| Forbidden Highway
Maybe the National Highway-39 is jinxed. It has seen too much suffering, bloodshed and violence throughout its turbulent history. As for instance, during the advance of the combined troops of the Japanese Imperial Army and Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, INA, during the Second World War, 65,000 troops, mostly Japanese, perished along this highway, many of them out of starvation and disease (Field Marshal Sir William Slim’s “Defeat Into Victory’).
Half a century later, the legacy of violence still has not been exorcised, and the highway, running all the way from Moreh on the Indo-Myanmar border, to Numaligarh in Assam, has acquired the notoriety of being a Highway to Hell.
And Hell indeed it has been all along, especially since the 1990s, after the prolonged and bloody ethnic feud between the Nagas and Kukis in Manipur. Ever since those nightmarish days, the highway has not been able to shake off this dark reputation of being one of the most forbidding and unsafe to travel on perhaps in the whole world.
And sadly again, the profile of this danger has changed considerably for the worse in recent times. Apart from insurgency and ethnic animosity, it is now the presence of organized gangs of highwaymen along it that has further blackened its already ugly reputation. And this menace is also on an expansion mode at the moment.
A few years ago, incidents of robbery and dacoity by brigands were heard only on the Moreh-Pallel sector of the highway, and this was somewhat understandable, although we are in no way excusing it, for this is a trade route. From the bedtime stories we have heard, to the high-browed analysis of the law and order mechanism, all have informed us of the vulnerability of such routes in poorly administered territories, on land or sea, to pirates and brigands.
Highway-39 has all these ingredients necessary for becoming pirate infested. It is a trade route and it is extremely poorly administered.
But this highway is more than all that is said above. It has also been abused in all possible ways for political ends. There have been numerous bandhs, blockades and sabotages on it for sinister objectives that it has today become a live fuse to ignite dangerous communal passions. Anything that happens on this highway today is prone to be interpreted as motivated, making it a raw nerve that can make the entire state fly into an uncontrollable rage. Even the oil tankers
strike witnessed recently, which was thankfully resolved in time, was beginning to accumulate dangerous passions.
But what we are surprised the most is by the state government’s seeming indifference to the sensitive nature of the highway.
Why does it hesitate to make a serious effort to make the presence of its administration felt on it? It may be recalled, even the Guwahati High Court, Imphal Bench, had ruled against any willful disruption of traffic on the national highway, in a ruling on a public interest litigation, PIL, during one of the incapacitating blockades along it that the state witnessed last year.
What is it that is keeping the state from using its resources to sanitize the length and breadth of it? Why cannot it realize, it is not just a question of right and wrong, but one of preventing disasters from which the state may take years to recover.
(Courtesy: The
Imphal Free Press)
|
Welcome! 
International
Features
