By RN Ravi
Recent riots in lower Assam between Bodos and suspected illegal immigrants from Bangladesh that took heavy tolls in terms of death and displacement has rekindled the fear of illegal influx from Bangladesh to the North-East. The hill tribes of Meghalaya have begun clamoring for the Inner Line Permit system to the state which would stipulate every non-resident to get an official permit for entering the state. A xenophobia couched in the language for preservation of indigenous identity and culture is being whipped up by the vested interest groups to rally the masses.
Much of the current debate over the issue has been hijacked by the rabble rousers and is framed around ill-informed rhetoric. For an informed popular discourse over the issue it is imperative that the people are aware of the genesis and growth of the ILP system.
Inner Line is a construct of the British invented in 1875 ostensibly to define the boundaries of its districts in the Eastern Frontier of Bengal vis-à-vis the hills beyond these districts that constitute today’s Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Mizoram. In a series of six notifications under the provisions of section 2 of Regulation 5 of 1873 issued since 1875 to 1882 the Governor General in Council defined boundaries of the then ‘Luckhimpore’, ‘Durrung’, ‘Seebsaugor’, ‘Cachar’ and ‘Chittagong Hill Tracts’ prohibiting unregulated movements of the British subjects of these districts beyond these boundaries. The notification for ‘Seebsaugor’ district first issued in 1876 was revised in 1882 raising the number of notifications to six. For Cachar the boundary was only to the south much of which later became the Lushai hills district and later Mizoram.
The British did not notify any such line vis-à-vis the Khasi-Jayantia and Garo hills. They did not feel the need for it as after overcoming the fierce resistance of Raja Teerut Sing over building a road from Sylhet to the plains of Assam and his eventual capture and incarceration in Dacca jail for the rest of his life, the British did not meet with any significant challenge from Khasi-Jayantia family of tribes. Even though the Garos could be subdued much later- the Garo Hills District was founded in 1866 and placed under control of Lt Williamson, they did not raise any worthwhile resistance.
Although the stated purpose of introducing the ILP was to prevent a British subject from coming to harm from the ‘savage’ hill tribes, the real motive was their strategy to deal with the hill tribes’ resistance to acquisition and consolidation of ever more areas along the fertile foothills for tea cultivation. Discovery of tea in upper Assam and enormous potential for its commercial exploitation radically altered the British outlook to the region. Since the most fertile areas for tea were along the foothills, the British planned to acquire huge tracts which were thickly forested. Until 1872 they had acquired over 56,000 acres which grew to 3,38,000 acres by 1901. The tea production grew from 12 million lbs to 134 million lbs during the same period. The British tea imports from India increased from 4% in 1866 to 59% in 1902. While the tea stocks soared in the London Stock Exchange, British businessmen and even the civil and military officials went crazy for more and more tracts of land for tea plantations. Several British government officials resigned to become tea planters. The colonial government incentivized tea plantation by long term leasing out large tracts at throwaway prices.
These tracts were dear to the hill tribes as these were the traditional sources of their livelihood and also passage for their limited commerce with the plains.The British conceived the notion of Inner Line to emphatically convey to the hill tribes that the areas falling within the line did not belong to them though they couched it in subtle language of ‘peace’ and ‘governance’. The hill tribes viewed the policy as a hostile act of aliens and challenged it with sporadic raids on tea gardens. In these raids they not only vandalized the gardens and inflicted casualties but also took away laborers as slaves. Tea being a labor intensive industry such raids alarmed the British. They took several punitive military expeditions to ‘pacify’ the ‘savages’. The ILP was rigorously enforced and psychological distance between the hills and plains got widened.
Although by the early 20th century the hills were almost ‘pacified’ rendering the ILP meaningless, the advent of the Indian National Congress and rise of the National Freedom Movement by then gave the British a fresh reason to keep it alive so that they could keep the both at bay from the hills. During this period they recalibrated their narrative for justification of the restrictive regime in terms of saving the innocent hill tribes from the exploitative avarice of the inherently ‘cunning’ plains men. It was diametrically opposite to their original stated objective of saving the British subjects from the plains from likely harm from the savage hill tribes. While the Freedom Movement raged through the rest of India, the British administrators of the hill districts nursed the locals on lore of diabolical deviousness and cunningness of the ‘Indians’ of the plains and sought to engender in them an instinctive distrust of those from the plains.
One of the regrets of the British administrators, under the changed circumstances, was their inability to extend the ILP regime to the Khasi-Jayantia hills. Shillong being the capital of Assam proved an insurmountable hurdle. Its salubrious climate in contrast to the pathogenic humid climate of the plains of Assam and strategic location on the arterial road linking East Bengal with Assam outweighed all the arguments to insulate the area. Shillong town remained the melting pot of cultures and civilizations. It was also the Oxford and Cambridge for the aspiring students from the east.
Post-colonial India with its politics overwhelmingly dominated by the so-called mainland politicians and bureaucrats with scant understanding of the North-East continued with the British policy of ILP. They did so primarily to allay the prevailing apprehensions of the hill tribes over their uncertain future in an independent India that had little resonance with the region. Verrier Elwin, an amateur anthropologist who had the ears of Nehru on India’s policy to the tribes, reinforced the attitude of the Government of India to let the tribals govern themselves according to their native genius and not to let them get overwhelmed by the politically and commercially advanced plains men.
Concept of the inner line was not born out of a demand of the indigenous hill people. It was a fabrication of the others- the British to manipulate the hill tribes’ worldview and perceptions to fulfill their commercial and political needs.
In a digital age when the communities around the world are increasingly getting more and more connected and intensely interdependent; when the world is shrinking into a global village and the barriers of races and ideologies are fast turning archaic and untenable, some Meghalayans asking for gates and walls to keep them insulated from the rest is a desire that is retrograde and obscurantist. It is counter-cultural and a recipe for disaster. Unlike some dying races in the world who might need life saving measures like restrictive regimes, the tribes of Meghalaya are inherently robust in their past and present, having rich tradition of culture, politics and intellectual awareness. One wonders how such a people can ever resonate with a call for ghettoization that is the essence of the ILP.
(The writer is retired Special Director, Intelligence Bureau, reachable at [email protected])