Wars Without a Name

A History of Indian Counterinsurgency

Shubh Mathur

• Publisher: Academica Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781680535778
• eBook ISBN: 9781680535785
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Indian counterinsurgency has expanded steadily over the years, adding a new region in each decade since the 1950s. Beginning with Nagaland, these wars without a name have followed a remarkably consistent pattern throughout the Northeast, in Punjab, Kashmir, and the central Indian Tribal Belt up to the present day.Such shared features as blanket repression, intensive military mobilization, large scale violence against civilians, and the de jure and de facto impunity given to military and police forces provide an important corrective to facile descriptions of India as the "world's largest democracy." Received wisdom in Indian politics has long held that a strong, centralized government is needed to manage and control the wealth of diversity and pluralism that characterizes the subcontinent. In practice, the imbalance created by a powerful center and the absence of regional autonomy has produced a pattern of cumulative and escalating ethnic and regional conflict. This pattern is characteristic of the post-independence state in India, and indeed in all of South Asia. It might be seen as the outcome of the superimposition of a strong centralized power structure and extractive economy on a terrain of ethnic and religious difference. Read as a whole, these conflicts provide a portrait of the relationship between Indian state and society on the one hand and ethnic and religious minorities on the other.

Table of contents

• Wars Without a Name:A History of Indian Counterinsurgency
• Shubh Mathur
• “The UNPO Submits a Report to the UN Human Rights Committee (CCPR) on the Ongoing Human Rights Violations against the Naga People of Nagalim -.” 2024. July 5. https://unpo.org/the-unpo-submits-a-report-to-the-un-human-rights-committee-ccpr-on-the-ongoing-human-rights-violations-against-the-naga-people-of-nagalim/.
• Wars Without a Name:A History of Indian Counterinsurgency
• Shubh Mathur
• Academica PressWashington~London
• Contents
• Chapter 1Les Guerres sans Nom:the hidden wars of Indian counterinsurgency 1
• The Wars Without a Name 4
• Empire and nation 12
• A new vocabulary of state violence 19
• Methodological considerations and the plan of the book 23
• Chapter 2“Federalism with a strong center” 29
• Negotiating Independence 30
• Establishment of the unitary center: political and economic control 36
• The Spoils of Freedom 39
• Military rule and the state of exception 42
• Chapter 3In the beginning: Nagaland from the 1950s 51
• Naga Culture and Society 54
• Naga nationalism: 1919 to 1955 59
• Testimonies from the war years, 1956 to 1963 63
• Negotiations and internal conflicts 70
• Chapter 4The northeast from the 1960s onwards: Mizoram and Manipur 75
• Land and politics 78
• Mizoram: Famine, rebellion and military campaigns 81
• Manipur: AFSPA refined, engineered ethnic conflict 88
• Militarization and engineered ethnic conflicts 95
• Chapter 5The 1980s - 90s: Punjab 97
• A calendar of loss 98
• Political economy and Sikh identity 102
• Unleashing state terror: 1984 onwards 107
• Memory and justice: the next generation 114
• Chapter 6From 1989 - present: Kashmir 121
• Total war then and now: From Nagaland to Kashmir 123
• The Kashmiri Movement for Popular Sovereignty 125
• State Violence and Popular Resistance 131
• Post-Article 370 Kashmir: An International Dispute 137
• Chapter 72005 to the present: Chhattisgarh 141
• Globalization and Resource Extraction 142
• Civil war and Displacement 145
• Silencing the Opposition: Censorship and Arrests 149
• Tribal Ecologies: A Path to the Future 152
• Chapter 8Counterinsurgency and international law 157
• The international human rights law framework 159
• Indian state violence and impunity as violations of international law 163
• Transitional justice and reparations 168
• Chapter 9Sovereignty and federalism 173
• Wherein does sovereignty reside? 173
• Federalism as a Political Goal 177
• Rethinking the extractive model of center-state relations 180
• Chapter 10Seeing Delhi from Kashmir, at midnight 185
• Chakravyuh/ Labyrinth 187
• Appendices 191
• I The Nine-Point Agreement (Hydari Agreement) 191
• II Article 371A of the Indian Constitution 194
• III The Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973 198
• IV Mizo Peace Accord 209
• Bibliography 213
• Endnotes 239
• Chapter 1 Les Guerres sans Nom: the hidden wars of Indian counterinsurgency
• While the idea for this book goes back at least fifteen years, the manuscript was completed under the shadow of events in Kashmir and Nagaland between August and November 2019. On August 5, 2019, the Indian government unilaterally revoked Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, ending the limited autonomy these guaranteed for Kashmir (Bhasin 2022; Mathur and Beg 2024). This move of dubious legality, carried out entirely without consulting Kashmiris, was supported by a majority in the Indian parliament. Anticipating bitter opposition in Kashmir, the Indian government imposed a communications lockdown across the disputed region, shutting down all phone and internet connections. Also in anticipation of widespread protests, the massive Indian military deployment in the disputed region was reinforced, bringing the total number of Indian troops to over one million. Mass arrests of political leaders, lawyers, academics and others, and attacks on journalists clamped down on the flow of information out of Kashmir. Reports nevertheless trickled out of arbitrary arrests without charges, including hundreds of minor children, tortu e of detainees, and attacks on medical personnel and facilities. The internet blockade effectively disrupted civilian infrastructure, including crucial public services like medical treatment, ambulances, fire brigades, and banking as well as economic activity. Food and medical supplies were running low, and daily wage earners were facing destitution. The state of total siege lasted for over five months, merging with the Covid lockdowns which enabled intensified repression along a new axis.
• This massive humanitarian and human rights crisis was unfolding in Kashmir as negotiations between the Indian government and Naga leaders reached a crucial phase. Following a 22-year long ceasefire signed in 1997 between India and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (I-M), the largest group fighting for Naga independence from India, the two sides were reportedly on the b ink of signing a final peace agreement. Despite the secrecy surrounding the negotiations, it was commonly believed that the Indian government had agreed in principle to a concept of shared sovereignty where the Nagas would have their own constitution and flag. However, over time the Hindu nationalist BJP government in Delhi became more confrontational, whittling away at the process of negotiation itself, unilaterally overriding conditions previously agreed to, such as holding the talks at the prime minis erial level, and in a third country. The revocation of Article 370 and the appointment of a former Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer as the Indian government’s Interlocutor for the peace talks made the Nagas uneasy, as did the increasingly strident mood of Hindu nationalism in India, with the accompanying resurgence of violence against religious and ethnic minorities. At the popular and emotional level, there is deep sympathy in Nagaland for Kashmiris, and understanding of their sufferings under the current lockdown. Like Kashmir, every Naga family has its own memories and stories from the years when the Indian state waged total war against the population. At the time of writing, no agreement is in sight, with the crucial unresolved issues being attributes of sovereignty, a separate Naga flag and constitution.
• Also like Kashmir, the Naga movement for independence predates the creation in 1947 of the new South Asian states of India and Pakistan. Besides Nagaland, all the northeastern states have seen pro-independence insurgencies, violently crushed by the Indian state. Ngurang Reena (2019) a young woman from Arunachal Pradesh, wrote about the Indian siege of Kashmir:
• “It is quite uncanny how identical the picture of today’s Kashmir is with that of India’s Northeast. Most Northeastern states, since independence, have seen resistance movements, demands for autonomy and a yearning for dignified integration. Like in Kashmir, the government has in the past shut down communications in the Northeast; the region has witnessed repressions; people have been locked inside their houses for days, for months. Our states have been divided, activists and leaders arrested, there have been unwarranted deaths and women have been raped. J&K, though distant from the Northeast, shares a sense of familiarity with such developments. Both regions have witnessed adversity in the form of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), impoverishment, infringement of human rights, media apathy and misrepresentation. But most importantly, the regions share years of prolonged suffering; the Northeast and the Kashmir Valley together sing a song of despair, estrangement and yearning for true freedom.”⤀
• In Punjab, the repression in Kashmir revived memories of 1984 and Operation Bluestar, when the Indian army cordoned off the en ire state before launching an assault on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest shrine of the Sikh faith. Journalist Amandeep Sandhu (quoted in Menon 2019) wrote of the parallels: “As Kashmir is cordoned off, no Internet, no landline, no news coming in and out, I am reminded of a similar clampdown on Panjab summer of 1984 – Operation Blue Star. A wound on the nation’s conscience that has still not healed. Then we had 1990 Kashmir and now. We have learnt nothing.” The veteran journalist Jaspal Singh Sindhu (2019) recalled the efforts by Indian media to portray the population under siege as a national security threat, in 1984 and in 2019:
• “The manner and intent of Indian Establishment in sending of the Indian army to the Golden Temple in Amritsar on 3 June 1984 a d degradation in special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir on 5 August (2019) bear a lot of similarities. Both actions were sudden and unexpected, carried out with excessive use of the armed forces. These two events were concerted swoops intended to shock and bamboozle the targeted people of Punjab and Kashmir, thereby, rendering them numb and reactionless.”
• The northeast state of Manipur has quite literally gone up in flames since 2023, as decades of a divide and rule policy pitting different communities against each other has led to widespread violence against minority groups. The trigger was a state-sanctioned pogrom against the Zo ethnic groups, also known as the Kuki-Zomi tribes, carried out with the active help and support of he Hindu nationalist BJP as well as local police and Indian military and paramilitary forces in May 2023. A cycle of retaliatory violence has left thousands of homes burnt out (Haokip 2023) and hundreds of thousands have been made refugees. There is no end in sight as leading political parties, specially those with connections to the Hindu nationalist BJP, continue to instigate hate and violence for electoral gains.
• These developments, which threaten the lives, liberties and livelihoods of peoples in the borderlands, unfortunately provided proof for the central theses of this book. First, that the Indian state has historically chosen to use military force rather than peaceful negotiations to crush any dissent to its political and economic expansion at the cost of regional minorities. Second, that there must be a reckoning for the harm and generational trauma that decades of state terror have inflicted on these peoples. Further, this large-scale violence by the Indian state against those over whom it claims sovereignty shows that Indian fede alism as currently constituted is little in fact more than an empty facade, particularly after the revocation of Article 370. And finally, that the shape of a workable future may be a multinational South Asian federation in place of the highly centralized, extractive and majoritarian Indian state as it exists today.
• For over seven decades, the received wisdom in Indian politics has held that a strong and centralized government is needed to manage and control the wealth of diversity and pluralism that characterizes the subcontinent. In practice, the imbalance created by a powerful center and the absence of regional autonomy has produced a pattern of cumulative and escalating ethnic and regio al conflicts. This pattern is characteristic of the post-independence state in India, and indeed in all of South Asia. From a comparative perspective, it might be seen as the outcome of the superimposition of a strong centralized power structure and an extractive economy on a terrain of ethnic and religious difference. Read as a whole, these conflicts provide a portrait of the relationship between Indian state and society on the the one hand, and the ethnic and religious minorities which inhabit the borderlands, on the other.
• As the chapter headings of this work indicate, Indian counterinsurgency has expanded steadily over the years, adding a new region in each decade since the 1950s. The violence of Indian counterinsurgency, too, follows a remarkably consistent pattern over the seven decades, beginning with Nagaland in the 1950s, and including the northeast, Punjab, Kashmir and the central Indian adivasi belt up to the present day (Sundar and Sundar 2012; Banerjee 2004). This continuity provides the justification for a comparative and historical examination of the multiple rebellions and the state’s military response. Each new operation does not supersede the previous ones; rather, they are cumulative, and the structures of military rule and control initiated in the early decades of independence in the northeast are still in place. As this strategy of the systemic use of military or police force to repress dissent goes unchallenged both within India and internationally, it is expanded to new areas, with the minority identity and regional geographic concentration of the target populations being the common factor.
