Book Extract / Two trajectories of militarisation of the Northeast

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By Pradip Phanjoubam

The following is another extract from my forthcoming book written under the IIAS, Shimla fellowship. All footnotes, annotations and citation sources have been removed to suit newspaper article style.

Although civilian casualties in terms of direct deaths caused was not too heavy, the WWII experience of the Manipur and Nagaland nonetheless, and expectedly too, resulted in extreme trauma and misery for the people. In the short run, there were the all round uncertainties, with people at very short notices having to evacuate homes in towns and wherever else there were military concentrations, to take shelter in safer villages in the peripheral regions, therefore forcing unsafe drinking water and living conditions on them, causing outbreaks of killer cholera and typhoid epidemics etc. In the longer run, there were also the harms caused by disruptions in education, civil amenities and overall trauma of witnessing and experiencing violence.

No proper study has ever been done on the extent of Post Trauma Stress Syndrome the populations were left burdened with after the war, nor has there been any substantial effort to explore in art or science if there are any connections between the violence witnessed then with the violence the two states are plagued by even today. The duration of the trauma being just about four months, perhaps the psychological impacts were not too heavy, but there were other more tangible consequences. The war also obviously left behind arms and ammunition dumps, especially by the vanquished Japanese army in their desperate retreat. It is anybody’s guess these would have augmented the fire power of many early generations of insurgent guerrillas, in particular first and most fundamental opponents of the idea of joining the Indian Union, A.Z. Phizo’s Naga National Council, NNC, and the party’s large sweep of Naga followers in the early 1950s in the then Naga hills district of Assam.

In Manipur, the communist movement under Hijam Irabot, although no sustained violent agrarian movement had broken off at the time, were privy to these dumps of the Japanese weapons and ammunitions. But when the communist movement was declared illegal and its leader Irabot went underground after an incident at Pungdongbam in Imphal east on 21 September 1948, in which a peasant rally went violent and killed a policeman, the movement split with the radical faction led by Irabot remaining underground. The softer faction, which eventually made compromises with the establishment and formally became the state’s unit of the Communist Party of India, disclosed these weapons dumps to the authorities, according to an interview with a Communist stalwart by this author.

The fact that the WWII entered India from Manipur and Nagaland, though stopped at this point, also is a loud testimony as to how important this route is strategically, therefore another reason to ensure its militarisation. It is also for the same reasons that two Asian Highways, AH-1 and AH-2 cuts through Manipur today, connecting South East Asia with South Asia. This strategic importance was immediately recognized by the British administrators in the 19th Century. In Alexander Mackenzie’s words ‘the Manipur Valley forms the great highway between the British Provinces of Assam and Cachar on the one side, and the Kubo Valley, which now belongs to Burma, on the other.’ Thankfully for India, its eastern neighbour, Burma (now Myanmar) is far from hostile. Much before the arrival of the British, this was also an ancient trade route linking the region with the rest of South East Asia and further on. Today, there is a much hyped though little seen ‘Look East Policy’ of the Government of India to reopen this trade route again to integrate the economy of the Northeast to that of the prosperous ASEAN region.

As we have seen, not long after the dust from the WWII experience settled, another traumatic event, the Partition of India followed, this was in turn to be followed by the invasion of Tibet by the People’s Liberation Army of China in 1950. Tibet suddenly transformed from a neutral country, culturally and religiously bonded to India, to a wing of a rival Power. Though not immediately a threat then, it was only a matter of time before it did become one. Tensions over the boundary between India and China also arose almost immediately, as China made it plain it did not recognize the McMahon Line in the Northeast sector or India’s claimed boundary in the Ladhak sector of Kashmir. This friction between the two giant neighbours was never allowed to be defused until border skirmishes gave way to a short but full scale war. Under the circumstance, it was a foregone conclusion that militarisation would be the destiny the Northeast is condemned to for the foreseeable future.

It is next to impossible to acquire, and understandably not permitted as well, to make public assessments of classified information on military deployment, but from open sources on the internet and unclassified information made available to the media by the government and the military, today it is public knowledge that almost the entire Eastern Command of the Indian Army is focused on the Northeast. In addition, India has announced it will be raising a mountain brigade in the near future, to be deployed in the Northeast along the McMahon Line. As Namrata Goswami of the Indian Defence and Security Analysis, IDSA, writes, this will be part of a total of four divisions to be brought into the Northeast region in a five year expansion plan, bringing up troops strength by 90,000 over and above the 120,000 already stationed in the region. India has also announced the deployment of the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile, with a flight range of 290 km, and has now tested the Agni V missile capable of hitting any Chinese city. This is besides two squadrons of Sukhoi 30MKI fighter planes with base at Tezpur in Assam.

