ONE thing that is constant in most of the struggles going on in the northeastern region, be they peaceful and constitutional or violent and unconstitutional, is that every agitating group seeks a `permanent solution' (sthayi samadhan) to this or that problem viewed, perhaps rightly and at any rate with passionate conviction, as a matter of life and death to the people whose interests the group claims to represent.
The formulation, though not identical to the infamous search for a `final solution', comes perilously close to it. Fortunately for the people in whose name such a demand is pressed, its proponents do not possess the same kind of single-minded viciousness and material resources as those who historically sought a `final solution' did.
The issues include the illegal influx of foreign nationals; land alienation; perceived or real threats to real or manufactured identities based on language, religion, `ethnicity', caste, clan and tribal affiliations; demands for the creation of a separate subdivision or a district; demand for greater autonomy or a separate State; and separatist and secessionist struggles with demands ranging from the right to self-determination to recognition of the right to conduct armed struggles for sovereignty and independence.
Each of these issues finds a resonance among people in different parts of the northeastern region and, according to the score or so identifiable organisations spearheading them, cries out for an "immediate and permanent solution". Indeed, this is true even of more realistic and remediable grievances such as the lack of economic development, the recurrent problem of floods, the mess in education, corruption and unemployment.
A unique feature of this ferment is that even if those in a position to make concessions in respect of these demands were to do so, the situation on the ground admits no such solution. Even a feasible solution, not to speak of a `permanent solution', is nowhere in sight in most of these struggles. This is, in a sense, a happy situation for those in authority as well as those who occupy the space in the opposition, constitutional or extra-constitutional, to ignore problems to which remedies can be found within the existing framework.
A telling instance of this inherent impasse is the `progress' of the Assam Accord, which has not been implemented even though those who led the Assam agitation and were among its principal architects occupied the highest political positions in the State between 1985 and 1990 and again between 1996 and 2001. Equally telling is the spectacle of the leadership of the All Assam Students Union (AASU) once again leading the chorus for the annulment of the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, ignoring the fact that its erstwhile leaders, who were equally vociferous in making the demand, occupied political office over two terms without doing anything about it.
To say this is not to take recourse to a so-called philosophic position that the problems posed by `life' simply do not admit of any solution - a splendid rationale for rank selfishness and inaction, entirely in tune with the dominant ethos of the country. Rather, owing to factors that have an all-too-material foundation, the social reality has repeatedly defeated every search for a `permanent solution', or even a workable solution, to the problems of the region.
A brief exegesis on the seemingly impending resolution of the Naga nationalist struggle and the Bodo demand for greater autonomy will perhaps help to see why such `permanent solutions' are at best a fetish and a mirage and at worst a calculated tactic to keep the people whose cause they claim to espouse permanently in ferment. The Naga struggle is as old as, if not older than, the history of independent India; the Bodo demand is less than a decade old.
At no time in the past 50 years has the Naga nationalist struggle appeared closer to resolution than at present. The contrast between the celebrated, some would say notorious, encounter between Angami Zapu Phizo and Morarji Desai in London in June 1977, which ended abruptly in recriminations by Phizo and threats of "extermination of all the Naga rebels" by Prime Minister Morarji Desai, and the more studied deliberations that have been going on for the past three or four years between the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isaac-Muivah), and emissaries/representatives of the Government of India in several locations outside the country could not be more telling. That the NSCN(I-M) leaders are now travelling to Delhi on Indian passports for talks with the Government of India, is a tacit, even if only tactical, admission by them that the settlement they hope to clinch will be "within the framework of the Indian Constitution", but with a much greater degree of autonomy than is now available under the provisions of the Constitution.
The guarded optimism about the prospect for peace in Nagaland would be justified but for the fact that meeting Naga nationalist aspirations as articulated by the NSCN(I-M) is inextricably entangled with competing, indeed conflicting, concerns of a corresponding kind, obviously and intractably in Manipur, and also in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh - not to speak of Naga irredentist aspirations in Myanmar. A core component of Naga nationalist aspirations is `Naga integration', that is, bringing together under one political structure all `Naga inhabited areas'.
There was a time when the maps of Nagaland even in official publications of the Nagaland government did not demarcate the State's eastern and southern boundaries. The idea of a `southern Nagaland', which, according to its proponents, would include the whole of Manipur barring the Imphal Valley and Churachandpur district, is a very powerful one and for whose realisation there is an across-the-board commitment among all Nagas. Indeed, in the political vocabulary of the erstwhile rebels, the last letter in NSCN, which once stood for `Nagaland', now stands unequivocally for `Nagalim', which is another word for `Greater Nagaland'.
No wonder, then, that the political leadership in Manipur is sceptical about the possibility of a settlement that will find acceptance in Manipur also, in particular by the numerically and politically predominant population in the Imphal Valley. Not to put too fine a point on it, any concession of territory to the NSCN(I-M) can spark a confrontation like one between an immovable object and an irresistible force, with unpredictable consequences the least likely of which is a stalemate.
Equally problematic is the impending resolution to the Bodo demand for greater autonomy, that is, the creation of a Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), itself a comedown from the original demand for a separate State.
While there is some substance to the argument put forward by many espousing Assamese regionalist/nationalist aspirations - whose most acceptable voice at one time was the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) - that the Bodo nationalist aspirations are merely a malevolent invention of the Congress(I) in Assam, the fact is that Bodo nationalist history is not all mere invention. The present Congress government in Assam has found the problem as intractable as its predecessor, the AGP government, found it.
This is not surprising. Whatever be the political identity of the formation in office in Dispur, on issues seen to affect the core population of the Brahmaputra Valley, the Assamese people, an expression which itself is full of contentious ambiguities, no government in Dispur can make concessions beyond a point.
At present, an impending settlement of this issue seems to hinge on the inclusion of 93 more villages in the territory of the envisaged BTC area. In practical terms, at stake is the giant refinery and petrochemical complex at Bongaigaon, which falls just outside the BTC area under the present plan. While the BTC leaders insist that there will be no compromise on the demand for the inclusion of these villages (read Bongaigaon and the industrial complex around it) in the BTC area, the State government seems to yield a bit only to go back on it later - truly a case of attrition and a test of will on both sides.
However, even if the State government were to concede the demand, there are far more potent forces that oppose the creation of the BTC on the grounds that they are the indigene of that stretch of territory being claimed by the Bodos as their historic (albeit drastically abbreviated) homeland. The confrontation raises complex questions about tribal-non-tribal relations, the process of tribalisation/de-tribalisation and re-tribalisation that has been going on in Assam for centuries, and the political dimension these once `natural' processes have acquired under the one-person-one-vote democratic dispensation, with all its promises and perils. The most intractable of these is the organisation mobilising the resistance to the creation of a BTC, the Sanmilita Jana Gosthiya Sangram Samity, an alliance of some 18 organisations of non-Bodo people, who historically belong to the same `ethnic' stock as the Bodos though they are now part of the broad caste Hindu Assamese society.
Each one of the ongoing `identity struggles' in the northeast has similar or corresponding complex dimensions. The issues do not admit of permanent solutions, simply because the historical processes of which they are a part defy all formulas. Thus, the constant make-believe negotiations, deals struck which sooner rather than later come unstuck, formation of fresh alliances, formulation of a fresh charter of demands, higher forms of struggle co-existing with lower, even debased, forms of compromise and deals. Maybe, out of all this churning, something creative and liberating might emerge. However, there are no such signs on the horizon.
