Gulliver’s Troubles: The State And Militants In North-East India
By Sanjib Baruah
In northeast India today it would appear that any determined young man of any of the region’s numerous ethnic groups can proclaim the birth of a new national liberation organization, raise funds to buy weapons or procure them by aligning with other militant groups and quickly become an important political player. With few exceptions, most of these groups are little more than rag-tag armed bands of one or two leaders and their followers. Militarily speaking, even the most formidable of them, the faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagalim led by Thuingaleh Muivah and Isaak Chisi Swu [NSCN-IM], has not been difficult for India’s security forces to overwhelm, though the Naga struggle itself – which the NSCN-IM now leads -- has persisted as a low-intensity conflict for nearly five decades. Organizations such as Assam’s United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and Bodoland Liberation Tiger Force [BLTF], and Manipur’s National Liberation Front [UNLF], People’s Liberation Army [PLA], People’s Revolutionary Army of Kangleipak [PREPAK] and the Kuki National Army have been influential for significant periods of time. But apart from these and a few more such organizations, there are numerous other militant organizations with highly pretentious names and public platforms, but hardly any obvious function, at least, as it appears to the outside world. The sheer number of militant organizations in the region is extraordinary. What interests me is not so much their ability to carry out their proclaimed liberation agendas – which is doubtful, to say the least --, but what the implications of this pervasive culture of militancy are for the health and capacity of the Indian state. Despite the Indian state’s apparently formidable strength, the phenomenon, I argue, points to a brewing crisis. Northeast India is a much more closely administered area than any other part of the country. With some of the smallest states in the country, the region is administratively organized into districts and sub-divisions with relatively low numbers of people within their jurisdiction. On top of it there is the long history of counter-insurgency operations, and the governmental infrastructure to support it. For militancy to be so pervasive in a region with such a dense network of state institutions and against such odds is striking indeed. The proliferation of militant groups under these circumstances, I argue, is a symptom of state failure. The Indian state in the northeast has not been able to (or may not even have tried to) reproduce the consent of the governed through the participation of citizens in routines such as tax payment and elections or the citizen’s reliance on the state for key services such as guaranteed public order. As a result, militant organizations play as important a role as the institutions of the state in the performance of certain key functions that are usually reserved for the state. And like the state, militant groups receive in exchange for those services, their share of loyalty and taxes. Indeed what may be lost in the talk of extortion by militant groups is that from the perspective of the small ethnic constituencies that each militant group seeks to serve, they are more reliable providers of security, deserving of financial contribution and support, and more worthy of loyalty than the Indian state. Even though the Indian state’s financial resources and military prowess may be a significant force to reckon with, it remains a remote entity, of limited relevance to urgent everyday needs, except as a cash cow, and with little claim to the hearts and minds of peoples. Thus while leaders of ethnic groups successfully make claims on the state’s formidable resources, those resources do little to establish the hegemony of the state vis-à-vis its competitors in crucial matters such as the provision of basic security in exchange for taxes and loyalty. According to one count, Manipur tops the list of militant organizations in the region with 35, Assam is second with 34 and Tripura has 30, Nagaland has 4 and Meghalaya checks in with 3 militant organizations (ICM 2002). Only Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram are relatively free of militancy at the moment. The numbers, of course, can change quickly and they are not proportionate to the political challenge that militancy presents in particular states. Thus Nagaland’s small number of militant groups only reflects the fact that the political turf in the state with India’s oldest insurgency is fully divided between two of the four militant groups that make the list. The militant groups of the northeast are mostly ethnically based, even though their political projects are not always exclusionary and may even be pluralistic. The names of some militant groups suggest agendas to liberate homelands, the names of which can be sometimes found on a contemporary map; some times they are long lost in history e.g., Kamatapur Liberation Army (of the Koch Rajbongshis), the Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council (of the Khasis); and at other times the names of homelands are new and have a modern ring to it, but are based on particular constructions of the past, e.g. the Bodoland Liberation Tiger Force. Many other organizations simply proclaim the names of the ethnic groups that the organizations seek to defend, e.g., the Karbi National Volunteers, Tiwa National Revolutionary Force, Kuki National Front, Hmar Revolutionary Front or Zomi Revolutionary Volunteers. Manipur’s UNLF and PLA do not refer to Manipur by name, but another organization PREPAK refers to Manipur’s historical name Kangleipak. There are, in addition, a large number of