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23-06-2025
- Politics
- Scroll.in
What two deaths say about ‘peninsular' India's insular view of the North East
In June, North East India witnessed two related deaths: Raja Raghuvanshi from Indore was murdered in Meghalaya and Roshmita Hojai, a woman from Assam's Dimasa tribe, drowned in Rishikesh in Uttarakhand. The North East link was common to both incidents but most media outlets in peninsular India had widely contrasting reactions. Racist stereotypes emerged first. A national daily declared Meghalaya as a region of ' crime-prone ' hills with no mention of how many murders or other crimes had been committed in an area where tourism is central to the local economy. One crime was all it took for mainstream and social media to condemn Meghalaya's residents as 'criminals', without bothering to mention that the villagers around Sohra, where Raghuvanshi was murdered by the wife he had recently married and her accomplices, held a candlelight vigil to mourn the killing of a complete stranger. This piece of yellow journalism is what the ToI is reduced to? Armchair reportage at its worst.. Disgusting and slanderous.. — patricia mukhim (@meipat) May 29, 2025 On the other hand, newspapers devoted a two-inch column to Hojai, who was aspiring to be a civil servant, and added that two men accompanying her were detained for questioning. There was a complete absence of journalism on how the life of a young woman was nipped in the bud. These contrasting reactions are not exceptions. Stereotypes abound in peninsular India about the people of the North East as 'terrorists', 'secessionists' and immoral women. Every few months, there are reports of women from the northeastern states were molested in Delhi. After one attack, a message was circulated in one of the universities that the women were assaulted because they do not dress like Indians. In December 2021, when security forces gunned down six young men returning home from daily wage work in Mon in Nagaland, social media groups were filled with messages that the men were secessionists who deserved to die. For over six decades, much of the North East has been under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which gives extraordinary powers to the security forces. It grants the forces the impunity to gun down innocent people, as they did in Nagaland, if they claim to have done it in good faith on the line of duty. I have heard a few who call themselves human rights activists and oppose the murder of civilians in the rest of India saying that the stringent law is needed in the North East because of secessionism. This assertion is rarely backed by an effort to find out how many 'secessionists' there are or why there are conflicts in the region. The 'conflict zone' itself is an exaggerated stereotype. The more than 45 million people of the North East live with the disadvantage of distance with peninsular India, which they call the 'mainland' because of its insular view of their region. This distance and relative isolation are physical as well as psychological and political. For the British colonial regime, the North East was used as an isolated buffer zone between the rest of India and China and Burma. That isolation has continued after Independence. Decades after three wars were fought in the region in the 1960s – against China in 1962, Pakistan in 1965 and following the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 – the North East continues to be a buffer zone for national security. Most North Easterners feel that peninsular India, which views itself as the 'mainstream' centered on the Gangetic Valley Hindu dominant-caste male culture, does not understand them and that 'mainstream' India stops at Kolkata. To most 'mainstream' Indians, the North East is a vague territory between Kolkata and Myanmar about which they know little. One murder case involving both victim and perpetrators from a different state. Case worked out swiftly. And still Meghalaya is continuously trying to bolster confidence about state being a safe tourist destination. — Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) June 18, 2025 During the last decade, this 'distant land of conflicts' has become 'the land of injustice' for the lakhs of immigrants excluded from the National Register of Citizens – like in Assam. But for that the North East rarely enters mainstream Indian thinking. Even the national anthem exalts 'Vindhya, Himachala, Yamuna, Ganga' and ignores the Brahmaputra, which is longer than the Ganga, is the fifth largest river in the world and confers an identity on the North East. But it is not an all-India sacred river. Efforts are being made of late to confer some sacredness on it but by connecting it to the Ganga, not in its own right. Another verse of the national anthem includes 'Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkala, Vanga', in other words, an Aryan-Dravidian India in which the people of the North East do not exist. Lakhs of people from the region are forced to go to 'mainland' India because of the high unemployment and poor education infrastructure of the North East. Because of their Mongoloid features, they are often referred to as 'chinki', a pejorative and racist term for the 'enemy' Chinese. Women among them often face sexual harassment because of their looks and their being perceived as open to sexual advances. These stereotypes have had disastrous consequences in times of crisis. In 2020, after the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in China and later spread globally, there were reports of North East people in peninsular India being harassed, evicted from housing or denied entry because of their 'Chinese' features. A group of Naga students was refused entry to a mall in Mysuru, as were two Manipuri students in Hyderabad. A nurse in Bengaluru reported that a child ran away from her screaming 'coronavirus'. Alana Golmei, who hails from Manipur and lives in Delhi, said that on three different occasions when she and a companion from Meghalaya entered the National Council of Educational Research and Training campus, staff taunted them with 'coronavirus'. The pandemic of racism endures even after the real one subsided. For 'mainstream' India, with its insular outlook and geographical distance from the North East, most conflicts in the region appear to 'secessionist'. Instead, it must recognise that the people of the region are searching for an identity of their own, within the Indian nation and not by joining the 'mainstream' that equates national unity with uniformity. They demand unity in diversity that respects their specificity. They want national security to mean the security of their people while belonging to a pluralist India that respects the ethnic specificity, culture, religion, language and worldview in which they find their identity. That is the pluralistic India mandated by the Constitution and it is time that the North East experiences it as well. The two deaths are an opportunity for peninsular India to look at North East India afresh.
