My friend of 40 years, from Assam, was down in Bangalore to visit his son, a software engineer, who had not, of course, fled back home as part of the panicky exodus that had gripped those from the northeast a couple of weeks ago. The young man did not look stereotypically “northeastern”, nor did he bear a name that would go with the way those from there have been profiled. He belonged to the Bengali Muslim stock that has been settled in Assam for generations.
Over the next couple of days, as my friend and I talked on the phone while he followed an incredibly tight sightseeing schedule, we revisited a lot of the post-Independence history of the northeast region and I relived my undiminished fascination with the enigmatic corner of the country.
“It happened like this, you see,” my friend recalled, “we have been had by statistics.” In the ’60s, the Nagas broke away from Assam to get their own Nagaland; in the ’70s it was the turn of Meghalaya to be born for the Khasis and the Garos; in the ’80s it was the Mizos who secured statehood. With every separation, Assam became more of just Assamese- and Bengali-speaking people, with the proportion of the latter rising (that’s where statistics come in) and creating a linguistic as well as religious fear among the Assamese. You still want to know why the Assam agitation happened, he asked rhetorically.
Most unfortunately, that was not the end. Around the mid-’80s, the Bodos and Assamese, who were together in the Assam agitation, parted company as the Bodos wanted their own state. What they have got till now is the Bodoland Territorial Council, which rules over an autonomous area of four districts. And the Bodos, naturally not happy, want all non-Bodos out and have waged a campaign against, you name them, Koch Rajbanshis, Santhals and, of course, Bengali Muslims.
At one level, it is a battle over land; at another, a clash of fine-grained ethnicities. When will the strife end, I asked my friend. His flat reply stunned me, even though I knew it in my subconscious. “The violence will go on intermittently,” my friend said, “till people come to terms with numbers. You can’t fudge them, can you?”
I first went to the northeast in the early ’70s and the region has, ever since, woven a magic charm on me. The hills, forests and mostly pleasant climate are only part of the story. The underlying one is getting to know peoples who are part of us but are not wholly like us. What makes things incredibly complicated is that distinct identities in the northeast draw boundaries among themselves, even as they see the rest of the country as a distant land — both in space and the mind.
I came to Bangalore a decade ago and felt the city exert an immediate pull over me. One of the most pleasant of trends I have seen over the last few years is the increasingly large number of young people from the northeast in Bangalore. After the city emerged as a tech capital in the ’90s, pulling people from all over, the way it played host to those from the northeast was yet another proof of its cosmopolitan nature and openness.
I thought, with regret, that Kolkata was like this till the ’50s, when everyone came from everywhere to make a fortune and many stayed back. Bangalore was addressing my other regret: that those from the northeast do not go out enough to the rest of the country, without which a feeling of oneness cannot grow. In the mornings, as I would look out from the verandah of my Indiranagar flat, I would see a little line of northeasterners walk to the bus stand, fresh, cheerful and chirpy, going out to work.
Of course, they had problems. They did not have the language, were sometimes poorly treated by their landlords, and kept mostly to themselves, marking their integration a long-term work in progress. But these things happen everywhere, I told myself. A prospective north Delhi landlord recently sought to turn away our house-hunting daughter by saying that he did not let out to Nepalis!
All of which makes the latest developments so depressing. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happened. Nobody threatened anybody. The menace of modern technology spread rumours, which caused a panic. And let it be said, those from the northeast, not yet fully acclimatised to mainland India, panicked easily. The nation is still very much in the making and needs ever-careful nurturing.