• The value of a comparative perspective on Indian counterinsurgency was first posited by Cynthia Mahmood, who observed that rather than looking at the multiple rebellions in different areas as problems, it may be worthwhile instead to problematize the Indian state. She wrote that
• “The fact is that Punjab, Kashmir, Assam, Tamil Nadu, and every place else in India are part of a single political order. It speaks to the great success of those who dominate that order that rebellions against it are couched in particularistic terms that can quite effectively be dealt with from the center on a case by case basis. A more insidious form of success is the fact that the academic vision of India has been refracted into similarly particularistic visions, which in asking why Sikhs are rebelling, why Kashmiris are rebelling, why tribals are rebelling, and so on seems to put the burden of explanation on the rebels rather than the order against which they all chafe. A more unified resistance would be deeply threatening for New Delhi; the more universalistic academic perspective on the Indian state and its malcontents now developing across a range of disciplines is revolutionary in its implications.” (2000, 78)
• The descent into a state of military or police terror is rapid and practiced, with a toolkit of repression developed over the decades. Special laws that give nearly unlimited powers and legal impunity to the military underpin a regime of military terror, characterized by large scale human rights violations including disappearances, torture, mass arrests, firing on unarmed protes ors, rape, extrajudicial killings, arming of pro-government militias or death squads, destruction of homes and crops, arson, and mass graves. Village “groupings,” a strategy first used in Nagaland and then in Mizoram in the 1960s and in Chhattisgarh in the 2000s, forced hundreds of thousands of displaced villagers into de facto concentration camps under the watchful eye of the army, police, paramilitary and pro-state armed groups, devastating rural economies (Sundar 2011). Blanket repression, outlawing political expression and imposing severe restrictions on media make it difficult and dangerous to record and share any news or information about these abuses. Media and public discourses are used to vilify opposition to central cultural, economic and poli ical domination, with appellations such as “terrorist,” “Maoist” and “national security threat” turning reality upside down and portraying the peoples at risk as threats to the nation. The political and military antecedents of these policies are to be found in colonial models. British and French counterinsurgency operations in Burma, Malaysia, Kenya and Algeria are the precursors of this ultimately failed strategy of seeking military solutions to political problems.
• Another common thread that ties together the far flung theaters of Indian counterinsurgency is the lived experience of the target populations. Widely separated through space, culture and history, their experience of military violence and political repression produces remarkably similar narratives of suffering and resistance (Manecksha 2022; Sundar 2011). While each region and history is unique, the comparative perspective allows us to see that Indian policies and military strategies represent an established institutional and political consensus on dealing with dissent from minority groups, from the borderlands of the northeast and Kashmir to Punjab and the central Indian adivasi belt. These political and military strategies of repression are not ad hoc responses to rebellion but a considered strategy, which has become part of institutional memory and practice. This continuity i both policy and strategy is not surprising, given the highly centralized nature of the military, police, fiscal and economic institutions and civilian administration in India.
• This violence has remained invisible in public and academic discourses for decades (with the exception of Chhattisgarh, which falls within the Hindi-speaking heartland). The silence on the Indian state’s wars against those it claims as its citizens has only been breached recently and to some extent by the possibilities opened up by the internet and online communication. There has been something of an efflorescence of writing on the lived experience of state terror in Kashmir, despite the difficulties and censorship faced by writers, journalists and academics (Chatterji 2011; Duschinski 2009; Duschinski and Hoffman 2011; Mathur 2015; Zia 2016). However, similar narratives from the the northeast and Punjab must be pieced together through material from various sources, genres and disciplines. Reportage in the form of memoir, human rights reports, legal analysis, fiction, poetry, music, and journalism is used here to begin the task of recording the human cost of continuous conflict on the target populations.
• This massive violence is, of course, symptomatic of the deeper problem, namely, the relation between the post-independence sta e and society and religious and ethnic minorities. But there is a further critique to be found in the analysis of state terror, which goes beyond delineating Indian strategies of control and domination. A comparative reading of the discursive bases of the multiple revolts against the Indian state may be viewed as a critique from the margins of the post-Independence state and society. The cultural sources of resistance in diverse regions like Nagaland, Kashmir and Punjab can be traced to an antipathy to the combined inequalities of caste and capitalism that the Indian dispensation exports outwards from the heartland. These also provide a necessary corrective to the statist narrative that attributes the diverse insurgencies to outside interference, specifically blaming China and Pakistan. While insurgent movements did obtain arms and support from neighboring countries, their origins are entirely indigenous, as is the continued resistance. This comparative perspective also makes it clear that the armed insu gency is only one facet of these struggles which continue as political movements even after the state has achieved outright military domination as in Punjab, or reached a stalemate as in Nagaland.
• Like the silenced minority voices within India, the discourse of resistance in the borderlands offers an alternative to the dominant narrative and dispensation, as well as glimpses of a way forward. Couched in such diverse voices as the writings of the Naga leader A.N. Phizo, the Naya Kashmir compact first articulated by Sheikh Abdullah, and the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973, these address the concerns of different communities facing the inroads of caste and capitalist inequality, and draw upon various cultural and religious traditions to resist and build alternative futures. Their vision of a South Asian future that is not locked into endless war and conflict may be the only practical and sustainable one.
• Dominant academic discourses on India, whether subalternist, leftist or the more centrist “idea of India” continue to silence he experience of those in the borderlands. Until recently, these scholars have fought shy of analyzing the national security state and its implications for the populations of the borderlands, a silence that some scholars have identified as complicity (Visweswaran 2012). Among the disciplines and even genres, there is an interesting pattern in terms of how this silence is slowly breached, with those fields that are closest to the lived reality of armed conflict - anthropology, literature, memoir, history, law and particularly human rights law, film and music - leading the way. Anthropologist Nandini Sundar’s (2011) work on the internment of rural populations in Mizoram and Chhattisgarh, forty years apart, is a landmark document in this field. She has edited, with Aparna Sundar (2014), a pioneering work on civil wars in South Asia, identifying the “shared prose and hardware of counterinsurgency” that produces similar outcomes in disparate regions and conflicts. The work also makes an argument for seeing civil wars and insurgencies as “a privileged perspective from which to examine questions of sovereignty, state contours, as well was the political economy of conflict and development in South Asia.” (2014, 33) More recently, Freny Manecksha’s insightful reportage from Bastar and Kashmir pulls together the threads of “…the ways in which the state uses nomenclatures like ‘development,’ or concerns of ‘national security’ or ‘securing the sovereignty of the nation’ to wage war on citizens and hold in contempt their basic rights.” (2022, xi)
• When it comes to the regions, however, there is a wealth of material on the historical, social, economic, cultural and political parameters of the different conflicts. Writing by scholars from Kashmir (Khan ed. 2012; Mathur ed. 2014; Zia 2019) and the Northeast (eg. de Maaker and Joshi 2007; Hausing 2014 and 2017; A. Longkumer 2017; Roluahpuia 2018 and 2023; Wouters 2019 a and b) covers a range of issues covering history, identity, politics, armed conflict, economic issues like mining, resource extraction and central control of planning and economic development, migration, and the political resolution of long-running conflicts with the state as well as between ethnic groups. Their work provides the historical and political context, and also the basis for a comparison of the systemic and structural features that produce a pattern of political repression, armed revolt and counte insurgency. Along with a range of fiction, memoir, biography and poetry, they help to fill in major gaps in understanding the origins of political movements and their continuity over decades.
• One stream of writing that does address these conflicts, from think tanks as well as academic institutions, falls within the field of strategic studies. It offers a supposedly realpolitik view of international relations, framing these in statist terms of national security and territorial control (Ganguly 2021; Staniland 2014 and 2021). With regard to these, Willem van Schendel’s assessment is equally applicable to the northeast, Kashmir, Punjab and Chattisgarh: “…on the one hand, social researchers had a firmly national mindset; on the other, politicians and bureaucrats created an overarching security discourse.” (2014, 267; also Haokip 2015) This statist discourse is thinly layered over racial, religious and ethnic prejudice and stereotyping, revealed in the language of extermination. The bio-military metaphors present insurgency viewed as an “infestation” and the solution as blanketing the “affected areas” with a military grid to separate militants from the “host” population. In its substance, the academic field of strategic studies is virtually indistinguishable from the communiques issued by the military and political estalishment. With an eye to an external and largely western audience, to which the security studies establishment is closely linked, the whole is packaged in the platitudes of winning hearts and minds and of the “restraint” exercised by Indian military operations. A recent trend in this literature is the addition of corporate concerns to the military ones, revealing the extractive nature of the state and its subservience to global capitalism (e.g. Ganguly and Woodfield 2017). However, even from the viewpoi t of COIN practices, Indian counterinsurgency is seen as a historical failure, and its lessons for other times and places are mostly negative ones (e.g. Lalwani 2011; Routray 2017).
• The strategic studies strand of writing on Indian counterinsurgency is further characterized by a near-complete disregard for he lived experience of the populations in the target areas. Framed as realpolitik and occupying a strange macho-nerd niche within the disciplines of political science and international relations, it ignores other applicable disciplinary and legal perspec ives that cast a very different light on this history (Aman 2024). Rather than statist narratives of territorial control, these conflicts might be better framed within the context of international law, particularly the laws of armed conflict and interna ional humanitarian and human rights law. These frameworks and their applicability to counterinsurgency in India are discussed in Chapter 8.
• A longer-term historical view, beyond a focus on armed insurgency, shows that militancy is a phase in a struggle for for cultu al, social, and economic rights and political rights, and for political arrangements such as autonomy and independence to fulfill these rights. These political and socio-cultural movements predate and outlast the insurgency, and the effort to understand hese inevitably leads us to reconsider the nature of Indian federalism. In the literature on Indian federalism we again encounter a duality between the dominant strands, which might be called the official version, and the minority voices that tell a very different story. The official version (Adeney 2007; Adeney and Swenden 2024; Bhattacharya 2010; Stepan et. al. 2011; Tillin 207; Varshney 2013) of Indian federalism complacently informs us of the near-perfect state of affairs, minimizing the stark imbalance heavily weighted in favor of the unitary center and the conflicts it engenders. This congratulatory mode does not neglect to take a little detour to scold Pakistan for its failings in this regard, though on a purely factual basis it is difficult to argue that these are worse than those of the Indian state. In its most recent iteration, some writers have attempted to give Indian federalism a fashionable gloss and argue that India can already be listed among the multinational states of the world (Adeney and Swenden 2024). In the wake of the revocation of Article 370 and the near-collapse of the Naga peace talks, this assertion does not correspond to any reality. It nevertheless continues to have an influential voice in the academic discourse on India federalism, a situation that is simultaneously perplexing and enlightening.
• However, when we encounter the minority voices struggling with the problems of Indian federalism from the northeast (Hausing 2014, 2017 and 2022), Punjab (Pritam Singh 2008 and 2010), and from the Center for Federal Studies at Jamia Hamdard University in Delhi (Rasheeduddin Khan 1992; Majeed ed. 2004), there is shift to substantive and historical discussion and analysis. These issues are discussed at greater length in chapters 2 and 9. Here we note that these minority voices, along with the grounded literature on regional experiences of counterinsurgency, also point the way towards possible resolutions.