The military modernisation and build up is even larger on the other side of the McMahon Line in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China as well, says the same IDSA report. This includes the replacement of China’s old liquid fuelled, nuclear capable CSS-3 intermediate range ballistic missile, intercontinental missiles such as the DF-31 and DF-31A with range of 5,500 km to 8000 km, 13 Border Defence Regiments amounting to around 300,000 PLA troops, upgrading of airfields etc. There are also an additional six of China’s elite Rapid Reaction Force, RRF divisions stationed in Chengdu, which can be airlifted to the Indian border within 48 hours. Almost as a parallel offensive on the political front, China has been increasingly employing aggressive rhetoric and stance on its claim to Arunachal Pradesh.

It would be naive to believe militarisation resulting out of this friction between India and China can be simply wished away. Such an outcome can only come after a comprehensive settlement has been reached on the border issue and the border tension between the two countries defused conclusively. For this to happen, there are larger issues of politics involved, not the least the Tibetan question which is unlikely to die just as yet, and India is very much entwined and implicated in this by default as the Tibetan Government in Exile under the leadership of the 14th Dalai Lama is situated on its soil. For this border tension to deescalate, a lot will depend on whether the Tibetan question is resolved or allowed to remain simmering.

This larger issue of rivalry between India and China however is not the focus of this book, and the brief foray into the subject is just to distinguish between the two reasons for militarisation happening in the Northeast, of which the one just described would fall within what can be considered as legitimate security concerns and measures of any country. After all, the role of any Army is essentially to ensure security of its land and people from perceived threats of external aggressions. And such a perception is a reality on either side of the border at this moment, though in recent times, growing trade relations between the two countries have establishing a growing network of interrelations at the individual and institutional levels, thereby beginning to provide hope and vision of a time in the future when scenarios of military conflicts have been rendered improbable, if not redundant.

Internal security

Militarisation happens at another level for a different reason as well, as mentioned earlier. For whatever its compulsions, India has also been using its military might in situations of civil unrests in the Northeast and Kashmir, for a prolonged period, and unlike the first scenario, it is this one which has come up for severe scrutiny within the country as well as internationally. To enable the use of the military in civil policing duties, India has enacted an infamous extraordinary law, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, (Assam and Manipur) 1958, later to be amended to become Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.  The necessity for such an Act was first felt in then Naga Hills district of Assam when the Naga National Council, NNC, under the leadership Angami Zapu Phizo, after their peaceful campaigns, including by a Naga Plebiscite in 1951 and the boycott of Independent India’s first election in 1952, to secure sovereignty for the Nagas from the newly born Indian republic, took to arms in the mid 1950s. In 1972, the act was amended to make it applicable to all the other new Northeast states created out of the former British province of Assam, besides the original Assam and Manipur.

A rough idea of how and how much of this second form of militarisation of the Northeast region is available from the account of Neville Maxwell, a British journalist, to whom the classified Henderson Brooks-Prem Bhagat Report on India’s disastrous 1962 war with China was leaked. Maxwell writes in his book “India’s China War” that ‘the Army’s peacetime deployment reflected a balance between the possibility of war with Pakistan and the requirements of internal security, almost as much a consideration with Indian military planners as it had been with their British predecessors.’

He continues, ‘these dispositions continued until 1956, and the Army was more or less static in size as well as equipment. The rebellion of the Naga tribes in 1965 necessitated a progressive build-up of forces in the north-east, and by end of the 1950s a division was tied down in guerrilla fighting in the Naga hills.” He also says that unlike West Pakistan, East Pakistan presented no strategic threat. But as the ‘demands of the Naga campaign increased, so more units of the Indian Army were siphoned across from Punjab to the north-east. New units were formed to sustain the Punjab force’s strength, and consequently the Army began slowly to grow again.’

He also writes of how the Army formations were actually changed, and a new formation XXXIII Corp with HQ in Shillong was introduced. The XXXIII Corp itself would ultimately be sidelines with the hasty formation of another Corp, the IV Corp, to facilitate the takeover of the crucial front marked by the McMahon Line, by Gen. B.M. Kaul, and push away his detractors and sceptics of India’s forward policy along the McMahon Line, without actually shaking up existing established hierarchy therefore avoiding possible unrests.

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