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| PM must look East before 100-day leap | | | Shankar Roychowdhury
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has commenced his second innings with tremendous goodwill and public support, symbolised above all by the Sensex pole-vault the moment the election results were announced. The point of repeated emphasis in ministerial pronouncements has been the economy (rightly so), and expectant voters are waiting for the action to begin. But a stable and secure internal environment is also an essential prerequisite, for which internal security must have adequate priority too. Security subtext is generally construed with reference to the Mumbai 26/11 attacks and its Pakistan connection, and now to some extent the Naxalite situation as well. But the special vulnerabilities and instabilities in the East and Northeast of the country again do not find specific mention anywhere.
Internal security as an extension of public order comes within the constitutional purview of state governments, but India’s northeastern states are a separate category altogether and have to be addressed somewhat differently. These are regions long targeted by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as "Badla for Bangladesh", from bases in that country established with tacit support and approval of previous regimes.
The present government of Bangladesh, recently in office, has declared its resolve not to allow its territory to be exploited for hostile activities against friendly neighbours (amongst whom India is most certainly one), but given the deep and pervasive links with Pakistan and its military the ISI establishment developed under the previous regimes, this is unlikely to be an easy task. "Death by a thousand cuts", remains Pakistan’s preferred strategy for its "Long War" in the eastern theatre, inflicted through a combination of sponsored ethnic militancy in the Northeast in tandem with sustained illegal migration from Bangladesh to alter the demographic balance in the border states of West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura.
Weakly controlled regions in upper Burma provide sanctuary for anti-Indian militants, sometimes with connivance of local Burmese authorities. Local vested interests with trans-border linkages have facilitated this agenda, and dispassionate assessment leads to the impression that Pakistan’s strategy has met with reckonable success in the targeted region. The requirement for strong countermeasures is obvious, but long outstanding issues of internal security in these sensitive regions have not been accorded sufficient importance and priority. This approach and attitude must change and the task taken in hand in real earnest by this government.
A multiplicity of separatist outfits based on ethnic and sub-ethnic denominations has torn the Northeast completely apart, generating violence whose epicentre lies in the Assam-Nagaland-Manipur sub-region, and only relatively less elsewhere, though peace itself is a very relative term here.
In Nagaland, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) is the dominant power centre and controls the state government. It is also the chief regional franchisee for the ISI and channels support to other militant groups of all denominations through a network of local sub-proxies spread over all states in the region, uninhibitedly sidestepping a nominal ceasefire which has brought about an uneasy cessation of hostilities with their chief opponents, the Indian Army. But intra-factional turf battles continue unabated, and state governments have failed to check rampant criminal extortion by all militant groups.
The main political focus remains Nagalim, or Greater Nagaland, a heartland incorporating Nagaland and the Naga-inhabited areas of adjoining states, particularly the hill districts of Manipur from where comes the bulk of the NSCN (IM)’s predominantly Tangkhul leadership.
States are on autopilot with their own local agendas, but demanding (and obtaining) Central assistance almost as a matter of right. The New Delhi establishment is a distant entity and federal influence barely touches the surface in these parts, if at all.
Mushrooming militant organisations have replaced the official dispensation with their own regimes and parallel administrations, and over time all have acquired a criminal overlay. Vast mafia networks maintain themselves and their organisations through extortion, bank robberies, and the most lucrative of all: drug trafficking. Militant groups are wary of rivals, not trespassing into each other’s domains, but all loosely bound in an anti-government orientation. There has resultantly been a huge rise in criminal activity, including untypical incidents like kidnapping for ransom and violence against women, hitherto associated with the mainland cow belt, along with bitter rivalry for control of the flourishing drug conduit emanating from the Golden Triangle in Burma.
This erosion of authority in the Northeast by crime, militancy and externally sponsored subversion has never attracted the necessary attention, urgency, or priority at the national level. Today there is more than a superficial resemblance between India’s Northeast and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, notwithstanding their totally dissimilar ethno-political and socio-cultural environments.
In both cases, the state has largely withered away at the grassroots, leaving both regions ungoverned and indeed barely governable in the grip of what can best be described as high intensity gang warfare with constitutional authorities clutching at the ceasefire agreements and refraining from intervention, perhaps until the contestants decimate each other adequately. Common sense is even understandable in some ways, but nonetheless, not desirable.
Nevertheless, in mainland India there are heartening signs in the increasing presence of young men and women from the Northeast, with students and workers particularly in the hospitality and transportation industries.
The Indian Army, in the forefront here, recruits its Assam and Naga regiments locally, as do the paramilitary and Central police forces. But as always, long-term resolutions require economic and political management, translated into education, healthcare, jobs and governance, within a calibrated over-watch of law and order, border management and internal security. The Northeast and eastern regions have traditionally been consigned to the outer penumbra of national attention. But now, with a Prime Minister who is in a sense "affiliated" to the region through his Rajya Sabha constituency, the new government’s internal security policy will hopefully "Look East" in a sharper focus commencing within the "First Hundred Days" of the new administration.
Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury (Retd) is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former Member of
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