• The proposal that such conflicts can be addressed through constitutional processes of devolution and decentralization flies in the face of conventional wisdom in the region but has a wide applicability. In the cultural sphere, opening the space occupied by nationalist discourse to multiple perspectives offers new opportunities to engage the meanings of freedom, identity and justice. Significant work by Kashmiri political scientists Noor Ahmed Baba (2014) and Gull Mohammed Wani (2014) offers analysis as well as insights into what conflict resolution might entail. Professor Baba’s work traces the historical and political evolution of the Kashmir conflict and argues for a resolution that respects Kashmir’s historical role as a contact zone, as well as the right of self determination. Professor Gull Muhammed Wani writes about the necessity for the devolution of power at the regional and sub- regional levels as an essential component of future conflict resolution processes. This is not to imply that there is any one-size-fits-all solution: resolution in each case must be founded on its unique history and politics. A federated struc ure with strong regional and sub-regional autonomy may well be the shape of a workable future. The work of scholars from the Northeast that addresses the deadly inter-ethnic conflicts is likewise central to imagining a peaceful resolution (eg. Fernandes 2008; L. Longkumer 2009; Hausing 2022; Wouters 2019).
• In the final analysis, the history of Indian counterinsurgency reveals the massive and epochal failure of the postcolonial Indian imagination to move beyond colonial and imperial paradigms. This toxic mixture of territoriality, cultural superiority and economic exploitation predates the long rise of Hindu nationalism to power, and indeed provided it the scaffolding to build the majoritarian state. In many ways, this illustrates the longer-term historical truth that successful social paradigms over time turn out to be victims of their own adaptive skills, which tend to fossilize. The ability to play the game to the disadvantage o others, and a total investment in what have been winning social adaptations, is in the long term a dead end. It precludes the ability to imagine and create alternative paths to the future, and this may be where the Indian state finds itself today.
• In rethinking the nature of the Indian state, new research and writing on Kashmir leads the way. This complex body of work is scattered across disciplines and genres, including history, anthropology, international relations, human rights, legal analysis, journalism, film, poetry, literature, memoir and music. By placing the Kashmiri experience center stage, instead of the rival claims of the two nation-states, it offers a transformative perspective on the borders of 1947 and the states they define. In theoretical terms, it views the Indian state as the true political and military inheritor of the British empire, and of its deali gs with rebellious borderlands as analogues to the colonial situation.
• Nitasha Kaul (2013) looks at the history and culture of Kashmir and its transformation from a mountainous contact zone to a conflict zone. Pre-1947 Kashmir, like the northeast, existed as its own cultural, economic and political hub with connections radiating out towards Central Asia, Muzaffarabad and Azad Kashmir, Tibet and China. At Independence, an ironic term in this contex , these connections were abruptly cut off by the militarized borders of the Indian state. Like Kashmir, the northeastern states had been the centers of their own cultural, economic and political networks, oriented towards Tibet, China, Burma and Southeas Asia (van Schendel and de Maaker 2014; de Maaker and Joshi 2007). The borders of 1947 closed off these networks and imprisoned Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and other borderlands within a political and economic order that would hencefor h be controlled from Delhi, to its own benefit and advantage. Compounding the irony, the maximalist territorial claims of the new nation were based on the high water mark of 19th century imperial ambition.
• It is one of the enduring and nearly invisible paradoxes of history that the Indian state has seen itself from the beginning as both the successful opponent of the British empire in South Asia and as the rightful inheritor of its territories and territorial claims. Stemming from their work on Kashmir, scholars like Dibyesh Anand (2012) and Suvir Kaul (2015) have theorized the post-Independence state as an informal empire in its dealings with different regions and ethnic groups. Anand writes that “Imperial ethos and actions are not exclusive privileges of the Western world. It is the nation-state that shapes the architecture of coercive control in the borderlands of India and China.” (2012, 69) He makes two important points: first that national identity is heavily weighted by cultural norms rather than economic or political compulsions; and second, that it becomes inextricably tied to maximalist territorial claims. The cultural imperatives of nationalism are played out in claims that are founded on little more than “fantasies of a sempiternal India, stretching back millennia across every yard of land claimed by the Raj,” in Anderson’s (2013) pithy and trenchant formulation.
• The territorial imperative likewise followed nineteenth century imperial precedent in disregarding the wishes of the inhabitan s of the regions concerning their future. While the populations were tagged as actual or potential traitors to the near-sacrosanct project of nation-building, their homelands were appropriated through nationalist discourse and a dense military grid as eternal and integral parts of the nation. Marcus Franke’s pathbreaking historical ethnography of the Naga conflict comes to the same conclusion as the scholarship on Kashmir. While the post-independence Indian leadership paid lip service to notions of democ acy and popular sovereignty, the reality was quite different: “It is shown that the Indian state, in the logic of the nation-building process of post-colonial states, employed massive armed force, qualifying as state terror and genocide, to make the Nagas accept the occupation of their country.” (Franke 2013, 4)
• The comparative perspective allows us to see the continuity in Indian national security and counterinsurgency policies followed since 1947 in the north-east, Punjab, Kashmir and the central Indian tribal belt. The common factor uniting these regions is the minority identity of their populations, which makes them ideal targets for cultural, religious, linguistic, ethnic and racial stereotyping. The persistent political imbalance that aggregated all power to the center, at the cost of diverse and far flung regions, sooner or later forced ethnic and religious minorities who dwelt therein to take up arms against the winner-takes-all model of centralized control. This control, which, is exercised through political, economic and administrative consolidation, plays out in different ways in each region. With the inhabitants variously labeled as anti-national, communal, fanatic, savages, and traitors, the takeover of their lands, resources and cultures is justified in the name of nation-building and “development.” Political opposition is outlawed and driven underground, as leaders are jailed and tortured. The use of force is not a last resort but a central element of Indian statecraft in dealing with minorities. The focal cause of each conflict is unique, but the parallels across regions are both striking and instructive.
• The paradoxical co-existence in the borderlands of a highly authoritarian legal regime and unlimited military powers with the rappings of democracy ultimately undermines Indian democracy itself, and its institutions. The military, intelligence and national security establishments aggregate to themselves power without accountability, to the point where they operate independently of civilian control. At the same time, the imperative of national integration, supported by a democratic consensus that cuts across political divisions, allows the development of a national conscience that can tolerate the worst abuses and violence in the name of national security. The strategies of political repression are also turned inwards, targeting those defined as domestic enemies of the state. Political repression and violence might begin in the borderlands but do not remain confined there. Their very success provides the grounds for their expansion into the heartland.
• The experience of the central Indian adivasi belt, and indeed of all dissent in the age of dominant Hindu nationalism, shows that the “national-security mindset” in dealing with border regions eventually travels back to deal with domestic opposition. There it merges seamlessly with the domestic repressive apparatus that the Indian state inherited, along with its territorial claims, from the colonial past and which it conveniently neglected to reform. While the liberal constitution adopted in 1950 became the showpiece of Indian democracy, criminal police codes and special laws giving the military nearly unlimited powers were carried over unchanged from colonial times, or even re-enacted by the newly independent state.
• The repressive laws were put to good use by the post-independence state, which continued like its colonial precursor to view home affairs as matters of internal security to be handled through repressive measures. Sumanta Banerjee (2004) writes that despite the cozy connotations of its name, the Ministry of Home Affairs conflates internal affairs with security:
• “During the last 50 years, the Indian state seems to have succeeded more in alienating a large number of our people than in wi ning them over into the folds of its ‘home.’ It is the home ministry which had been trying to rule vast swathes of our country with a rod of iron—from Kashmir in the north-west to the seven sisters in the northern-east. Laws like POTA and AFSPA, atrocities by security forces, indiscriminate arrests of innocent people, killings in false encounters—all these have become the natural order of things in these states. The measures adopted by the home ministry to suppress terrorism and secessionist movements (which ironically enough are the offspring from the center’s licentious exploitation of the people of these areas), have ended up antagonizing the common people living there. But it is not only these peripheral territories on the northern margins of what the Indian state considers its ‘home’—the Aryavarta—that remain alienated.”
• As the conjunction of economic liberalization and the global push by late capitalism to control natural resources reaches the adivasi belt that stretches across central India, a new area, which may be defined as a “resource frontier” (Sivaramakrishnan 219), is brought into the widening circle of resistance and counterinsurgency (Padel and Das 2010; Sundar 2016; Sundar and Sundar 2014). The expanding internal security apparatus is now also locked in on domestic dissent. The enemies of the state, memorably described in 2007 by former prime minister Manmohan Singh as the biggest national security threat facing the nation, now include “landless peasants, tribal poor, and Dalit laborer inhabiting a long belt that stretches from Bihar and Jharkhand, through Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa down to Andhra Pradesh...in search of a more equitable social and economic order. Reluctant to introduce such an order in their lives, the state has responded by branding them as ‘left extremists,’ and is attempting to suppress them by military means. It is thus forcing them out from the much-needed democratic process of recognizing pluralism and negotiating differences....Instead, India is fast becoming a ‘home’ bursting at its seams with estranged malcontents.” (Banerjee 2004, 4404)
• This brings us back to Mahmood’s opening question, about the nature of the unitary political order. It also leads us to ask why these sundry estranged malcontents are willing to risk all to resist it, when it proclaims itself to be democratic, secular and inclusive. Their minority identity - based on religion, ethnicity, language, or some combination of these - makes them an easy target, and reveals, as Mahmood suggested, the inherently majoritarian nature of the centralized political order. To trace the genesis of this order, it is necessary to go back to the countdown to independence and the First Roundtable Conference of 1929. That was when the issues of federalism and minority rights were first articulated in the process of defining the Indian state. Their defeat, in the name of preserving national unity, paved the way for the still-expanding cycle of repression and exploita ion, rebellion and ruthless counterinsurgency.
• The essential political and cultural features of the Indian polity, which came in characteristic riddling fashion to be descried as “federalism with a strong center,” took shape during the process of decolonization. Through the 1920s, the anti-colonial struggle had been transformed from polite constitutionalism into a mass movement. Gandhian civil disobedience was beginning to challenge the empire and to define the terms of the contest. With the endgame in sight, colonial strategies shifted to the devolution of power from the autocratic center to provincial governments in preparation for self-rule. This brought the questions of federalism, regional autonomy and minority rights front and center. It was an opportunity made for one last throw of the dice in the old imperial game of divide and rule. An unfinished task for Indian historiography is for analysis of this period that walks the fine line between recognizing the colonial imperative to divide and quit on the one hand and the intolerance of the rising Indian middle class for cultural and political difference on the other. Even as a series of Round Table conferences organized by the British government sought to address this issue through consultations with various ethnic and minority groups, the Congress position crystallized around the claim that it alone represented Indians, and that recognition of any other parties or groups was divisive and communal.
• The emergence of the unitary center and its consequences for minorities in the borderlands and throughout India are traced in greater detail in Chapter 2. Here, it suffices to note that the claim by the Congress to speak for all Indians outlawed, as a corollary, autonomous expression of cultural and political identity. Those deviating from the script, for a variety of reasons, were to be stigmatized with increasing vehemence as communal, anti-national, and traitors. But dominated as it was by the nascent, predominantly Hindu, middle class while purporting to speak for all Indians, the Congress forfeited the trust of those minori ies it claimed to represent. There was also the matter of its less than subtle use of a Hindu religious idiom.
• Even more serious, the right wing of the Congress was inhabited by Hindu nationalist sympathizers like Patel and Malviya, whose closeness to the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Hindu Mahasabha opened the door to acceptance of their anti-minority discourse and violence. In the long term, the centrist soft Hinduism of the Congress, combined with a political system lacking any constitutional safeguards for minorities, both regional and national and for Dalits, would pave the way for the rise of a culturally-driven majoritarian Hindu fascism (Ahmad 2017; Anderson 2013; Chatterji et. al. 2019; Mathur 2008). As Anand (2012) puts it, “Beyond the rhetoric of unity in diversity lies the reality of the dominance of a majoritarian identity.” The writing was on the wall as long ago as the 1920s, when the Nagas, Sikhs, Dalits and a large section of Muslims represen ed by the Muslim League began the ultimately failed effort to safeguard their political and cultural rights.
