Unresolved differences

Cachar district, once termed as an 'island of peace' by former PM Indira Gandhi, is now a victim of 'border politics'. I am a resident of this part. Gunning down of six policemen by defenders of the state of Mizoram, and injuring some 60 on the shadowy slopes of Lailapur reserve forests, well inside Mizoram, on the ominous day of July 26 by firing automatic weapons after the trigger was first pressed by Assam Police, left people of Cachar and Barak Valley in a state of shock and grief. Assam police ran over an empty post of Mizoram Police on the elevated hillocks of Lailapur. The Superintendent of Police, Cachar was heard praying for a ceasefire from his Mizoram counterpart. The whole situation showed deadly provocation and an ongoing tiff on who occupied whose land and who damaged whose property, blaming each other as 'first aggressors'. It's quite ironic that even 75 years after independence, Northeast of India has been witnessing frequent border skirmishes over the last five years or so at many frontiers including Assam-Meghalaya, Assam-Arunachal, Assam-Nagaland and now at Assam-Mizoram border at the green and peaceful hamlet of Lailapur.

The Central Government, through its rather late intervention, made both Assam and Mizoram agree to the presence of neutral Central forces in the Lailapur area, manning the entire border of 146 kilometres. The dispute on demarcation continues since 1875 when, for the first time, Lushai Hills was demarcated from Cachar. Again, back in 1933, the demarcation of Lushai Hills from Manipur created an issue with Mizo chiefs as Manipur accepted the far eastern part of Lailapur as the border between Cachar and Manipur, on which Mizoram stakes its claim even today, as there are natural rivulets flowing down from Lushai Hills. The 1875 demarcation, based on the policy of natural waterfronts, was unilaterally altered by the British in 1933, which the Assam government presently insists upon. This policy of natural waterfront once led the colonial rulers to include Lushai territory within Cachar, as Lushais drank water from a river which, according to colonial rulers, merged into the river Barak. This gave the colonial rulers the justification to include much of the territory of Lushai Hills within the Cachar district. Jumping to the present, this near ancient understanding of the border between southern Cachar and Mizoram, based on waterfronts, could not give a linear demarcation over undulating spaces, as it left out certain forest areas, hillocks, rivers and land stretches without any border markers. The only border sign that remains in Lailapur is the entry check gate of Mizoram.

Cartographic confusion between land and waterfronts leaves the Cachar-Mizoram border in a shared yet disagreeable situation, mixing up two kinds of boundaries — the cultural and the political — that cast omen over the slightly elevated topography of Lailapur, typical of Barak-Surma landscapes. In the jungles, beyond the border check gate of Mizoram at Lailapur, Mizos do not extend their cultural boundary, while the statist political boundary extends into 'un-demarcated' hills on both sides of the national highway.

Private ownership over these 'un-demarcated' land either by Mizos or by Bengalis from Cachar with their tenures in two different states of Mizoram and Assam, only builds a proposition of 'claim rights' by way of occupancy. Interestingly, the nature of possession and land use in the hillocks around the Lailapur border remain largely 'non-agricultural', which then could only be used for the collection of forest products by local communities on the border. In a sense, the presence of the state is limited to Macadam Road that is called the national highway, leaving the 'un-demarcated' elevated spaces to private occupancy, periodic renewal of leases and an open interpretation not to be given by users but by their respective states. This is how the political boundary is made by rulers over the economic and cultural boundaries. This is how the colonial concept of 'natural boundary' is turned into a rather conflicted interpretation of the 'un-demarcated' border spaces by instituting a deliberate difference between cultural and political boundaries.

Firepower-based conflict of claims and counter-claims over the village tract of Lailapur is a state-sponsored conflict propelled by a politics of framing the border. While the border is framed by demarcating inside from outside, the confusion between land and water, cultural and political boundary, refuses to shift to a much more non-linear nation space of a common country that we, the people, presently inhabit. This brings out a beautiful point that people belong to the land and it is not the other way around.

To whom do these 'un-demarcated' areas of Lailapur then belong? Untying a deeply divisive and relativistic answer, tied mostly to the colonial and pre-colonial narratives, now poses a big challenge to a possible agreement on a common border sans all past baggage.

For instance, Lushai raids on tea gardens of Southern Cachar in the mid 19th century and taking away of slaves, as recorded in both oral history and in a chronicle like 'Tripura Rajmala', create an extension of the so-called imaginary slavery system called 'Bawi' as practised by Mizos unto plains of Southern Cachar. As in Plato's apologia, can the so-called 'slaves' released in Mizoram by the colonial rulers in the late 19th century be the undocumented 'illegal immigrants' belonging to a demarcated border? Or, could the slave-owning people belong to the demarcated land, and the land belongs only to the imagined slaves and peoples who now can be colourfully labelled as 'Bangladeshi'? Then, whom does the border belong to, especially when it lies on 'un-demarcated' land? Is it just the case of constructing a border in which some people are to be cast first as 'videsi' or the outsiders and then are to be purged and displaced after capturing the land? Any state can capture any 'un-demarcated' land in a competitive manner, but the "videsi-Bangladesi-desi" logic of Lailapur-Vairengte violence shows fixed targets and targeters, both of whom construct an imagined ringside on an 'un-demarcated' border.

As the friendly match started by Assam turned bloody unlike other occasions, the towels are now thrown by calling the other side foreigners and infiltrators. Gates of death only turn those Bangladeshi Assam Police officials into 'Indians', a rare tribute by Assam chief minister to slain Bengali Muslim policemen from Barak Valley and Barpeta. Posthumous 'desiization' of slain Assam police and ordinary citizens who are injured by an otherwise virile public discourse of native/immigrant tenor established the lie of the border by attributing the clash to illegal Bangladeshi settlers. The other home truth is the scene of firing that involved suspected militias who might have infiltrated from Myanmar and carried out the mayhem with local collaborators.

At the end of the day, hardening soft borders between states only brings out the weaknesses of the respective people of the states, none of whom are autochthons. It is their politics of constructing a claim on the 'un-demarcable' and 'un-demarcated' border that the post-colonial Indian state finds very difficult to settle, because of centuries of ethnocentricity.

Views expressed are personal