D Kitbok Ryntathiang
“Young people are either restless or weary of the game and join the club, while the unemployed youth who feel lost in the jungle of ‘winner takes it all,’ take up arms to loot. Some get lost in substance abuse that cause their early death resulting in no rest for families who have to weep and cry in the stillness of the night are prime examples of that deprivation.”
It was the 10th April 1970, when news flashed from Delhi where the leaders of the All Party Hill Leaders Conference, were gathered to lobby for granting of the Statehood to the hill regions of northeastern India. It must be remembered that that Hill leader’s conference has been reduced to only leaders from Garo Hills under the leadership of Captain Williamson Sangma, leaders from United Khasi & Jaintia Hills, comprised BB Lyngdoh, Prof G G Swell, SDD Nichols Roy, Hoover Hynniewta, Ripple Kyndiah, Hopingstone Lyngdoh and others from the Khasi side, Kistobin Rymbai, Edwin Bareh, Johndeng Pohrmen and others from the Jaintia side and it should not be forgotten that then Mikir Hills now Karbi Anglong under the leadership of C S Teron were sitting on the fence as members of the All party Hill Leader’s Conference. Nagas had all moved away from the idea of a Hill State as early as 1955-1956 while Mizos moved away from the idea by 1964.
It would not be out of place to mention that the idea was to begin with a thought of all the hills united in the movement for that peace and rest when freedom from colonization did not bring that dream. It was the act of enforcing Hindi as the main language which caused regional languages to raise their hood of regionalism by imposing their majority language as the official language of the province and in case of the hills it would mean Assamese. The Nagas believed they do not belong to India under the leadership of A Z Phizo who was a resident of Shillong, in Jaiaw Laitdom where his family continued to live there till the 1970s, with his wife, the daughter and two sons being the occupants of a house across the present Pearly Dew School. The Mizos followed suit in 1964 under the leadership of Laldenga. What a loss to the cause of a Hill State! The south, particularly then Madras blacked out Hindi.
Freedom from the British did not bring peace and rest and now this brought about the idea of “No Hill State No Rest!” It was the death of a dream twice over with leaders of each hill district choosing their narrow vision and self-aggrandizement at the expense of a higher cause. The proclamation of April 10 1970 resulted in a euphoria in Shillong and Tura the then major towns of the truncated Hill State. What followed was the unbelievable excitement of people leaving Shillong to go down to Byrnihat to pick up their new-found heroes, so much so that Shillong town becoming almost a ghost town. There were no more motor vehicles left in the town and only children and older people waiting at home to join in the euphoria. What happened that day in Byrnihat, Nongpoh and other villages is a story for another day. That all happens without the present social media but suffice to say it is an antecedent to a consequent.
For any peace to happen, economic growth is important. Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson, in their well-researched book, ‘Why Nations Fail.’ a research spanning over hundreds of years, wrote, and I quote maybe extensively so we can understand context, “All economic institutions are created by society. Those of North Korea, for example, were forced on its citizens by the communists who took over the country in the 1940s, while those of colonial Latin America were imposed by the Spanish conquistadors. South Korea ended up with very different economic institutions than the north because different people with different interest and objectives made the decisions about how to structure society. In other words, South Korea had different politics.”
Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it. Governance determines the prosperity of a nation or the poverty thereof. Prosperity brings peace if governed right but what we see in the world, say USA, today there is no peace no matter how prosperous they are, because governance is toxic. This is on the macro side but coming to our context which is micro, governance is governed by an uninformed populace albeit they may have schooling or college education that has no bearing with enlightening the choices they can have or the type of governance they can choose. Acemeglu and Robinson also state, “Politics surrounds institutions for the simple reason that while inclusive institutions may be good for the economic prosperity of a nation, some people or groups, such as the elite of the communist party of North Korea, or the sugar planters of colonial Barbados, will be much better off by setting up institutions that are extractive. When there is conflict over institutions, what happen depends on which people or group wins out in the game of politics—who can get more support, obtain additional resources, and form more effective alliances. In short, who wins depends on the distribution of political power in society.”