• The Congress fought the battle to speak for all Indians on two fronts, both in the name of national unity: against the claims of regional religious and ethnic minorities for a federal structure, and at the national level, against the demands for separate electorates for Dalits and Muslims. The legitimate fears of minorities, large and small, national and regional, that they would be swallowed up in the narrative of the numerical majority were stigmatized as separatist, a word that has cast a long and pejorative shadow over minority rights in India. Within the heartland, there would be no proportional representation for Muslims, and no separate electorates for Dalits to maintain the integrity of the political leadership faced with pressures to conform by the upper caste majority (Bajpai 2008 and 2010). Over time, the fears not just for the cultural uniqueness and values of religious and ethnic minorities across India and the borderlands but also their basic civil rights and safety have been fully realized (eg. Sethi 2014).
• The question of minority status and cultural difference had geographical referents as well and federalism was the second major battleground shaping the future Indian state. The inherent contradictions of “federalism with a strong center” are most sharply delineated when the extractive unitary state is imposed upon the terrain of cultural difference in the borderlands. This has played out to the detriment of the regions, in a variety of ways. Their fate has been an overwhelmingly tragic one, as the liberal centrist discourse in India merged with a powerful, extractive state, laying claim to the full territory of the empire and its resources in the name of the nation-state. In diverse locations, the maximal claim to imperial territory was realized through military action, backed by political repression and cloaked in promises of autonomy that have only ever been honored in the breach. The question of regional autonomy was one that the Congress agreed to in principle but in practice undermined at every opportunity. Until the last minute, in the drafting of the Indian Constitution, a federal structure was envisaged, only to be compromised by the powers given to centrally-appointed state governors. Political consolidation was backed by economic, with all revenue and expenditure firmly under central control. Regional dissension within India was handled through the creation of linguistic states, but in the borderlands any dissent was seen as anti-national and provided the pretext for military intervention.
• While the national discourse in India, disseminated through the strategic studies establishment as well as the media, views military responses and the accompanying abuses as the consequence of armed rebellion, the sequence of events in region after region shows that insurgencies are the result of political repression rather than its cause. While Articles 370 and 371 of the Constitution of 1950 offered limited autonomy to Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, centralized administration backed by military force and Delhi’s control of economic and natural resources rendered the promise of legislative and cultural autonomy null and void. The Nagas were the first to revolt against their forced inclusion in the nation. Nagaland thus became the crucible of Indian counterinsurgency, where its essential shape was forged.
• The hidden wars of Indian counterinsurgency, India’s own guerres sans nom, are barely known outside the regions where they are staged. Traumatic events like the forcible relocation of the population to strategic hamlets in Nagaland and Mizoram, (followi g British practices in Kenya and Malaya which were later copied by the US in Vietnam), and the bombing of Aizawl, the capital of Mizoram by the Indian Air Force in 1966, are not part of the historical narrative of India, even though they are focal points in popular memory of the target populations. Despite the existence of a thriving academic sub-field devoted to the imagining o India, these events find no place in the image of India in either Indian or western discourse. Academic work on ‘the idea of India’ may in fact be seen as part of the process of excising these from the historical record (Anderson 2013; Visweswaran 2012).
• Like colonial counterinsurgency, memories of these operations are preserved in private memory rather than public discourse, in the drawing room conversations and private reflections of those who were in a position to know the truth about what happened. Comparisons with the French experience in Algeria are inescapable. Bernard Tavernier’s 1978 film, Les Guerre sans Nom (“The war without a name”) explored these suppressed memories through conversations with veterans and their families. These unspoken memories represent an unsuccessful effort to forget horrific crimes committed or witnessed: the torture, rape and disappearance of ebellious colonial subjects. They become part of a long-term pattern of collective historical denial, and popular outrage greets efforts to bring these memories to light. As recently as 2010, a film on the Algerian War of Independence by director Rachid Bouchareb, Hors la loi (Outside the Law), drew a hostile reception in France and protests at its Cannes screenings.
• As noted above, the continuity between colonial and postcolonial strategies of control is manifested in the strategies, tactics, laws and public discourses of counterinsurgency. The British way of counterinsurgency has long been seen as a model, for it perceived success and for its ability to operate within an overall structure of civil administration. This has been contrasted with the French style, exemplified in Algeria, of carrying out counterinsurgency operations under martial law. This notion has been challenged in a recent book by David French, who points out that the British eschewed martial law not as a matter of principle but of expediency. As a reviewer of French’s work notes, “Martial law was not widely deployed because existing legal frameworks, skewed to uphold colonial power, allowed security forces almost the same scope of authority.” (Silvestri 2012) Indian coun erinsurgency likewise operates under the cover of the laws of exception such as the Disturbed Areas Act, Armed Forces Special Powers Act and other national security laws.
• The edifice of national security and counterinsurgency laws built over the years defines the state of exception, giving wide powers to the military while protecting military personnel with provisions for legal impunity. The most notorious of these laws is the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), adopted by the Indian parliament in 1958. It is copied directly from the Armed Forces Special Forces Ordnance of 1942, a repressive wartime law brought in by the British to break the Indian nationalist movement. Using language lifted directly from the colonial law, AFSPA gives the army wide ranging powers of search, arrest, seizure, destruction of houses, the right to shoot to kill to maintain public order; while providing immunity from prosecution for army personnel accused of abuses against the civilian population (Human Rights Law Network 2009; McDuie-ra 2007). AFSPA was first used in Nagaland, to support the army against the Naga struggle for independence. Underlying the decision to send in the military rather than negotiate with the Naga leaders was a deeply racist worldview, compounded of images of “primitive” “tribals” with “Mongoloid” features and presumed communistic and Chinese sympathies. In 1950, in a letter to Prime Minister Jawarhal Lal Nehru, Sardar Patel, the first Indian Home Minister wrote about the northeast: “The contact of these areas with us; is, by no means close and intimate. The people inhabiting these portions have no established loyalty or devotion to India. Even Darjeeling and Kalimpong areas are not free from pro-Mongoloid prejudices.” (Campaign for Peace and Democracy 2010)
• The few members of Parliament who opposed AFSPA when the bill was presented were from the northeast. Shri Rungsung Suisa (Outer Manipur Reserved –Sch. Tribes) expressed the universal experience of military conquest and occupation:
• “... I want to ask the Government very seriously; are the conditions such that this Ordinance is necessary in Manipur? Do the Government think that such kind of an Ordinance will solve the problem? ... All these Ordinance and sending of Armed Forces will not solve the problem. I can tell the House very clearly and very frankly that it is only creating more bitterness and harm. We know what a soldier is. A soldier is trained in the art of killing and destruction. He cannot appreciate the yearning of the human soul. As soon as he finds a colleague of his is killed, his anxiety is to kill some other people, whether they belong to the rebel party or not. So, we have to learn one lesson from the past actions.” (Campaign for Peace and Democracy 2010)
• Critics were outnumbered and overruled. After debating the bill for just half an hour, Parliament passed the bill.
• The application of AFSPA expanded steadily: Mizoram in the 1960s, Manipur and Tripura in the 1970s, Punjab in the 1980s, and Jammu and Kashmir in 1990 (Human Rights Law Network 2009, 122) In each case, the historical narrative as well as legal analysis records the suspension of civil and human rights, the erosion of the rule of law and the complete impunity granted to the security forces. Over the years, civil liberties and human right advocates, human rights bodies and finally now also the UN have documented the regime of state terror extending across the borderlands over seven decades. Personal testimonies from the borderlands reveal an experience of nationhood which is unrecognizable to those who grew up in the “mainland,” as India is known in the Northeast. One such account from Nagaland was recorded by the Center for North East Policy and Research (2011):
• “A young woman in Dimapur who is a member of a women’s association which works like an informal, tribal panchayat or village council where social cases related to women are handled, shared an experience. Her village, she said, was bombed by the Indian Air Force in the 1960s. She was only a baby at the time but her mother who was running away from the burning village hid her in the hollow of a tree thinking she’d come back and retrieve her when it was safe. It was three days before she could come back. The child lay inside that hollow, hungry, frightened, alone. We wondered: ‘What must she have thought? What sort of impact would it have left on her?’ The trauma haunted her, she said, and then, as soon as she was old enough, she went to join her father, who was a member of the Naga army fighting the Indian state. It was only much later that she came to terms with what had happened to her village, to herself, and to her father, who was killed in the course of battles with Indian security forces.”
• Such memories form the suppressed history of the Indian republic, the hidden scars of its wars without a name. As Nandita Haksar (2007) has written, for those who grew up privileged in post-Independence India, the narrative of nationhood was one of righteous struggle against colonialism. We did not learn from our teachers and public intellectuals, for whom we had the greatest respect, about the foundational acts of injustice that forcibly annexed Kashmir, Hyderabad, Junagarh, Manipur, Nagaland and later, Sikkim and Goa; perhaps it was because the cognitive vocabulary was lacking. It was left for us to discover these bitter truths and their political lessons, along with the task of handing them on to the next generation in our various capacities as writers, scholars, teachers, artists, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates. As the numbers of this group approach critical mass, it is time to begin a reexamination of the extractive model of center-state relations and to consider alternatives from a constitutional and policy-making point of view. Beginning with Kashmir, the necessity of rethinking the borders a d political arrangements of 1947 is now part of the political discourse and may help to move towards a South Asian federation that recognizes the independence of diverse peoples. The future may well be one of Tamil, Naga, Sikh and other republics living in harmony within a genuinely federal structure.
• The comparative perspective represents an original and overdue approach to the study of Indian counterinsurgency, and therefore necessarily covers a lot of ground both geographically and chronologically. This will doubtless raise concerns about both the validity and limits of comparison. In order to find the balance in seeing the broad patterns across regions without losing the specificity of each situation, the chapters are organized chronologically and by region.
• The political lessons to be drawn from the comparative history of Indian counterinsurgency center on the failure of the unitary model of the Indian state. This is above all a massive failure of the post-colonial imagination to develop alternatives to nineteenth century statecraft and warmaking. The need for resolution of these conflicts leads us to consider federalism and devolu ion of power, and the cultural recognition of different traditions with their aspirations and potential for social justice. Finally, it must be stated that the need for comparison should not obscure the specific history of each region. Though this work focuses on the common experience of state terror stemming from what Nandini Sundar and Aparna Sandar (2014) have called “the shared hardware and prose of counterinsurgency,” it should not be taken to imply that each case is identical. In terms of conflict resolution, there is no single solution that will work in all cases. Each movement has different goals and each case will require a unique solution, based on history, culture and politics. These may range from autonomy through federation in Nagaland to t ibal control over natural resources in central India to complete independence in Kashmir. These will all involve the devolution of power - political, economic and cultural - from the unitary center, leading to the creation of a genuinely federal structure.
• Methodologically, this is a descriptive, comparative and analytical work that brings together material from primary and secondary sources in various genres and across different regions, to decipher the underlying patterns. The type and accessibility of materials varies from region to region, but there is a sufficient volume available to justify a work of synthesis. Secondary sou ces including academic books and articles, biographies, policy documents and analysis are used to outline the history and culture of each area, and to trace the course of political events. Political writings, documents, statements, speeches and personal memoir build an image of the ideas behind the diverse insurgencies challenging forcible annexation to the project of nationhood. They also provide a remarkably clear picture of the visions of a just society that drive resistance to the Indian state.