Islamicist militant organizations mostly in Assam. Even people living in the region may not have heard of most of the ethnic groups in whose names these national struggles are being fought. Well-informed Indians may have heard of a couple of militant organizations or the names of one or two of the ethnic groups whose cause militant groups proclaim. However, to say that outsiders may not have even heard of them may be to entirely miss the point of ethno-national political mobilization. If they are about what Charles Taylor calls the politics of recognition (Taylor, 1994), to say that no one has ever heard of the Karbis or Tiwas of Assam or the Hmars or Zomis of Manipur may at least partly explain why their leaders feel the need to make their existence known. What appears to be an especially large number of ethnic groups in the region today, should be placed in a historical context. The ethnic landscape of this region has always confused outsiders -- states as well as ethnographers. Indeed the taxonomies about the hill peoples, to use James C. Scott’s words, have been almost always wrong, groups identified as distinct were later found to be not “uniform, coherent, or stable through time.” The ethnic landscape has had a “bewildering and intercalated gradients of cultural traits.” Whether it was linguistic practice, dress, rituals, diet or body decoration, neat boundary lines had been impossible to draw (Scott 2000). Julian Jacobs and his colleagues, for instance, describe the efforts to classify various groups of Nagas by ethnographers and missionaries as a struggle “to make sense of the ethnographic chaos they perceived around them: hundreds, if not thousands, of small villages seemed to be somewhat similar to each other but also very different, by no means always sharing the same customs, political system, art or even language” [Jacobs, 1990, 23]. Indeed, the outsider’s bewilderment, if Scott is right, may be exactly the point of the structure of political and cultural organization of the hills, which Scott describes as a non-state space -- an “illegible space” from the perspective of the states in the lowlands. Scott even hypothesizes, that there is a structural correspondence between slash and burn agriculture – till recently, the common mode of livelihood in these hills – and non-state space. That mode of agricultural production means dispersed and mobile populations that could not be captured for corvee labor and military service by the labor-starved states of the lowlands; nor could tax-collectors monitor either the number of potential subjects or their holdings and income. Of course, not all hill peoples had been shifting cultivators, just as the lowlanders were not all exclusively settled agriculturalists (Scott 2000). The Angami Nagas, for instance, are well-known for having transformed steep hills into rice fields through terracing and irrigation. Yet Scott’s hypothesis is plausible and it is significant that sedentarization, fixing such population in space – “in settlements in which they can be easily monitored” – has been the state project par-excellence, including that of the post-colonial Indian State in the north-east. Indeed the state, in Scott’s words, has always been the “enemy of the people who move around.” It is from the perspective of the surveillance systems of states, Scott suggests, that the ethnic landscape of the hills appears so non-transparent (Scott 2000). Historically speaking, the non-state spaces in the hills and the state spaces in the lowlands had been anything but separate. Unfortunately Indian policy discourse on the region has gone little beyond the colonial clichés of tribals and non-tribals. But categories such as “hill tribes” and “valley peoples” are, to use Scott’s words, “leaky vessels.” People had continually moved from the hills to the plains and from the plains to the hills. Since manpower was always in short supply, wars in this region were not about territory, but about slave taking. If wars produced movements in either direction, the attractions of commerce and what the lowlanders called civilization may have generated a flow of hill peoples downwards. On the other hand, the extortionist labor demands of the lowland states and, the vulnerability of wet-rice cultivation to crop failure, epidemics and famines produced flight to the hills where there were more subsistence alternatives. While in other parts of the world, such movements may have produced broader cultural formations, here the “lived essentialism” between hill “tribes” and valley civilizations –- their stereotypes about each other -- remained powerful organizer of people’s lives and thoughts. The cultural distance between lowlanders and highlanders were thus reproduced over time, even though this has always been a continuum rather than a sharp line of demarcation [Scott, 2000, 3-4]. Underlying the extraordinary outburst of ethnic assertion in the region today are forces of profound change in society, polity, economy and culture that pull in many different directions. For instance, among the forces that this ethnic assertion has sought to resist are threats to the ancestral domains of many of the peoples posed by large-scale immigration as these sparsely populated areas become part of the historically densely populated south Asian economic space. At the same time, among the forces attracting immigration to the region is the structural differentiation taking place within these societies -- the transition from shifting cultivation to settled agriculture and from clan control of land to commodification of land, which have created new economic niches that need immigrants. Cultural change including the conversion to Christianity, and the expansion of literacy and education, has expanded people’s horizons