

All these struggles share a perspective of a past, real or imagined it is immaterial, when the people and the land they claim to represent were sovereign and independent, and were never a part of what their ideologues inside and outside the country call ‘the colonial construct’ that was, and continues to be, ‘India’. In this perspective, the modern Indian state, and everything that flows from this like citizenship, territoriality, boundaries and borders, indeed the very concept of national sovereignty, are little more than ‘colonial constructs’; and the separatist and secessionist outfits are performing a necessary and historically valid task, indeed even a ‘progressive’ task, in their struggle to unravel this despised ‘colonial construct’.

The attainment of sovereignty by the constituent units of the modern Indian state will mark the beginning of the inevitable, indeed necessary, unravelling of this ‘colonial construct’. What is however being sought to be put in its place is very much a ‘neo-colonial construct’, crafted by forces driven by an agenda of re-colonisation and rank reaction.

Consider the facts. Insurgencies and separatist movements and autonomy struggles and similar enterprises of one kind or the other have been a fact of life in Assam and its neighbourhood in northeast India for over half a century.

The oldest of such enterprises is the sovereignty struggle in Nagaland. This, according to its proponents, began with the declaration of independence by the Naga people on the eve of Indian independence, though the armed insurgency, along with the counter-insurgency measures began, only in mid 1954. An important instrument of counter-insurgency was the Assam Disturbed Areas Act, 1955, a state legislation (the present state of Nagaland was little more than a district of Assam then) that inspired The Armed Forces (Special Powers Act), 1958, later the Armed Forces (Assam and Manipur) Special Powers Act, 1972, with further minor verbal amendments to enable the extension of the Act to the full-fledged states of Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram in 1986.

While the trajectory of the Naga insurgency has followed a complex course with bitter internecine struggles and splits and shifting alliances within the insurgency, the objective has remained the same – the attainment of a sovereign and independent Nagalim (in the vocabulary of the NSCN-IM) that would include the present Nagaland and other Naga-inhabited areas in Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh (and across the international border, in Myanmar).

Since the announcement by the Government of India of ceasefire and the beginning of unconditional talks in June 1997 with the (NSCN-IM), and the simultaneous approaches made to other Naga nationalist factions, peace, of a kind, has prevailed in Nagaland. The ceasefire does not however cover areas in the neighbouring Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Manipur claimed for the sovereign Nagaland. During this period, as indeed during the years of active insurgency, elections have been periodically held in the State — indeed have just been held. Elected governments have been defeated in a subsequent election.

There was a time when the insurgency leadership scoffed at this democratic process; this not the case now. Without formally acknowledging the legitimacy of the elected government in Kohima, the insurgency had learnt to live with it even before the ceasefire. However, the stated objective of a sovereign Nagalim remains intact, uncompromised.

A similar disconnect exists between the public pronouncements of and the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), whose objective too is the attainment of a sovereign, independent Asom, and the reality. ULFA, which was founded in April 1979 and came to public and official notice after the bloodstained elections in Assam in February 1983, had a virtually free run in the State till the Central intervention in 1990. Since then, successive military operations, as well as splits, defections and surrenders have severely hobbled the organisation. However, its rhetoric about striving for a sovereign, independent, Asom, through armed struggle, remains intact, strident.

Much the same points may be made with the insurgencies in Manipur. The oldest of these is the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), founded in November 1964. Other insurgent groups active in the State are the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), People’s Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK) and Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP), all bespeaking a ‘Marxist/Maoist’ orientation, with the stated objective of restoring the State’s lost sovereignty.

Other, more legitimate grievances against India include the ceding of Kabaw Valley to Burma, the events and circumstances surrounding the State’s accession/integration into independent India, the indifference about recognising Meitei and including it in the Eight Schedule, which, when it came, had lost any grace it may have had, the long period of apprenticeship as a Union Territory before Manipur became a full-fledged State, apprehensions that the Government of India may make another deal, as it did with Burma when Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister, this time with Naga nationalists, at the expense of Manipur’s territory and territorial integrity. These have for long fed and sustained the secessionist mindset.

How seriously do these organisations believe they can attain sovereignty, considering that their adversary is the Indian state? Half a century of “armed struggle” and nearly a decade of direct and indirect talks in foreign lands and in Delhi has not really advanced Naga aspirations for sovereignty. The de facto legitimacy that ‘Nagalim’ has acquired owes little to the protracted negotiations.

Even allowing for unpredictability in international correlation of forces, the Indian state is too big and too powerful to allow it to be defeated in war and occupied by a foreign power — the historically necessary conditions for the disintegration of a nation state.

The persistence and resilience of these insurgencies may perhaps be explained in the context of their reading of the seemingly never-ending break-up of former Yugoslavia and, the earlier collapse of the Soviet Union which, unlike Yugoslavia, collapsed without any overt foreign intervention.

The Indian state, in this perspective, is getting more and more enfeebled, unable to resolve the larger contradictions besetting it nationally. What the struggles of these marginalised nationalities in the marginal regions of the country need to do is to keep up the pressure, keep on chipping away, if necessary over generations. With the received ideas of the nation-state losing their legitimacy, such `colonial constructs’ as the Indian state are bound to crack up and collapse even without external aggression, defeat in war and foreign occupation.

Such ideas and ideologies may not have any immediate material impact on the ground situation. What is less clear is the long-term impact, especially in the context of the U.S. support and recognition, a lead that may be followed by the countries of the European Union.

The apparent reluctance of the Government of India to unambiguously condemn these ongoing U.S.-made agendas to go on dismembering existing nation states with material resources or having a strategic significance will further embolden the separatist and secessionist movements in the region, confirming their reading that time, and the big battalions, are on their side. Nothing else can explain the persistence of these movements in face of the blindingly obvious fact that they can never win their “armed struggles.”

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