• Primary sources including documents such as memoir, testimony, reportage, records of UN and parliamentary proceedings, manifes os and statements fill in the details of the historical narrative. Individual testimonies and human rights documents from local, Indian and international groups help to delineate the lived experience of state terror. Online social media and journalism have opened up new avenues for multiple voices to record their experience and thereby reach a wider audience. Reportage, human rights documents, legal analysis, film, fiction, poetry and music express experiences across regions and help to identify common threads in the pattern of repression and resistance. The new field of digital studies considers online media to be both an archive and an object of critical study (Chacon 2017; Cohen and Rosenzweig 2005; Phillips and Plesner 2014). As a mass medium which acts as an outlet for memory, it is at one and the same time a new means of historical transmission, a source of historical information and a tool for historical research (Gallia 2009). As with all primary sources, online sources must be vetted for accuracy through such methods as triangulation and corroboration by known and reliable sources. When written from a partisan point of view, they are taken to illuminate that particular perspective.
• Oral history is an important resource and I draw upon my own fieldwork in Kashmir (Mathur 2015) on the experiences of the families of the disappeared, torture victims, and prisoners. Oral history makes it possible to access stories hidden by the dominant narratives and mythologies of South Asian nation-states. Popular memories, told and re-told in family and community settings, go back to the 1920s and subvert these official histories. My fieldwork experience and data serve as a baseline to construct a comparative account of life and struggle in these forgotten conflicts.
• The following chapters trace the chronological and geographical progress of Indian counterinsurgency as well as the common pat erns that emerge across regions. Chapter 2 looks at the emergence of the contemporary Indian state with its strong unitary center, and the consolidation of economic and political power. The consequences played out differently across the regions, but the experience of the borderlands was uniformly one of repression, leading to the closing of political options and the turn to armed insurgency. The cycle of repression and rebellion began in Nagaland and it has not yet ended. Chapter 3 looks at Naga history and culture, the emergence of Naga identity and the demand for nationhood. The refusal by the Indian state to negotiate with the Naga movement for independence was accompanied military and political repression, including the arrest, torture and murder of political opponents. This pushed the Naga movement underground and forced its members to take up arms. It was here that AFSPA was first introduced to give the army “a free hand,” and the principle of military impunity was enshrined at the heart of Indian counterinsurgency. This chapter also traces the history of the Naga movement, from the charismatic leadership of A.N. Phizo, the development of the underground movement and the Naga army, and the war years to the stalemates, ceasefires and protracted nego iations that created the uneasy peace that currently prevails. Finally, personal testimonies of the conflict manifest the human experience of the conflict and how this continues to give shape to the resistance. They also explore the divisions along political and ethnic faultlines, nurtured by the Indian state, that are a continuing legacy of the conflict.
• Chapter 4 traces the further developments in the northeast, and the establishment of the pattern of repression, rebellion and military actions targeting the civilian population. In Mizoram and Manipur, it was the combined impact of political repression and resource extraction that led to the outbreak of conflict, while Tripura and Meghalaya were inundated by migrants from the plains. By the 1980s, persistent conflict had produced a patchwork pattern of armed groups at odds with the state and with each other over inter-ethnic conflicts or turf wars. The many-sided conflicts makes resolution both more complicated and more urgent.
• Chapter 5 looks at militarized police operations in Punjab to put down the demand for a separate Sikh homeland. The movement for Khalistan was a response to the inequalities spawned by the Green Revolution, and a longing for economic justice as expressed in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1972. The Indian state’s ruthless response wiped out nearly a whole generation of Sikh men. Estimates of the total number of those disappeared and killed in the course of the insurgency, which began in the early 1989s, are credibly placed at around 40,000 (Kumar 2003). The Rajiv-Longowal accord of 1986, which officially ended the insurgency, made some political concessions to individual leaders. But like the Mizo peace accords signed the following year, they maintained central economic control. This chapter also looks at the economic and social consequences in Punjab of the successful counterinsurgency in defense of the “breadbasket of the nation”: stark economic inequality as manifested in a high rate of farmer suicides, environmental devastation, a contaminated and depleted groundwater supply and a demoralized population with a growing drug problem (Singh 2017).
• Chapter 6 outlines the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, its history, the persistence of the Kashmiri demand for independence and the slow shifts in Indian and global consciousness of the need for rethinking political options for a just resolution. Chapter 7 looks at the central Indian adivasi regions as they become the target of the late capitalist push for resource extraction. Leftist insurgencies become the pretext for the militarization of the police, arming of pro-state militias and forcibly displacement of thousands of people into so-called strategic hamlets. The expanding circle of Indian counterinsurgency has not yet reached its limits.
• Chapter 8 places Indian counterinsurgency within the frameworks of international human rights and humanitarian laws, which are binding on all states. It is widely recognized that impunity and unresolved legacies of human rights violations create conditions for continuing violence and Indian counterinsurgency serves as a textbook example. While international geopolitics and strategic interests have worked to shield India from international scrutiny and accountability for its actions, this is changing rapidly. Many human right victims, survivors and advocates groups that are already seeking justice and accountability for human rights abuses in Kashmir, Manipur, Punjab and Chhattisgarh may find support at last from the UN human rights mechanisms. Chapter 9 looks at the possibilities for rethinking the option of federalism and regional autonomy, which were ruled anti-national some ninety years ago. From a constitutional rather than a nationalist standpoint, there are a wealth of examples from the movements discussed here and also around the world. These would include western models of federalism exemplified by the US, Canada and Swi zerland to the Russian federation of independent republics to the confessional system of electorates, as achieved in the Lebanon after decades of civil war, which provided a balance that yet holds despite extreme regional and geopolitical stresses. While each conflict and region will find a different solution, the answers will lie in the unique history and experience and history of each. Many such proposals are in fact to be found in political movements in Punjab, in the ongoing negotiations on sovereign y between the Indian state and the Nagas, and in the political struggles of adivasis in central India. Chapter 10 does not attempt to frame a conclusion but notes the emergence of new movements of empathy and solidarity across regions. Groups as diverse as Kashmiris, Dalits, Nagas, Sikhs and Tamils are discovering solidarity in the face of a shared oppression, which may help to map a way forward.
• Chapter 2 “Federalism with a strong center”
• “Traitors.” “Fanatics.” “Terrorists.” “Secessionists.” “Anti-nationals.” These pejoratives have echoed through the past hundred years of Indian history, stigmatizing minority groups as enemies of the nation when they sought to safeguard their rights. But when turned around and viewed from the other side, these in fact represent the building blocks of a pluralistic, multi-ethnic democracy. Proportional representation. Minority rights. Regional autonomy. Self-determination. Federalism. Not only do these ensure the rights of minorities, they are a bulwark against the majoritarian totalitarianism that has engulfed the Indian state a d society today. Reorganizing India as a truly multinational federation may smack of Balkanization to many, but in fact the federal principle is so strongly entrenched at the heart of democracy that it scarcely needs to be mentioned any more. While the p actice of federalism is far from perfect, it is the basis of the political compact in states with diverse histories like Canada, Switzerland, the US, Australia, Belgium and the Russian Federation.
• Muslims have been cast as the lead villains in the grand narrative of Indian nationalism, particularly the Muslim League under the leadership of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and blamed for the Partition of the subcontinent along religious lines in 1947. But it was not only the Muslim League that had deep reservations about the Congress commitment to Indian pluralism, let alone the rheto ic and violence of the Hindu nationalist groups like the RSS. Sikhs too had profound misgivings about the nature of the newly independent state. The two Sikh members of the Constituent Assembly, Sardar Hukam Singh and Bhupinder Singh Mann refused to sign the official version of the Indian Constitutional Act (Fatima Khan 2018) as it did not provide any safeguards for minority rights such as separate electorates. Further, they disagreed with Article 25 of the Constitution which is titled, with unselfconscious irony, “Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion,” but denied a distinct identity to the Sikh, Jain and Buddhist religions, construing them as Hindu.
• The defeat of minority rights and provincial autonomy opened the way to the concentration of economic, political, administrative and military power in the unitary center. Political and economic political consolidation went hand in hand. Following Independence, the strong center established a near-monopoly on all sources of revenue, which was then doled out to the states by the highly paternalistic finance commission (Tyagi 2012). Decades of centralized planning ensured that resources, labor and technology would be devoted to “the greater common good” (Roy 1999), defined as anything that benefitted the powerful capitalist interests in industry and agriculture and the urban middle class.
• Political control over the states was achieved by Article 356 of the Constitution, according to which state governors are appointed by the central government rather than elected by the states. These unelected satraps would also have the power to dismiss state governments, a power that was used a used as a political tool to maintain central control until the pushback from the sta es in the 1990s. The case of S. R. Bommai v. Union of India challenged the extensive use of Article 356 to dismiss state governments. Within India, the worst conflicts were also mediated or displaced by the organization and reorganization of states on the basis on language and ethnic identity. Over the years this strategy has provided the empty window dressing of identity politics, while crucial powers in areas like education, finance and agriculture have remained firmly in the hands of the central gover ment. The limited recommendations of the Sarkaria Commission, created in 1983 to examine center-state relations, have languished in hallowed obscurity (Saez 1999). Nevertheless there exists a somewhat surreal body of literature extolling Indian “federalism” (Tillin 2017) while simultaneously decrying the Pakistani failure to manage conflict in its borderlands (e.g. Adeney 2007).
• Indeed a closer look suggests that the very term “Indian federalism” may be an oxymoron, both in terms of the original intent of the Constitution and developments over the years undermining regional autonomy. The Constitution itself describes the Indian republic as a union, rather than a federation. A critique of the centralizing majoritarian state, discussed in greater detail i Chapter 9, is to be found not in the dominant literature on Indian federalism, but from minority and regional viewpoints. Publications from the Center for Federal Studies at Jamia Hamdard University in Delhi, a minority institution, while adhering to an overall nation-building project, do nevertheless identify the cracks in the edifice and their systemic nature (eg. Rasheeduddi Khan 1992; Majeed ed. 2004). Placing the analysis of necessary political and fiscal devolution in the context of federal systems around the world, from Canada to Brazil, they offer a basis for future work in this field. In a regional context, there are active and informed discussions of the failings of Indian federalism as well as proposals for alternative constitutional arrangements that would give more power to the states . These do not however get the attention they deserve in academic and public discourses.
• In the 1949 debates on the Sixth Schedule, Shri Rohini Kumar Chaudhari, a member from Assam lamented that:
• “We want to assimilate the tribal people. We were not given that opportunity so far. The tribal people, however much they liked, had not the opportunity of assimilation....I have no right to purchase any property in the tribal areas. An Indian has no right to purchase lands in those areas...”
• Further, he claimed, autonomy was a British device intended to sunder the tribals from Indians eager to embrace their fellow countrymen:
• “This autonomous district is a weapon whereby steps are taken to keep the tribal people perpetually away from the nontribals a d the bond of friendship which we expect to come into being after the attainment of independence would be torn asunder. During the British days, we were not allowed to introduce our culture among those people. Even after the British have gone, we find the same conditions in the new Constitution of Dr. Ambedkar.”
• Another member, Kuladhar Chaliha, likewise saw the British behind the tendency to keep the tribals separate, and raised the twin bogeymen of Communism and tribal justice meted out by savages if this continued:
• “If you see the background of this Schedule you will find that the British mind is still there. There is the old separatist te dency and you want to keep them away from us. You will thus be creating a Tribalstan just as you have created a Pakistan. The ultimate result will be that you will create a Communistan,...There are so many people of our country, so many Assamese, Punjabis and Sikhs-all people of the country. You cannot consign them to misrule, to a primitive rule. It is impossible that they should remain such. It is said that they are very democratic people, democratic in the way of taking revenge; democratic in the way hat they first take the law into their own hands. And it is threatened by some that they are so democratic that they will chop off our heads.” And finally there is a crude formulation of the strategic argument: “There is no need to keep any Tribalstan away from us so that in times of trouble they will be helpful to our enemies.”
