Importance of Being Tribal

By Patricia Mukhim

This article is not an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of being Earnest, a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personas in order to escape burdensome obligations.

In the Northeast, leaders of militant outfits all construct romantic facades about themselves. In the region, Che Guevera is our hero but only in so far as the name goes. The actions of our homegrown supermen are far removed from that of the legendary Argentine Marxist revolutionary with several remarkable qualities, none of them fictitious. Che was a physician, author, writer and an intellectual par excellence. So comparisons cannot only be odious but ludicrous as well.

Recently, there was a media splash detailing the material acquisitions of Jewel Garlosa’s Dima Halam Daogah. The media took vicarious pleasure in giving a blow-by-blow account of Garlosa’s possessions, like a watch costing over a lakh of rupees, etc, and his facial maintenance regime. This information was, of course, shared by India’s premier sleuths, the National Investigating Agency. I found this undue haste to sensationalise Garlosa’s wealth ranking somewhat phony. Garlosa is already a discredited man. You can do no further harm to a guy who is down and out. However, there is a certain gaucherie in the NIA’s actions, which reek of bellicosity. It feels pretty much like the state landing a final punch on one of its baiters.

Why is the NIA not so gung-ho about giving us an inventory of possessions of other more powerful groups like the NSCN(IM), the Ulfa and the National Democratic Front of Boroland? If the DHD(J), which is just about a few years old, could have amassed so much affluence, think of the amount Ulfa has accumulated in its more than two decades of militancy which nearly pulverised the tea industry and other economic sectors of Assam.

Garlosa has accomplished no mean feat. He has only walked the path of his mentors (NSCN-IM), so what’s the big deal about publicising his ignoble deeds? Now that a number of Ulfa leaders have either surrendered or been arrested, why are similar seizure lists not made public? Let us also have a public exposure of Ulfa’s wealth, including its numerous bank accounts and its strategic investments. Let’s not fool ourselves that the swish malls and shopping plazas that have turned Guwahati into a mall city have been created with “duly accounted for” private wealth. Those glittering malls and the huge real estate industry are examples of what you can achieve with “black” money in a situation where no one, not even the Income-Tax sleuths, bothers to ask questions. It is easy for the NIA to kick a man who is already down and out, but how about taking on the Ulfa or the NSCN? A crime is a crime is a crime. The state should not use different sets of lenses to view different militant outfits.

And that is precisely the point of this article. Every armed outfit needs an alibi to convince a gullible public. That alibi comes in the form of an ideology built around people’s aspirations. In general, people are disillusioned by the absence of governance and the dwindling opportunities for equitable growth. People see that only those in the favoured list of the powers that be enjoy the fruits of development while the rest languish in the black hole of poverty and destitution. This frustration and disillusionment is the fertile ground that militancy needs to sow its first seeds. After that, the ideologues who have mastered the art of demagoguery in colleges and universities can simply collect their spoils.

When the Ulfa started out it drummed up support for its cause by demonising “India” and othering it as the “state” that treated Assam like a colony in the same vein that the British treated India. Choruses of exploitation of Assam’s rich natural resources by mainland India and the humungous influx of Bangladeshis from across the border were themes constructed by those who led the pre-Ulfa movement or the Assam agitation of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Everyone joined the chorus. Ironically, when a young and dynamic group wrested political power and entered Dispur, one would have thought things would change. Nay, it led to another trajectory in Assam’s tumultuous politics. The “boys” at Dispur seemed to have failed to rein in the dark forces. When the Ulfa, with another set of “boys”, was baptised it received the blessings of every hardliner Assamese who believed that there was need for a counter-force to challenge an insouciant state. By then the “state” encapsulated all who held the reins of power at Delhi and Dispur. After all, Dispur was only an extension of Delhi. The rest, of course, is history, which need not be narrated ad nauseum.

But if the Ulfa came up on an anti-India slogan and a demand for sovereignty, the other militant outfits, mainly from the “tribal” areas of Assam, raised their ugly heads as a protest against Dispur’s perceived apathy towards their cause. It started with Rajiv Gandhi’s famous accord with the All Assam Students’ Union, which was later perceived by the other groups to be “exclusively” with and for the Assamese people. By then the Bodos and other tribes realised they were out in the cold and that the Assam movement did not actually embrace their aspirations. The Bodo insurgency, then, is a cantankerous reaction to the Assam Accord.

It was only a matter of time before other contumacious groups would come up. The Karbi and Dimasa militancy are also based on the same analogy as that of the Bodos. Dispur became the bashing board and rightly so because development was inherently skewed. Even today all development indicators in the tribal areas of Assam are akin to those of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not to say that other areas of Assam are not equally in the doldrums. But ethnic aspirations and the politics of identity had by then become very lucrative for the plains tribals.

The Bodo Accord, which actually gave the Bodo leadership (not the people) unparalleled access to power and pelf, became the model for the Karbi and Dimasa groups as well.

The much-vaunted Rs 1,000-crore development package for the North Cachar Hills came as a result of the senseless violence wreaked by DHD militants on the state. This is Delhi’s way of responding to the sulks and complaints of the North-east. Those who rule this country believe in the philology of “Money Talks”. It is patronage democracy at its crudest. The Centre believes today that the only way to actually shut people up and get on with the Delhi-based governance model is to throw a few crores of rupees here and there and let the rest take care of itself. It is not Delhi’s heartache how the money is used. The underlying idea is to corrupt the belligerent trumpeters of different hues to the point that they develop a fatty liver and ultimately die of the disease. But what of the new contenders to leadership?

It’s not as if militancy will die with its leader. Delhi does not care about such repercussions. It is our own illusory ideas that make us believe that the North-east matters to this country. Yes, the region matters only to the extent that the natural resources here still make business sense. That’s it!

It is unfortunate that this region has not imbibed the lessons of self-reliance and autonomy. We have learnt instead to dance to Delhi’s tune. As a result, those we elect are subservient to the Delhi Durbar. This region used to be the land of proud people with rich cultural values. Now all that is in the past. We have been corrupted to the core and now all of us are exposed in the same manner that Jewel Garlosa is. Garlosa’s shame is our collective shame because what the NIA is trying to tell us (the tribal leadership of all persuasions) through the expose is that “you people come up with high-falutin slogans but are rotten to the core”. Indeed, the word “tribal” is today equivalent to being backward, sloppy, intellectually vacuous, morally bankrupt and politically cacophonous. This is how Delhi understands the “tribal” mindset. That’s because over time our engagements with Delhi have been more about “money” and less about pragmatic development paradigms.

The Jewel Garlosa story is a sad denouement to what could have been an intelligent assertion for more equitable development, better governance and better infrastructure creation in Dima Hasao or the “land of the Dimasas”.

We only have to look at Meghalaya to see how a small section of the tribal elite has enriched themselves on Delhi’s largesse even while millions live on the brink of dispossession, to understand that tribal politics has sunk to its nadir and so has the character of its Delhi-driven rulers.

**The writer is editor, The Shillong Times, and can be  contacted at patricia17@rediffmail.com