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NEARLY four decades back, journalist/researcher Amrita Rangaswami managed to get permission to visit Mizoram. Unusual, because at the time Mizoram was facing a violent insurgency and securing an ‘Inner Line Permit without which one cannot enter the state was near-impossible for a non-official. Amrita, however, was not interested in the insurgency. Fresh from her brilliant coverage of the Maharashtra famine, and how it was being ‘managed’, she was keen to find out more about the reported famine and widespread hunger in the state.

Famines in India are not unusual and rarely make news. Post Amartya Sen’s classic work on the Bengal famine of 1943, the conventional wisdom was that famines are not natural; they are man-made, a consequence of faulty food pricing and distribution policies. Mizoram apparently represented an exception, the food shortage caused by an explosion in the rodent population, attracted by the rare chance to gorge on the flowering bamboo, a once in 38 year phenomenon.

What Amrita Rangasami ‘discovered’ was shocking. While it was clear that the rats had substantially depleted the food stocks, the endemic hunger appeared more a result of deliberate state policy. Drawing heavily upon the tactics deployed by General Templar to crush the Communist uprising in post-war Malaya, our counterinsurgency strategy involved a ‘relocation and bunching together’ of existing scattered tribal settlements at the bottom of hills, under the constant surveillance of military/paramilitary contingents placed on the hilltops. The settlements were barricaded and subjected to a dusk to dawn curfew.

What followed was nothing short of catastrophic. The Mizos, at the time, practised jhum cultivation. The need to return to the stockade before dusk implied a dramatic decline in the land they could put under cultivation, and thus the production of food. This, in turn, permitted the authorities to use food as a ‘weapon of war’. Supplies to recalcitrant settlements were routinely held back, that is, till they learnt to behave.

A second implication flowed from the differential intensity of search men and women moving out of the stockade were subjected to. Crudely stated, while women moving out of the settlement routinely faced sexual harassment or worse, the men were more likely to experience torture or be ‘encountered’. Over time, this led to a significant shift in gender roles, with women increasingly being forced to take on larger and more varied roles in the outside sphere, in turn creating a new strata of insecure and parasitic men.

Less understood, though with serious long-term consequences, was the impact of living under constant gaze, that too of an armed force with power of life or death. We know from studies on regions which have experienced long periods of conflict/occupation that the accumulated trauma and attendant disfunctionalities can carry over for many generations. Some years after the publication of Amrita’s chilling, and deeply disturbing essay, ‘Mizoram: A Tragedy of Our Own Making’, the insurgency ended, a peace accord was signed, and the state embraced the mainstream of the Indian democratic experience. The traumas, and the disfunctionalities three decades on are still evident. Normality, even of the kind the rest of the country is familiar with, however, remains somewhat distant.

The ‘tragedy’ of Mizoram generated no outrage in India – neither from the establishment nor from the intelligentsia, otherwise quick to flaunt (Indian) democratic and humanist credentials, if only to signal our distinction from our neighbour. Mizoram, after all, was and is a forgotten and distant corner. At the time no one, other that JP, objected to imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and expectedly no one questioned the conduct of the armed forces. Clearly, far more important in the eyes of the national elite than the rights of the people we claimed as our citizens was the need to ensure the inviolability of territory.

Cut now to the present. Kashmir, unlike Mizoram, has long been central to our national imagination, an example of our secular, democratic and republican collective self. Its experience in independent India, however, reflects a less rosy picture – a flawed democracy, rigged elections and, in recent decades, a troubling insurgency kept in check mostly by an overwhelming reliance on the armed forces. Irrespective of whom or what we hold responsible for the ongoing conflict, it is impossible to deny the persistent and growing feeling that matters are rapidly slipping out of control.

The successful ending of the long and violent insurgency in Mizoram is often held out as an example of the suppleness of Indian democracy, and of the courage and creativity of our political class. None of this is unfortunately on display in Kashmir, as our leadership persists in privileging the ‘unity and integrity’ of the nation over the aspirations of the affected people.

Harsh Sethi