• It was clear from the outset that for the indigenous peoples of the northeast, integration with India would mean not just the loss of cultural and religious values but very tangible assets like land and natural resources. The Rev. Nichols Roy spoke in defence of tribal culture and the high value it set on equality between different classes:
• “It is said by one honourable gentleman that the hill tribes have to be brought to the culture which he said “Our culture” mea ing the culture of the plains men. But what is culture? Does it mean dress or eating and drinking: if it means eating and drinking or ways of living, the hill tribes can claim that they have a better system than some of the people of the plains....Among he tribesmen there is no difference between class and class. Even the Rajas and Chiefs work in the fields together with their laborers. They eat together. Is that practised in the plains? The whole of India has not reached that level of equality. Do you want to abolish that system? Do you want to crush them and their culture must be swallowed by the culture which says one man is lower and another higher? You say “I am educated and you are uneducated and because of that you must sit at my feet.” That is not the principle among the hill tribes. When they come together they all sit together whether educated, or uneducated, high or low. There is that feeling of equality among the hill tribes in Assam which you do not find among the plains people.”
• Ambedkar stood firm on the protection of indigenous tribal rights, knowing that poverty and immiseration followed the alienation of tribal lands to outsiders in central India. He also drew upon his experience of Native American lands to envisage the autonomous districts as self-governing regions. The Sixth Schedule provided for tribal autonomy through local district councils in areas where their population was in the majority. Regional autonomy provisions in the Indian Constitution, added under varying circumstances, included Article. 370 for Jammu and Kashmir, and Article 371 for the northeastern states of Nagaland, Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim. However this form of asymmetric federalism, which gave uneven powers to different states and constituent units, was not integral to the Indian vision (Hausing 2014). These constitutional protections could not withstand the imposition of military rule and counterinsurgency operations which were launched in 1955 in Nagaland and which were supported by national security laws that gave unaccountable powers to military personnel.The de jure autonomy provisions were also increasingly limited by constitutional amendments brought by the central government in Delhi. Article 12 (A) reduced the powers of the district councils under the Sixth Schedule and in Jammu and Kashmir, “... between 1953 and 1986 alone GoI brought about 42 constitutional amendments and extended as many as 260 out of the original 395 articles of India’s Constitution.” (Hausing 2014, 90)
• As noted above, the chipping away of constitutional provisions of autonomy was accompanied by the hammer blows of military cou terinsurgency operations and political repression. However, a new language of conquest and pacification was needed to soothe post-WWII and post-colonial sensibilities as well as the United Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 198, and the the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (which were based on the earlier 1929 articles) necessitated a shift in language and terminology. Military suppression of subject populations, viewed negatively when practiced by retreating colonial empires in Malaya, Vietnam and Algeria, would be recast as nation-building, development, progress and brotherhood. In practice, the development and elaboration of Indian counterinsurgency practices and discourses was merely the re-labeling or rebranding, as it were, of the imperial processes of conquest and pacification.
• It has been observed that torture is a craft that is handed on through informal structures resembling an apprenticeship. Likewise counterinsurgency, while it has a recognizable genealogy, has been informally taught and handed down. Its origins may be traced to the mid- twentieth century, when metropolitan liberal sensibilities had begun to chafe at the pacification campaigns tha were the late colonial version of Kipling’s savage wars of peace. Since then, counterinsurgency has been shrouded in euphemism and legal cover, making acceptable to a modern political idiom the processes of conquest and repression in their various forms.
• In the northeast, the massive military deployment from 1953 onwards and the institution of national security laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Assam in 1958 brought all of Assam (which then included the areas that would become the states of Nagaland and Mizoram) under military rule. The legal structures underlying Indian military rule were based on laws inherited from the British. As civil libertarians have pointed out, the formal transfer of power did not change colonial systems of governance. “The principles of governance set up by the British in India were seen as appropriate and relevant for free India. The advent of Independence was just an event which did not disturb continuity; it did not announce a change in the existing social order.” (K.G. Kannabiran in Human Rights Law Network 2009, 36) The colonial laws, from criminal and penal codes to emergency legislation, remained on the books or were even re-enacted.
• While these laws enabled the Indian state to continue the policy of state terror in the Naga hills, there was a crucial difference between colonial and Indian expansionism. A new nation born out of the struggle with colonialism needed a new language of conquest and domination. Thus nation-building became the moral imperative against which all minority rights and liberties founde ed. As Franke puts it:
• “...imperialism had lost its legitimacy, and the doctrine of self-determination and democracy demanded a voluntary union of equals. This being so, neither formal nor informal imperialism was left as a choice and nation- building had to be the order of the day, necessitating the total penetration of the projected territory and population. When the latter, however, proved highly recalcitrant, the Indian state resorted to terror, and then to violent repression, to achieve its aim....in India, the major tool for nationbuilding in the periphery was the Indian army.” (2013, 66-67)
• AFSPA, discussed in the previous chapter, was bolstered by other national security laws, forming an iron grid to support military counterinsurgency operations. The Preventive Detention Act of 1950, which allowed the central and state governments to hold individuals to prevent them from “...acting in a manner prejudicial to the defense or security of India.” The Disturbed Areas (Special Courts) Act of 1976 allowed state governments to notify certain areas as disturbed when it perceives “...extensive disturbance of the public peace and tranquility, by reason of differences or disputes between members of different religions, racial, language, or regional groups or castes or communities…” The National Security Act of 1989 gave extensive powers to both the armed forces and and police even in areas that were not declared disturbed. It is notable for its use in arbitrarily detentions, and that was its intention: “The Act provides the police and the armed forces with wide powers to detain people suspected of activities “prejudicial to the defense of India,” the “relations of India with foreign powers,” or the “security of India” for up to one year.” (Human Rights Law Network 2009, 36-37) By 1972, AFSPA was extended to all seven states of the northeast: Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. In 1990, it was extended to Kashmir.
• In the field of strategy, as well, Indian counterinsurgency was based on colonial models, particularly the British in Malaya a d Burma. As noted previously in Chapter 1, Indian counterinsurgency operations did not bring the targeted areas under martial law but instead followed the British model of enacting laws that gave total powers to the military. Viewing modern counterinsurgency practices from my current vantage point, researching the history of the Indian military siege of Nagaland and Mizoram in the 1950s and ‘60s while close friends and associates are suffering through the lockdown of Kashmir in 2019, makes it clear that he goal is a total war against the civilian population. Strategies like the village groupings that forced rural populations to leave their homes to be herded into internment camps under military control (which prefigured American operations in Vietnam), were first used in Nagaland, then Mizoram, and in the 2000s in Chhattisgarh (Sundar 2011). The best-documented example of the forcible resettlement of populations is of course Vietnam, where the strategy of cutting off guerrilla fighters from their popular base entailed disrupting all arrangements that would provide them food, shelter and safe passage. But the village groupings had a purpose beyond the officially state one of combating guerrilla warfare. The uprooting of traditional villages has another important effect, which was also be intentional: it cut at the very roots of the agrarian economy and constitutes a deliberate effort to undermine the well-being of the civilian population.
• Anthropologists have recorded the means used to persuade insurgent populations to end their support for guerrilla fighters: “Tactics include destruction of food supplies, eradication of communities, dislocation of populations into state camps, establishment of “free fire” zones, killing of captured prisoners and wounded combatants, rape, arbitrary and systematic arrest, imprisonment and torture to instill fear and submission, and military occupation and imposed military rule over cities, regions, and populations.... dirty war and genocide are often the state’s antidote to irregular warfare.” (Sluka 2018, 2) Counterinsurgency tactics such as waterboarding and other forms of torture, forced displacement of the population into village groupings, disappearances, arming and training pro-government counterinsurgency death squads are all adapted to local conditions. Media and other pulic discourses are deployed to dehumanize the target population, using ethnic stereotypes to draw a contrast between the recalcitrant, primitive, fanatical rebels and the advanced forces represented by the conquering forces, who only want to share the be efits of progress with the ungrateful natives. Some unique Indian features embellish these strategies for terrorizing civilian populations - desecration of religious sites, rape and sexual violence, burning of crops and destruction of food stocks, looting and the use of civilians for forced labor and as human shields.
• The state of exception extending for decades suspends both domestic and international law. The Kashmir lockdown, like the dirty wars fought by the Indian state in Nagaland, Mizoram, Punjab and Chhattisgarh, is a violation of international humanitarian laws as well as the laws of war. In particular, it contravenes Common Article 4 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which mandates the protection of the civilian population in armed conflicts. These humanitarian laws apply whether the conflict is between states or within national borders, as will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8.
• ————
• Chapter 3 In the beginning: Nagaland from the 1950s
• Like the Kashmiris and Sikhs, Nagas have taken to social media to share their hitherto buried memories. The images and stories of the war years seen online defy comprehension. Young women with innocent faces pose with serious dignity for the camera, unaware that these photographs will become part of the memory of collective grief. Posted on social media, they mark an annual cycle of remembrance. One of those remembered is Rose Ningshen, and her online memorial reads:
• “Miss Rose Ningshen (1954-74) LEST WE FORGET Miss Rose Ningshen, a Tangkhul girl of Ngaprum village in Ukhrul district was ga g raped for hours in the night of 4 March 1974 by the officers of 95 Border Security Force. Rose committed suicide on 6 March 1974. Indian paramilitary officers Deputy Commander Pundir and Assistant Commandant Negi of 95 Battalion Border Security Force (BSF) committed the heinous act and crime of raping 19 years old Rose of Ngaprum. Her sacrifice brought Tangkhul Women to come together and form the Tangkhul Shanao Long (Tangkhul Women’s League).”
• There are notes and fragments of memories of the war years from aging survivors, and obituaries and online memorials for Naga army soldiers and leaders. Fugitive videos record memories of abuse by Indian forces: torture, rape, forced labor, village groupings. A black and white picture from the 1960s shows a Naga man in a white shirt with a shovel, in a small clearing in the forest. He is a prisoner, surrounded by the three Indian soldiers, who are dressed in camouflage and hold him at gunpoint. He bound by a rope at the waist, and the other end of the rope is held by one of the soldiers. He is being forced to dig a grave - his own.
• ————
• As in Kashmir today, the memory of the war years in Nagaland is part of every family’s experience. It is now at last being sha ed with the world, in online fragments. As in Kashmir and Punjab, the calendar becomes a catalog of loss, recorded, in the age of the internet, on social media. Each month, sometimes each week, commemorates a person or an event. It can take a generation or more to find a voice, but memory outlives state violence and repression. One goal that remains constant across the years is sovereignty, understood by the Nagas as the right to live their own lives, according to their own laws, and not have their hills taken over by people from the plains with their numerical, economic and military advantages.
• While the events of Kashmir’s disputed accession are relatively better known, it was not the only region forced to join the Indian union under duress. At the opposite end of the Himalayas, in the northeast, the Nagas had watched the drawdown of empire with the conviction that they wanted to return to their precolonial status of independence instead of becoming part of India. This put them on a collision course with the Indian nationalist movement. Intent on securing its maximal claims to territory, the Congress and the newly independent state paid no heed to Naga wishes and political aspirations. Though the Nagas declared their independence on August 14, 1947, one day ahead of India, the Indian government began setting up its local administration in the Naga Hills. This included the imposition and collection of land taxes, a new and unwelcome feature in indigenous lands that were communally owned by groups with individuals holding usufruct rights. The new Indian administration also began the delimitation of land use and imposed demands for forced labor. These were seen by the Nagas as violations of their sovereignty and ways of life, something that even the British colonial government had not attempted.