Coming back to our desire for prosperity resulting in peace, it was like chasing a mirage that disappears all the time. The ‘No hill State, No Rest’ became an illusion, as the society found no rest in the absence of peace. There is no doubt that money wise, there is great improvement and people are seeing more money in their hands than in 1970s, but is it possible that the State lives on a false economy? The economy of the State is driven more because of the Government and not that the state has become richer because of the community. Take away the Government funding, you may as well see the collapse of the whole system like nine pins. In the government economy, only a few are the beneficiaries even in the best of times but more than likely that extractive institutions created, an unholy nexus lurking in the shadows and like a leech drains out the blood from the sapiens it sucks, causing the same to collapse and die, while the leech grows and multiplies.
Young people are either restless or weary of the game and join the club, while the unemployed youth who feel lost in the jungle of ‘winner takes it all,’ take up arms to loot. Some get lost in substance abuse that cause their early death resulting in no rest for families who have to weep and cry in the stillness of the night are prime examples of that deprivation. It would have seemed that peace and rest should be the fundamentals of every citizen irrespective of caste, creed or religion but lo and behold class consciousness was created by having the ‘them and us,’ where the haves and have-nots come to the fore. The issue of tribal and non-tribal appears where the haves tell the have nots, “I have but you have not.”
A State was created for the welfare of all those who live in it but the fact is that those who have lived in the state for generations have even lost their rights to livelihood. Thus, extractive institutions were created for the few only. This is not trying to absolve the non-tribal of responsibility, where their lumpen elements, before any sort of caste violence appeared, on a beautiful evening of the 60’s stabbed to death an innocent young man who was on his way home from All India Radio, after delivering dinner to his mother who was on late duty that day. He was an innocent victim, not a violent person, still in high school, but became an innocent gun powder that triggered the great divide, the death knell to a peaceful co-existence.
As a result of the proclamation, jockeying for the juiciest chair began in earnest. Suffice to say that Captain Sangma was the clear winner as he was the only leader with a clear following to command respect and qualified to take the lead role. The others were too many of them to have a clear lead. In the process, Mikir Hills was forgotten, and Assam Government took CS Teron under its wings and nurtured him. This required for a referendum of the Mikir people to decide whether they would choose to be a Hill State or go with Assam. Both Prof G G Swell and B B Lyngdoh along with the others got busy looking inwards and missed the forest for the trees, resulting in the loss of Mikir Hills as the part of the Hill State as the referendum said they wanted to stay with Assam. C S Teron played his card very well, being the only leader of the Mikir people. The result is loss of the larger Khasi tribe as the Khasis knew them as “Bhoi MIkir” part of a larger Khasi Tribe and the granary of the nation. A division was made between the Khasis who were largely Christians while the Mikirs were largely animist. The failure of Christianity in perspective was because of Calvinism that believes in pre-destination, thus, placing them outside of Christian salvation. A big failure of the church and the State lost a people and their land which could have added to the wealth of the State; the well-being of their people. While Hinduism went on to embrace them under its fold the Khasi lost their place in the horizon to become leaders due to a narrow vision.
We have the border problem, because leaders were too busy jockeying for position to have time to think of looking at their own house where termites have started to penetrate.
In conclusion to this episode, peace loving people were forced to become ferocious. Malcolm Gladwell in his Essay, ‘Trouble Makers’ wrote, ‘Because we don’t know which dog will bite someone, or who will have a heart attack or which drivers will get in an accident, we can make predictions only by generalizing. As the legal scholar Fredrick Schauer observed, “Painting with a broad brush”, is “an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision -making lives”
(The writer does not claim expertise or scholarly achievement, but only as an informed reader with an interest in forming public opinion and he can be reached at [email protected])