animating the construction of new identities. Yet some of the new identities that are getting crystallized sometimes come in conflict with competing constructions of the identities involving the same people. But two aspects of this drama of ethnic assertion are politically quite significant: (a) the frequency with which they take the form of armed national liberation groups, and (b) the finances of those militant groups. Both point to serious weaknesses of the Indian State at the local level that may be obscured by its visible strength in military terms or in terms of the structure of its bureaucratic organization at higher levels. Students of international relations use the concept of security dilemma to explain the `anarchic’ nature of global politics. In the absence of an over-arching authority, according to this theoretical tradition, sovereign states are forced to provide for their own security through self-help, in turn causing the insecurity of other states. In a situation when one ethnic group is organized as an armed `national liberation force’ threatening the security of a rival group -– and the State is not seen as a reliable provider of security -- it is easy to see why the latter too would turn to self-help as a way of finding security, i.e. form its own armed militant group. While mainland Indians are not used to thinking of the Indian state as weak and incapable of providing every-day security to its citizens (except in particular situations like riots) in at least many parts of northeast India, something like the security dilemma is at work which leads rival ethnic groups to form their own rag-tag bands of liberation armies. No state can provide every-day security to citizens through military might alone. Furthermore, from a grass-roots perspective there is no generalized threat of insurgency, militancy or extremism, as it might appear to those in the country’s capital who look at this border region exclusively through the lenses of national security. A group that Indian security officials may see as an extremist group, from the perspective of its ethnic constituency may be a reliable provider of security. Indeed in an ethnically divided situation, where the actions of Indian security forces may be seen as partisan, offensives against militants who are seen as security providers by their ethnic kin, may even add to the latter’s sense of insecurity and an incentive for strengthening the self-help form of security. The perceived effectiveness of militant groups in providing security to their ethnic kin – at least compared to that of the State -- is quite self-evident to their followers and supporters. If we assume that citizens are smart enough to vote with their feet, the very proliferation and persistence of small bands of militant groups in the face of the long and violent history of counter-insurgency operations would suggest that militant groups persist and proliferate only because they serve important functions. Their incapacity to deliver on the agenda of `national liberation’ may be quite irrelevant to the politics of security in a context where the state cannot guarantee it. Access to finance is a more significant predictor of civil conflicts than deprivation or objective grounds of injustice. Low national income, Paul Collier argues, is co-related with armed civil conflicts not because objectives condition of poverty sustain rebellion, but because in a context of poverty and unemployment, an insurgent group that is able to raise enough money can recruit new members quite inexpensively (Collier 2001). For militant groups in northeast India, the major source of financing is what Indian officials term extortion but, in an analytical sense, can be seen as taxation by non-state actors. Arguably, many militant groups have better capacity to tax than the Indian State. Indeed, as Sanjay Ghose found in the case of the engineers of the Nagaland government’s public works department, unlike government tax collectors who could target only what is officially declared as income, militants -- drawing on popular perceptions and rumor -– can impose higher taxes based on more realistic assessments of legal and illegal income (Ghose 1999). It was hardly surprising when early this year; the Indian Home Minister complained that funds that the government spends on the region’s development often find their way to the coffers of militant groups. All the moral outrage about the pervasive corruption in the region expressed by Indian government officials and commentators misses its central political significance as oxygen to militant groups, and for all the Indian State’s formidable strength, it does not include a capacity to cut back on, not to speak of switching off, that source of oxygen supply. When Swedish journalist Bertel Lintner clandestinely traveled to Nagaland in the 1980s, he was struck by the contacts between mainstream political parties and the factions of the Naga underground. “From out previous experience in reporting on insurgent movements in Burma and elsewhere in Southeast Asia,” he wrote, “we are used to a clear-cut division between the government and the rebel forces. In Nagaland it was entirely different” (Lintner 1996, 53). In a context where gun-toting militants roam freely, and often with the complicity of government officials, “extortion” may indeed partly explain the way militant groups collect taxes. But an exclusive focus on coercion may obscure the fact that the very culture that makes ethnic groups rely on self-help for their security, and not on the state, also sustains notions of reciprocal obligations that require leaders of ethnic groups holding official positions in the Indian state to redistribute resources acquired through those positions among followers and supporters – and, among them, the line separating militants from non-militants is necessarily blurred. While there are numerous stories about corruption, extortion and complicity between mainstream politicians, bureaucrats and militant groups that circulate in the region, it is hard to separate rumors from facts. For illustrative purposes, let me therefore cite a recent account of Manipur by an unusually authoritative source, E.N. Rammohan, a senior Indian police official, who has served as Advisor to the Governor of Manipur: For the last couple of years the valley and hill militant groups have penetrated the state and central administration and carved out specific areas of influence. Every month when salaries are disbursed, a percentage is deducted and paid to militant groups. In effect this was a replication of what was done by the NSCN (Naga Socialist Council of Nagalim) in Nagaland, as also the Naga districts of Manipur, regular deductions are labeled as house tax and ration money. The militant groups reportedly interfere in the award of contracts and are also known to enter offices carrying files to secure signatures of officers in gunpoint (Rammohan, 2002). Rammohan reported that militant groups had even subverted the government’s public distribution system in Manipur through connections with local politicians. Only the deployment of the central government’s security forces in crucial state government departments eventually managed to break the penetration of government departments. He quotes government officials wryly commenting that representatives of different militant groups queue up at their homes every morning (Rammohan. 2002). If the reliance of ethnic groups on self-help for their security and the ease with which militant groups collect taxes from their constituents reflect a disturbing level of weakness of the Indian State, the Government of India’s response to militancy point to a serious crisis in the making. The collapse of the Soviet Union has dramatically brought home the point that even states that appear all-powerful may actually be quite weak in terms of their coherence and capacity to shape society and implement their policy agendas. A recent attempt at reconstructing the history of the building of the Soviet Russian state concludes that while it had impressive formal sources of power, e.g. its coercive and bureaucratic organizations, the state’s capacity was constrained by the personal networks which were the informal sources of power at the regional level (Easter, 2000). The Government of India has defined the problem it faces in the north-east, very a-historically and unimaginatively, as one of insurgency and economic under-development. Counter-insurgency operations and a push for development are the two prongs of New Delhi’s crude northeast policy. I have argued elsewhere that in order to have effective counter-insurgency operations, the Indian government has been able to fashion a de facto parallel political system, somewhat autonomous of the formal democratically-elected governmental structure of the states. This parallel system connects New Delhi with the region with the centrally appointed governors of states as crucial nodes giving them a role that far exceeds the more ceremonial functions that the Constitution-makers had in mind. While there is limited participation of the elected officials of these states in this parallel system, they are seen as the weakest link in the chain and the organizational structure effectively marginalizes them and even keeps them under watch (Baruah, 2001). Most political scientists today emphasize the importance of states being embedded in society in determining their capacity to implement policy agendas. As colonial states realized long time ago, state capacity is not just a function of autonomy from societal influences; state capacity is significantly enhanced when an autonomous state is embedded in society through networks connecting state and society (Evans 1995). Yet the thrust of India’s policy towards the northeast seems to be to de-link the institutions of the state from the local societies of the region as much a possible. The preference for a disembedded state is, of course, the result of frustration with the ties between militants and local politicians and locally recruited officials who share ethnic ties with militants. Thus the policy recommendations for Manipur made by Rammohan, the security official quoted earlier, include (a) to ensure that officers of the All India Services assigned to the state, but who frequently seek assignments elsewhere, stay in the state and (b) to get central government officers to monitor all rural development projects, which are centrally financed in any case, so that “politicians and the militants” do not interfere in the process. Among his other policy recommendations is further strengthening the Indian military presence in the state, which is already quite dramatic for a democracy. He would like battalions of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) to guard all government offices and the residential neighborhoods housing central and state government officials in order to stop the penetration of the government departments by militants. In addition, he recommends that ten battalions of the Central Para-Military Force (CPMF) be deployed in the Manipur Valley in a “counter-insurgency grid” and six to eight battalions be deployed in each hills district, where roads are few, with “helicopter support to effectively dominate them” (Rammohan 2002). According to Rammohan, ninety percent of the officials of all-India cadres assigned to the state are “on deputation” and they “continually manipulate their non-return.” Newly recruited officers of the all-India cadres to Manipur in the last five years