Saturday, December 14, 2024
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Will the past be repeated?

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By Bhogtoram Mawroh

It was the late 1990’s and I was in high school. Every day I would take the stairs which passed through my locality on the way to school. One day coming back home, I saw a couple of youths dashing down the stairs. I sidestepped so that they didn’t barge into me. Right after they ran across me, another group of youths carrying clubs were chasing after them. Up ahead there was a commotion. Apparently, the group who ran ahead had shot the owner of a restaurant. I made my way to the spot where the shooting took place. Lying unconscious on the ground was the owner, a lady in her forties, with blood streaming from the top of her head. There were two versions that were floating around. The youths who had killed her had refused to pay money for the food they had eaten. In the argument one of them took out a gun and shot her. Another version was that this was an extortion attempt gone wrong. Whatever it was, for a young boy like me seeing someone I knew being shot and lying in a pool of blood was traumatic.
This was the time when militancy in Meghalaya was at its peak. Every now and then you hear such stories coming out on a regular basis. All are tragic stories but one was a particularly distressing one. This was about a shopkeeper whose daughter had been kidnapped for ransom. Rumours were floating around that she had been taken across the border. Whether he paid the ransom is not known but she never came back. Even now the father can be seen sitting in his shop. Sometimes I try to imagine his emotional state and try to put myself in his situation. The pain however is too much. But then he was not alone in it. The times were such that such stories were quite common.
A couple of weeks ago when I was discussing the deteriorating situation in the State and sharing some of my memories, my friend revealed similar experiences. When he was young he remembered seeing a body being stuffed into a drain in his locality. The victim was an alleged homosexual. It seems that the perpetrators were well aware of his identity. Lipstick was violently rubbed across the face and the victim was dressed in women’s clothing after he was killed. Was it a victim of another extortion gone wrong? Or was it a hate crime which took advantage of the prevailing law and order situation? For the person who lost his life and the family who has to grieve for it doesn’t matter. The dead are not going to come back.
But it wasn’t only the common people who were losing their lives. Apart from the police who were fighting the militants, the militants themselves took casualties. There were many encounters and one whose outcome I saw with my own eyes.
I had this habit of going to the forest to read. The quietness helped me concentrate. It was a forest on top of a hill below which the Wah Umkaliar flows. Now the forest is gone and the river is polluted beyond recognition. In later years I would regularly cross the river and come upon the road which would take me to my college. One day I heard a loud noise. In the distance across the river I saw black smoke rise. Making my way across the river I reached the spot from where the smoke originated. On the spot was a charred body lying on the bonnet of a vehicle covered with blood in areas which had not been burned by the fire. Around it there were policemen establishing a perimeter. The papers later reported that the deceased had gone for extortion but was confronted by the police. A chase ensued. The roads are quite narrow and there are some sharp turns which if not careful could lead to a fatal accident. This seems to have happened. The driver lost control of the vehicle and it met with an accident which proved fatal for one of the occupants.
As the new millennium dawned upon the State, militancy started waning and the law and order situation improved. In the meantime I had entered University. There were people from different parts of the region and I made good friends especially with those coming from Manipur, a State torn by many decades of violence. In school I remembered reading about the violence in Nagaland and Manipur in the papers. Now I was getting to hear a firsthand account of the senselessness of it all.
There was a joke about Manipur in my friend circle. There were three ways in which a Manipuri could die: being killed by the Indian armed forces, killed by militants or dying of drug overdose. All three were related. Being killed by militants either on suspicion of being an informant or a rival was quite common. At the same time, fake encounters were endemic. Prominent among them was the Manorama Devi Case who was tortured and killed by the Indian armed forces. The incident made national headlines prompting Meitei women to strip down in protest. Then there was the fake encounter exposed by Tehelka magazine. These were of course the tip of the iceberg. The fragile law and order allowed illegal activities to flourish chief among them being the drug trade. Violence and death inevitably followed. The crux of all is that the genesis of violence does not matter. Once it becomes endemic there is no distinction between those who deserve it and those who don’t. Innocent bystanders always get caught in it.
When I saw the visual of the bomb blast in Laitumkhrah I was horrified. In the video of the blast a child is seen running towards the direction where the bomb had been planted. Fortunately the child stopped. What would have happened if the child had been closer to the bomb? Maybe we would be reading about a casualty then. The incident was particularly chilling because I used to frequent the place. If things had been different I could have been the victim. In fact anyone who is reading this piece could have been a victim had fate been any different.
The aftermath of the bomb blast brought about the encounter of former HNLC leader Cheristerfield Thangkiew. Whether it is a planned encounter or an operation gone wrong is something only the deceased or the people involved know. An inquiry has been set up which will try to find out the truth. Whatever might be the truth, once the cycle of violence begins there will be casualties on all sides, those who are involved in it and those who have nothing to do with it.
What will happen now? What will the future hold for the State and its people? How do we prevent reliving the past? One way is not to forget the past and remind those around us about what had happened. The state of affairs in which we find ourselves right out, even if the violence of the last few weeks, is ignored is not perfect. The common people were left to fend for themselves during the pandemic. In the state border we have problems with a recalcitrant neighbour. Now with the announcement of the palm oil plantations our indigenous land rights are also in danger of being taken away. There is a need for people to raise their voice against all that is wrong but that cannot be allowed to descend into violence. If that happens there will be no solutions to any of the problems, except the destruction of lives which will never be recovered.
Email: [email protected]

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