• As with Kashmir, this history is practically invisible in India. One reason for the paucity of information on Nagaland was the lack of access during the war years. Entry into the “Protected Areas” was limited under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulations of 1873, which included all the areas covered by the northeastern states and which were renewed by the Indian government in 190. Inner line permits were required to travel to these areas. These limitations could cut both ways: on the one hand, they protected to some extent indigenous lands from appropriation by outsiders, but on the other they made access for researchers and journalists much more difficult. This had a lasting impact on research in the area, as de Maaker and Joshi note: “Special travel permits are needed even by Indian citizens to enter many of the states of the Northeast, and foreign researchers have to go through an arduous application procedure in order to work in these ‘sensitive border states’ (so labelled due to the various ongoing insurgencies). These requirements have been a deterrent to fieldwork-based research in the region.” (2007, 383) The entry restrictions for Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura were ended in the 1990s, in keeping with the Indian government’s “Look East” policy seeking connections to Burma and Southeast Asia. Restrictions on travel to Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh con inue to the present.
• Besides the problems of access, censorship and self-censorship have left the field dominated by statist narratives propagated y the military and strategic studies establishment, faithfully reproduced by media and academics, and limited outsiders’ understanding of the conflict. With very few exceptions (Haksar 1984; IWGIA 1986), there were until recently almost no reliable accounts of the Naga movement for independence. But over the past ten to fifteen years, there has been a steady stream of publications on the northeast and Nagaland in particular, with testimonies of the war years and human rights abuses by Indian forces. These cover many genres, from early records of human rights abuses with numbered lists of victims on cyclostyled sheets by the Naga Peoples Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR) to Marcus Franke’s (2013) magisterial survey of the Indo-Naga war years to ephemeral posts on Facebook and other social media. Fiction and memoir have added both substance and spirit to these narratives (Ao 204; Kire 2013). These testimonies also record the impact of conflict between different militant factions as well as inter-ethnic strife on daily life.
• In various academic fields, work by a new generation of scholars - ethnographers, political scientists and historians - brings focus and analytical clarity to issues of conflict, ethnicity, migration and social change (de Maaker and Joshi 2007; Oppitz, Kaiser, von Stockhausen and Wettstein 2008; Roluahpuia 2015; Wouters and Heneise 2017; van Schendel 2014; van Schendel and de Maaker 2014). Writing on the war years and the two decades of stalemate and ostensible peace negotiations, based on analysis from the ground up, also identifies the tactics used by the Indian government over the years to perpetuate, direct and use inter-ethnic conflicts to divide and rule (Haokip 2017 and 2013; Franke 2006; Hausing 2014).
• Among primary sources, the speeches and letters of A.N. Phizo and other leaders present the ideological underpinnings of the s ruggle, and give voice to the profound opposition to caste and religious orthodoxy from the Naga point of view. Media interviews and recorded testimonies of the war years (Center for North East Studies and Policy Research 2011; Center for Peace and Democracy 2010; Kikon 2017 and 2009) finally allow us to access memories that were crucial to the formation of Naga identity and history but virtually unknown outside the region. As the internet opens up new means of communication, it may perhaps begin to break down the barriers of region and identity that isolated each struggle.
• Naga society, culture and history have been viewed by outsiders as a terra incognita for almost a hundred and fifty years. Within Naga society, however, there is a strong oral tradition that preserves accounts of the history, origins and culture of the different communities. Elements of this tradition are literally woven into fabrics, retold in myths and folktales, built into homes and memorialized in standing stones. It is in this tradition, glimpses of which can be seen in the narratives of contemporary storytellers as well as in political identities (Ao 2014; Kikon 2008; L. Longkumer 2009), that one can find the spirit that ies the people to the land and to each other. A spiritual connection to the land has been an enduring feature of Naga life, connecting people, animals and nature in a way reminiscent of other indigenous peoples around the world. A. Longkumer argues that he “symbolic attachment to territory that constitutes identities, security and a sense of belonging” (2017, 2) must be an element of sovereignty. It may indeed be considered the central feature of Naga sovereignty down to the present day, forming the basis for political goals.
• Their geographical setting makes the states of the northeast - Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura and Ma ipur - borderlands in multiple ways, particularly in the post-1947 world. K. Sivaramakrishnan (2019) argues that a frontier can be political, cultural, or ecological, and also mark the expanding limits of resource extraction: “...where exploited land or mineral or hydrocarbon wealth exists in the traditional territories of indigenous people, ethnic minorities and tribes/adivasis (in South Asia).” Sharing international borders with the modern states of Burma, China, Bhutan and Bangladesh, the northeaste n states mark the transition from the plains of the Brahmaputra valley to the hill regions to their south, east and northeast. Geographically, they are connected to “mainland” India only by the Siliguri Corridor, colloquially known as the “chicken’s neck.” This narrow strip of land is only around twelve miles wide and runs for almost forty miles along the Brahmaputra River, flanked by Bhutan to the north and Bangladesh to the south.
• The state of Nagaland, created in 1963, borders the Indian states of Assam, Manipur, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, and shares a long international border with Burma to the south and east. The Naga hills range in height from 800 to 2,000 feet, and represent a rich and unique ecosystem. Ironically, like Kashmir, the Naga Hills with their mist-covered hills and dense forest, have een regarded as a Shangri-la or paradise, albeit an inaccessible one. Traditional Naga villages were located on the hilltops while rice was planted in the valleys and on terraced hillsides. Shifting or jhum agriculture was also practiced, which in long cycles of as many as thirty years preserved the fertility of the land. Due to various pressures over time, shorter cycles of five or six years led to deforestation and depleted the soil without giving it a chance to recover.
• Control over natural resources has been a driving concern in relations between the Indian state and the Nagas. Access to rich eserves of coal, oil and natural gas, and other minerals undergird the determination of the Indian state in maintaining control. Along with strategic interests, they provide the rationale for massive military mobilizations and deployment. Culturally, the entire northeast is a patchwork of linguistic and ethnic diversity, though terrain broadly defined cultural regions. While migration has transformed demographics across the region, the plains historically were inhabited by Assamese-speaking Hindus and the hill regions by indigenous groups speaking a number of different Tibeto-Burmese languages. However, these distinctions are by no means clear cut, and there are plains tribes as well, especially in Manipur.
• The present-day state of Nagaland does not include all the Naga groups, who also live in parts of Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Burma. The ethnic diversity of the northeast has made it a fertile ground for colonial and postcolonial policies of divide and rule, while the expansionist state claims the role of protector and arbitrator, even as it instigates division and violence. The extent of the bad faith of this claim can be seen in its role in the violence and ethnic cleaning that have engulfed Manipur since 2023 (Haokip 2023).
• In Nagaland, early colonial discourses fixed on the practice of head hunting as an indication of a perpetual Hobbesian tendency to violence. These images also helped to justify colonial “punitive expeditions” into the Naga hills and post colonial expansion (Tong 2016). Oral tradition on the other hand records that while there was occasional war between tribes and villages, there were also economic and cultural exchanges (eg. L. Longkumer 2009; Kikon 2008). The current ethnographic understanding of traditional society sees it as organized into autonomous self-governing villages:
• “The Nagas and their neighbours to the north, south and east organised themselves in autonomous ‘village republics.’ Agrarian land was abundant; every village had its own area for slash-and-burn farming and wet-paddy rice cultivation wherever the topography permitted. Marital and trade relationships existed between the villages, as did strategic alliances and formal bonds of friendship between villages, clans and individuals; but headhunting (whose victims were by no means restricted to members of other tribes) prevented lasting bonds beyond a village’s own boundaries.” (Kaiser et. al. 2008, 16)
• Overlapping social affiliations of family, clan, village, morung and tribe connected the individual to the community and the land. While the designation of “tribes” to denote the indigenous peoples who lived outside the control of established states in the plains has been rejected by many groups, in sociological terms it indicates forms of social organization that are resistant o centralized political authority. Political and social organization among the Naga groups varied widely, from “acephalous” units governed by consensus to villages with headmen. What they all had in common was the absence of coercive state institutions like police, jails and revenue collection. As in many other gift societies documented by ethnographers, prestige was earned through sharing rather than accumulation. The feasts of merit made famous in the ethnographic work of Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf marked major milestones in an individual’s life, where merit was earned by giving progressively larger feasts, turning material possessions into social capital. Like the potlatch among Native American peoples, the giver of the feast accumulated merit by giving away worldly goods rather than accumulating them. Feasts were commemorated with memorial stones or menhirs which were markers of status and influence and constituted a record of the feast-giver’s life (Wouters 2020). An empty granary was a sign of generosity and high social prestige. Ending the feasts of merit (and possibly the apocryphal practice of headhunting) was one of the essential conditions imposed by American Baptist missionaries for conversion to Christianity, a process that began in the late nineteenth century. This was accompanied by a shift from community to capitalist values, which created a new measure of social prestige, namely granaries full to rotting of rice and grain.
• The first direct contact between the Nagas and the British is dated to the Anglo-Burmese war, ending in the Treaty of 1826, which marked Assam and Manipur as the boundary between the two states, dividing the Nagas between British and Burmese territories. Franke (2013) sees British control as being much less benign than it is commonly portrayed. He identifies two phases in the history of British relations with the Nagas, with an initial push for conquest being later replaced by a policy of non-interference, using them as a buffer against the Burmese state. In the second stage, from the 1860s onwards, the British made no effort to extend their control over the Naga hills, save for occasional punitive expeditions.
• A closer look at land usage in the foothills bordering Assam for tea plantations supports Franke’s view of the damage done by colonial encroachments. Transfer of land from the indigenous groups, to be used for tea plantations and forest buffer zones, marked the expanding colonial state, and set up future conflicts along economic, ethnic and military axes: “By mid-1800s, colonial planters from outside the region were settled in the foothills. They were ignorant of the historical facts and the good traditional relationship that existed between the Nagas and Ahoms.” (L. Longkumer 2009, 12). Kikon likewise records the British disregard for traditional land rights, as Naga territories were transferred to Assam. In classic colonial fashion, the former inhabitants of the land were now categorized as land grabbers and extortionists:
• “Naga villages were displaced and declared as illegal settlers, land grabbers and extortionists inside the newly declared British territories. Archival records from the beginning of the twentieth century extensively document the punishments meted out to the Naga perpetrators from the hills who ventured into the foothills (Foreign Department 1908). The implementation of regulations like the Inner Line Permit in 1873 prohibited outsiders from entering the Naga Hills and functioned as a mode of safeguarding colonial economic interests and served to corral the Nagas into enclaves and restricted trade and communication with other communities along the foothills. Such regulations enabled the administration to control the people in the hills while appearing to show paternalistic concern for their customs and livelihood. In reality, the contiguity of the cultural, political and geographical landscape that allowed the Nagas to trade, hunt, farm and fish were effectively reduced by such laws that kept them away from land that was being acquired by powerful European capital and converted into tea plantations.” (Kikon 2008, 60)
• The British also began the process of importing labor from the plains, known by the derogatory appellation “coolies,” to work in the tea plantations. Franke concludes that even though British colonialism administered the Naga Hills areas lightly, its impact was not negligible: “...the opening up of the Naga hills had a devastating effect on the populations there, with resulting amines, forced labor, epidemics, loss of self-esteem and value.” (2013, 147)
• Alongside the colonial presence, another major transformative force in the Naga hills was the presence of Christian missionaries in the form of American Baptist churches, starting in the late nineteenth century (Tong 2016). The association of Christianity with modern education and its compatibility with traditional religious beliefs in a supreme deity attracted followers. Chris ianity has played a major role in all areas of Naga life. From ending old customs like feasts of merit to education in mission schools and the standardization and Romanization of languages, and creating a basis for unity among the different tribes, it has been essential in creating a Naga identity which formed the basis for the nationalist movement. It also became a marker of difference and resistance to the expansionist and destructive Indian state (A. Longkumer 2017). The majority of the population co verted during the war years, in the 1950s. While the vast majority of Christian Nagas belong to the Baptist Church, Catholicism has become popular since the 1980s, in large part due to its willingness to accommodate indigenous beliefs. However, the contrast between Christianity and traditional beliefs may have been overstated, as Vibha Joshi’s (2013) work on faith healing practices shows.