The Hindu
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Militarised Kashmir: Where Peace Remains Elusive
Published : May 24, 2025 18:15 IST - 5 MINS READ In the shadow of the Himalaya, the Kashmir Valley—once serenaded by poets—is now eerily quiet. The hush is not peace but paralysis, a silence heavy with occupation, suspicion, and forgotten promises. Once envisioned as a crown jewel of India's postcolonial federation, Kashmir today lies buried beneath a fortress of military installations, surveillance drones, and barbed wire. India's claim of development is dwarfed by the reality of desolation. With nearly 700,000 troops stationed in the Valley, Kashmir holds the distinction of being one of the most militarised zones on earth. The omnipresence of military boots is not incidental; it is intentional. This is the face of state power in the 21st century—what Michel Foucault described as 'biopower', the ability to manage life by calculating what lives, and what dies. India's defence budget swelled to $72.6 billion last year, outpacing healthcare and education combined. Pakistan, though economically beleaguered, follows a parallel track, investing in F-16s and Chinese drones while millions of its citizens struggle with food insecurity. This is not budgetary imbalance; it is a political theology that prizes territorial domination over human well-being. Arms race Both nations have adopted what Noam Chomsky termed the logic of the 'manufactured enemy': an ever-present threat used to justify the machinery of war and the erosion of civil liberties. Kashmir serves as this manufactured arena, a theatre where nationalism is rehearsed through force, not dialogue. Also Read | The LoC is calm again, but Kashmiris still live under the shadow of war The greatest casualties are not just lives lost but futures erased. In rural Kashmir, over 60 per cent of schools lack reliable electricity or clean drinking water. A UNICEF report said that 70 per cent of children in the region show signs of psychological trauma. Curfews, lockdowns, and Internet blackouts have made learning episodic and livelihoods impossible. Media narratives from New Delhi or Islamabad rarely capture these subtleties. Instead, Kashmir is reduced to two binaries: security and sedition. The lived experiences of farmers unable to sell fruit owing to blockades or schoolgirls whose teachers have fled for safer jobs are ignored. These human costs are not collateral damage—they are the central plot. Colonial playbook Both India and Pakistan emerged from the crucible of anti-colonial struggle. Yet both have internalised and intensified the colonial playbook. Surveillance, sedition laws, mass incarceration, and enforced disappearances are mechanisms inherited from imperial administrators. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben warned, we now live in a permanent 'state of exception', a place where constitutional rights are suspended indefinitely in the name of security. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in India and Pakistan's draconian anti-terror legislation have normalised impunity. Soldiers shoot without consequence. Homes are raided without warrants. Dissenters vanish without trial. In this zone of lawless legality, human rights are not protected—they are strategically erased. Kashmir is not just a case of state control; it is a laboratory of 'necropolitics', a term coined by the philosopher Achille Mbembe. In necropolitical regimes, power is exercised not just by preserving life but by deciding who may die, and how. The border, once a demarcation, becomes a weapon; the checkpoint, a ritual of humiliation. The violence is intersectional. In India, Dalit and tribal soldiers, drawn disproportionately from marginalised communities, are sent to patrol territories where they are simultaneously feared and expendable. In Pakistan, it is young, jobless Pashtuns who are conscripted into the line of fire. This is a shared tragedy: militarism consuming the poor to defend the illusions of the powerful. Kashmir's suffering Arms dealers from the US, Israel, Russia, China, and Türkiye profit from the suffering in Kashmir. Between 2020 and 2024, both India and Pakistan ranked among the top five arms importers in the world. Surveillance systems, anti-riot gear, and sniper rifles are marketed not only for defence but for suppression. The global military-industrial complex has no morality—only contracts. International institutions offer rhetoric but little resolve. The UN and the World Bank note rising instability in South Asia, yet the economic interests of weapons-producing states outweigh the calls for justice. This is neoliberal militarism at its most insidious: state violence funded by international finance, legitimated by silence. If there is to be a future for Kashmir—and for South Asia at large—it must begin with moral clarity and policy courage. What India, Pakistan must do First, India and Pakistan must urgently recalibrate their defence priorities. Diverting even 20 per cent of military expenditure toward healthcare and education could end child malnutrition in India and rebuild Pakistan's crumbling schools. Second, an international embargo on Kashmir-bound weaponry must be seriously considered. Countries that arm governments to suppress citizens must be held accountable. No peace is possible with rifles aimed at classrooms. Third, a credible peace process must centre not just the states but the people. Kashmiris—Muslim, Pandit, Sikh—must be at the table. Political resolution cannot be achieved through nationalist tokenism or bureaucratic decrees. It demands listening to those who have borne the weight of war, curfew, and betrayal. Also Read | Fragile peace, persistent tensions, and the limits of diplomacy Arundhati Roy once distilled the region's tragedy into a single line: Kashmir remains the subcontinent's most haunting remnant of Partition. But in truth, it is also the unfinished dream of postcolonial dignity. We must continue to believe that Kashmir, a region rich in culture and history, can rise above the barbed wire and gunfire to embrace freedom, equality, and justice. The ghosts of the Valley are not silent. They are asking the subcontinent, what kind of nations do you wish to be? Militarised shells ruled by fear or plural democracies animated by hope? The answer may determine not just Kashmir's fate but the moral soul of South Asia itself. Debashis Chakrabarti is a political columnist and Commonwealth Fellow, UK.