mostly got “cadre transfers” to other states (Rammohan, 2002). The reasons why an officer of the all-India cadre may want to be away from Manipur, and by extension the northeast are, of course, varied. The absentee officers, for instance, may include those who are themselves involved in the murky world of corruption involving nexuses of politicians, officials and businessmen; which is hardly surprising considering that their positions of power in a climate where counter-insurgency dominates the Indian government’s policy agenda, provides more than the usual opportunities for personal enrichment. To some of them with a frontier mentality who use the assignments in the northeast to make a fast buck and quit, the safety of New Delhi or a place away from the north-east may be attractive for understandable reasons. Officers of all-India cadres include persons from other parts of India as well as some with local roots. But irrespective of ethnicity, no matter how much security and financial incentives are provided for them to stay in the region, those who view working in the region as hardship assignments –- not unlike the way many diplomats view postings in a third world country -- or as a frontier opportunity can hardly be the foundation for creating the connections between state and society that account for a normal, legitimate state. The challenges confronting the Indian state in the northeast are more serious than what the counter-insurgency mind-set can grasp and remedy. What is needed is a radical rethinking of policies of recruitment, training, terms of employment and administrative cultures and, first and foremost, confronting the fact that India’s much vaunted administrative system has failed miserably in this region. The Indian state may be strong in certain sense, but in many parts of the northeast, despite the easy military victories of the security forces against militant groups, the weaknesses of the state that sustain the plethora of militant groups have a disconcerting affinity with situations of state failure. In recent years there has been much emphasis on the part of the Indian government on investing on infrastructure to develop northeast India. There are even ambitious efforts to connect the region to its natural markets in Southeast Asia by building roads through Myanmar. In February 2001 India’s Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh visited Myanmar to inaugurate a road connecting the Myanmarese border-town of Tamu with Kalewa, built by the Government of India. Those developments were followed with much interest in Manipur. As a Manipuri journalist points out, the local media was more interested in them than the national media since the road was one of the three ancient trade routes linking Manipur to Myanmar. There is a thriving informal trade between Manipur and Burma and many markets in the city of Imphal “deal exclusively in goods that flow into the state through this route.” Thus the road would have “a direct impact on the lives of every individual in Manipur.” But when the foreign minister was in Manipur on his way to Myanmar, he did not even “bother to hold a press conference or even issue a press release.” The team of Indian journalists that accompanied the Foreign Minister did not include a single Manipuri journalist. The national media, however, contacted their Manipuri colleagues as native informants who could provide background information on the road (Phanjoubam, 2001). This episode may be illustrative of a gap that is more and more apparent between the agendas and visions of the Indian state and the lives and hopes of the peoples of northeast India. In his visit to Myanmar to inaugurate the Tamu-Kalewa road the Indian foreign minister said that “the natural movement of goods, people and services for the Northeast is not through Calcutta;” and he described the importance of “opening up the natural outlet of the Northeast” (Assam Tribune 2001). One can hardly disagree with that sentiment. Yet improved infrastructure will not automatically guarantee that the peoples of northeast India will benefit from it. As economist Hal Hill puts it in the context of intra-country regional disparities in Southeast Asia, “For one thing, improved infrastructure may lead to a loss of `natural protection’ for local producers, as lower transport costs and improved information flows lead to increased competition from national and international suppliers.” While consumers may benefit from this process, the “adjustment costs” should not be underestimated. Improved infrastructure “may just as easily lead to resource outflows as to inflows.” While this uncertainty is not an argument for not investing in infrastructure, such investment decisions should clearly be based on their “social rates of return;” it cannot be assumed that they would “automatically improve regional outcomes” (Hill, 2000: 3). A central question that is increasingly at the root of the disconnect between the vision and agendas of the Indian state and the what animates the persistent politics of militancy in the northeast – and the complicity of segments of mainstream politicians and civil society with it – is whether the control over land, resources, ideas and people would remain in the hands of the peoples of the region or would they pass on to the control of the institutions of the Indian state which privileges the pan-Indian point of view at the expense of the regional one. The two can, of course, be harmonized; but a weak state increasingly disembedded from society is hardly in a position to do that. To deal with the troubled northeast region, India has a counter-insurgency strategy, an economic development strategy and even a vacuous nation-building strategy. 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