The Indira Gandhi government did not have a plan, but does the country have one now?

DURING A FINANCIAL Times Indira Gandhi told me during a Financial Times interview in February 1983 that her government would wait until a crisis in Assam cooled down before taking the next step to resolve issues that had led to some 3,000 people being killed. There had been controversial state Assembly elections in the state, and the government had sent in 75,000 troops to control the violence. The Indian Prime Minister said that she had “no plan as such” to resolve the crisis. The problems of illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh dated back to Indian partition in 1947 “and we can’t just wish that away”. Bangladesh should, she added, take back migrants who had entered India when their country was being created (out of Pakistan) in a 1971 war. Beyond that, she said blandly, her Government would wait. (Financial Times February 25, 1983). At the time, new to South Asia, I was shocked that a Prime Minister could stand back while so many people were killed, though Mrs Gandhi had belatedly visited the area. Now nearly 30 years later, the problems of Assam and other Northeastern states remain, and it seems that the Indian government is still waiting until the situation cools down. But the world is different, as has been demonstrated last month (August) in what was probably one of the biggest sudden mass migrations since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Tens of thousands of Assamese and other workers and students from Northeastern India fled home from Bengaluru and other cities in the south because they feared mass attacks after very-exaggerated social media reports of clashes in the northeast between indigenous Assamese tribals and Muslim settlers. Bengali speaking Muslims had been forced out of their villages in attacks staged by the indigenous Bodo tribe. This put more than 300,000 Muslim refugees in relief camps, which was of course an extremely serious human crisis. But the panic in Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai and elsewhere was induced by hugely exaggerated reports and pictures faking anti-Muslim atrocities that had never in Assam. One of the photographs on the net was for example of a mass grave in Bhutan after an earthquake there, and had nothing at all to do with India’s Northeast. These fakes were carried and spread by mobile phone text messages and other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which inevitably led to a government crackdown, temporarily banning bulk text messages, closing about 250 allegedly offending web pages, and claiming that many of the false messages originated in Pakistan (which Pakistan has rejected). There are many lessons to be learned from these events, not least the way that social media can be used quickly to stir up trouble in international as well as local conflicts. This is clearly a controversial area because there is, quite correctly, concern that governments should not use controls on websites and other social media vehicles such as Twitter and Google to block items that they find politically objectionable. On the other hand, there is a case for taking action for internal and external security reasons. That is a fine line which will be endlessly debated. There are also lessons about how increased labour mobility means that communities need to absorb newcomers, as well as about older problems such as the treatment of both ethnic and religious minorities and migrants from neighbouring countries. But perhaps the biggest lesson for India is that the seven Northeastern states—often known as the Seven Sisters—can no longer be treated Indira Gandhi-style as a distant delayable problem. Ever since independence in 1947, the Indian government has regarded armed insurgencies and other uprisings and illegal immigration issues in states such as Assam, Nagaland and Manipur as events that have virtually no impact on the rest of India, located as they are far away on the other side of Bangladesh. That is rather similar to the way that the growing threat from Naxalite (Maoist) rebels in central and eastern India used to be regarded as a distant irritant that did not need Delhi’s urgent attention – something that has been corrected in the last two or there years. This is yet another example of how India can no longer survive as it has in the past by simply turning muddle and adversity into some form of (often inadequate) success, assuming that everything will eventually function adequately. The pace of events and economic development—and now of communications—means that issues such as the Northeast can (to use an English idiom) no longer be swept under the carpet, as they have been for decades. The escalation of the various forms of social media—and economic integration— should indeed help to bind the country together, with the north-east being seen as part of India’s mainstream. But such developments can also split India apart, with the people like those from the Northeast feeling so isolated and vulnerable in southern Indian cities that they flee home. So the Northeast has indeed come to Delhi, in a political sense. It has also come as a social and economic phenomena with a vast influx of mostly young, energetic and friendly people who have come to the capital and the southern cities for work, or as students. “The staff come from the Northeast,” is a remark frequently heard about a restaurant. This is not said in a derogatory way, but as a slightly dismissive description of a people who, looking more Far East than most Indians, are indeed regarded as internal migrants from a distant part of the country and not as part of the mainstream, even though they have become an important part of these cities’ economies. Yet when Mary Kom from Manipur won a boxing bronze medal in the Olympic Games, India celebrated with a fervour that could not have been greater if she had come from Mumbai or Delhi. Next February, it will be 30 years since Indira Gandhi said in the FT interview that she was waiting with no plan. Various steps have of course been taken since then,but the Northeast has never been the focus of government attention that it needs to be, and the basic problems clearly remain. But the world is now different, as we have seen in the past few weeks, so surely the waiting game is over.