• The first expression of a united Naga national identity was the formation of the Naga Club in 1919. Its members were educated, Christian, and schooled in the ways of the modern world on the battlefields of Europe in the First World War. In 1929, they submitted a Memorandum to the Simon Commission stating that they wanted the British to leave them independent as they had found them. This has been seen as the first claim of Naga nationhood. While the Indian National Congress branded all those who chose to engage with the Statutory Commission as traitors, the Nagas were quite clear about what they were defending against impending I dian rule:
• “...our population numbering 102,000 is very small in comparison with the plain districts in the province, and any representation that may be allotted to us for the council will have no weight whatever. Our language is quite different from those of the plains and we have no social affinities with Hindus or Muslims. We are looked down upon by the one for our ‘beef’ and the other or our ‘pork’....we are afraid that new and heavy taxes will be imposed upon us and when we cannot pay them all our lands will have to be sold and in the long run we shall have no share in the land of our birth and life will not be worth living then.” (in Kire 2011, 249)
• The enduring Naga concept of sovereignty can be heard clearly through the correct Edwardian language: if the Nagas lose the co nection to the land of their birth, “ life will not be worth living then.”
• Following these representations, the Naga Hills were left out of the purview of the Government of India Act of 1935. The next stage in the development of the national movement was the foundation of the Naga National Council (NNC) in 1946, with twenty-nine members representing different groups elected on the basis of proportional representation (Glancey 2011, 167). Under the leadership of Angami Zapu Phizo, the NNC negotiated the Nine Point Agreement with Sir Akbar Hydari, the Governor of Assam. The agreement essentially spelled out the terms of Naga sovereignty and the ninth point guaranteed that after a ten-year period, the Nagas could choose whether or not to continue the arrangement. While the Naga leadership interpreted this to mean that they could opt for independence after ten years. Sir Akbar Hydari warned them that India would resort to violence if they attempted to leave the union. In the event, India refused to honor the agreement in its entirety, and began preparations for extending local administration into the Naga Hills, even though the NNC declared Naga independence on August 14, 1947, one day before India became an independent nation. The Indian government however continued to act as though the Naga hills were part of India and the state government in Assam began changing local laws, especially those relating to usufruct land usage.
• The consequences of the transfer of power were immediately felt in the Naga Hills, beginning with the “...influx of numerous t adesmen from the plains. Another consequence was the coming into effect of new laws, which brandished traditional usufruct rights as illegal. The theory of the Sixth Schedule was relating the protection of minorities. The reality of the conduct of the new masters spoke of chauvinism and indifference, of subjugation and colonization, instead of equal rights, of assimilation into the lowest layer of Indian society, not of respect.” (Franke 2013, 103)
• The well-founded fear of what the future might hold had become immediate reality. Nehru shared Gandhi’s profound contempt for minority claims and further did not accept the Nagas’ ability to speak for, much less govern, themselves: “The new administration penetrated now into even the most remote villages. Every Naga was from then on confronted with his categorization as an inferior primitive, as someone who had no rights in what he had hitherto considered as his own country....Nehru’s integration was perceived by the Nagas as invasion, and as insincere, as treasonable.” (Franke 2013, 103)
• Even as the Nagas continued to try and press for their rights through political means, Phizo was arrested in 1948 and jailed for two years for promoting rebellion against India. Like many other Nagas who were arrested at the same time, he was tortured in jail. In 1951, the Nagas decided to hold a plebiscite to show support for Naga independence. Like the Memorandum to the Simon Commission, the letter accompanying the plebiscite announcement occupies an important place in Naga history. Written by A. N. Phizo, it set out the reasons why Nagas were not and did not want to be part of India.
• As did the tribal members of the Constituent Assembly in the 1949 debates, Phizo argued that the difference between Naga and I dian society did not imply the superiority of the latter. In fact, as the Rev. Nichols Roy had said, it was exactly the opposite. In his famous plebiscite speech in May 1951, Phizo articulated how the Nagas viewed the difference:
• “The Indians repeatedly tell us that we cannot manage our national state, and all that. But what we see in India? Their dead bodies are abandoned to the jackals in the fields. Those who die in the hospitals, even their own relatives very often refuse to claim them! Millions of their sons and daughters are pitifully roaming about in the streets in their awful cities begging and s ealing. Why? No work, no land, no self-respect....And this is not to traduce them but they must know that Nagas are not ‘fools’ to be bluffed or frightened to give away their fatherland. Their society is absolutely their own concern. We thought helpless humanity is to be pitied whatever race they may belong to; but when these hopeless race wanted to grab our national state and usurp our birthright by sheer force of preponderant might, why! it is entirely a different matter....NAGAS DO NOT WANT to be associated with, much less to become citizens, of a people who have no sense of human honour in their make-up, and no human compassion even toward their own sons and daughters.”
• While Indian leaders and intellectuals dismissed the Nagas as primitive and tribal, Phizo said:
• “There is no pauper in Nagaland. There is no social ‘out-cast’ in our country. There are no professional beggars up to this ve y day. There is no families who are houseless anywhere throughout Nagaland. There are no landless persons among us. We do not pay even land tax, which is always a crushing burden to the mass citizens in many other countries. We have no unemployment problem. Economically, Nagaland is on a strong foundation.”
• Though they pitied the downtrodden Indian masses, Phizo and the Nagas had no wish to join them through a forced incorporation into the new nation. The results of the plebiscite showed 99.98% of the population in favor of Naga independence. They presented a striking contrast to the near-total boycott of the 1952 general elections by the Nagas (Glancey 2011, 173), also indicative of the Nagas’ wish to separate entirely from the Indian polity. A final attempt at negotiation was made in 1952, when Nehru visited Nagaland along with Burmese premier U Nu. A Naga delegation was refused permission to submit a petition directly to Nehru in private before the planned public meeting. At the public meeting, the Nagas turned their backs on Nehru to express their disapproval, and walked away. This was widely seen as a major humiliation for Nehru, and is often held to account for the vindictiveness of the Indian military response.
• Alongside the 1952 election boycott, a Naga civil disobedience movement began to take shape: schoolteachers resigned, and people refused to pay the new taxes or provide free labor as demanded by the Assam government. This civil disobedience campaign was treated by the Assam government as a ‘law and order’ problem to be solved by harsh policing:
• “Police outposts in the Naga Hills multiplied and the Assam Rifles and State Police launched a series of raids which served only to intensify the civil disobedience campaign. Government servants down to the village authorities resigned, government functions were boycotted, and the population refused to supply labor to carry luggage, or to sell food and other supplies to officers and police. The Assam government promulgated regulations compelling Naga service.” (IWGIA 1987, 27)
• In January 1956 the Naga Hills were declared a disturbed area and police began arresting Naga leaders. As many as 40,000 India troops were deployed in Nagaland as India prepared for full-scale war. In March 1956, the NNC proclaimed the formation of a federal Naga government, and promulgated its Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of religion, the continued autonomy of the tribes and equal rights for women. The new republic also created the Naga army. It was not an easy or even unanimous decision to take up arms or to continue to fight (Wouters 2016), and early disagreements paved the way for future splits, giving India an opportunity to divide the Naga nationalist movement.
• Indian army counterinsurgency operations began in Nagaland in 1956. The years from 1955 to ‘63 were a state of total siege, wi h the army targeting civilians and villages suspected of helping the Naga army. In a pattern that would become familiar over time, military deployment was accompanied by reports of abuses against civilians - torture, rape, burning of houses, desecration of sacred spaces and destruction of crops and food stores. As a report on the abuses suffered by the village of Mokochung during the years 1954-1964 says:
• “Our tongue cannot express the suffering we experienced under the India government army since out struggle began to regain strength. But we submit a short report of events between 1954 and 1974 in Mokochung village. For let it be known to the people of the world who regard the Naga people with sympathy.” (IWGIA 1986, 136)
• This Village Diary, with its touching faith in the good conscience of the people of the world, was first recorded in the classic Nagaland File by Nandita Haksar and Luingam Luithui (1984) and thereafter in the IWGIA report. In narrating testimonies of the abuses suffered by the population, in every case from Nagaland to Punjab to Kashmir to Chattisgarh, one confronts the sheer impossibility of being able to cover anything but a small fraction of the stories. In Nagaland as in Kashmir, there is not a single family that is left untouched by the violence of Indian counterinsurgency. What are the appropriate criteria to use in selecting testimonies? Many will never be recorded, as victims perished without any witnesses, and many in the older generation have passed on, taking their memories with them. From a human rights perspective, narratives can be chosen that will illustrate specific types of abuse - torture, rape, arbitrary detention, extrajudicial killings, burning of villages, granaries and crops, desecration of sacred spaces. These patterns of abuse are repeated across the regions, and reveal a systemic policy to terrorize the population.
• Researchers at the Center for North East Studies and Policy Research faced the same choice, with the additional difficulty of ollowing their typology, because each incident of abuse spanned several categories:
• “One of the most difficult areas for the Nagaland team was to restrict the respondents to those who were victims of trauma and PTSD. The team had thus to work with an individual focused model of trauma which did not always fit in with an indigenous tribal and community based society. In Naga society, even the identity of the victim is strongly rooted in clan and community and is regarded as collective identity rather than individual. Trauma resonated therefore at the level of the whole village community (even if they were on opposing sides) and this was transmitted across the spectrum because according to them the entire village had suffered the same way. For this reason people were reluctant to talk about individual trauma and suffering. This is also a valuable coping mechanism however because here everyone carried a collective ‘burden.’” (2011, 18-19)
• Individual wounds were also social wounds, and that was indeed the purpose. The types of trauma encountered by the researchers is worth listing in detail, as it mirrors the strategies of counterinsurgency. These included trauma resulting from personal assault or from witnessing torture and killings of members of family, clan, and village; trans-generational trauma passed on through the family; and trauma of identity and way of life. Destruction of the oral tradition that defined Naga tradition and identity was a further consequence of the total war waged by the Indian state on the Naga people. (2011, 19)
• The abuses of those years are slowly being documented as a new generation finds its voice. Writer Easterine Kire recounts those documented by the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA). Since 1955,
• “...as many as 100,000 Nagas were killed in fighting with India....villagers who fled their burnt villages and died of starvation and disease bring the number closer to 200,000....some of the tortures in April and May 1955 by the Assam Police Battalion, beginning with the burning of 200 granaries of Mokokchung village. This was accompanied by atrocities like beating a pregnant woman and forcing her to give birth in public, raping of the village women and killing of the menfolk....In 1956 the Indian army began taking prisoners and using them for target practice. Groupings of villagers and tortures of the villagers became routine y 1957....in the army’s inhuman treatment of the Nagas: men were tied to poles and burned; they were buried alive; their genitals were given electrical currents....One of the stories of rape had as its intention the desecration of the village church of Yankeli where four minor girls were rated by the Maratha contingent on 11 July, 1971. The church building was abandoned by the villagers after that incident.” (2011, 1-3)
• Following the example of British counterinsurgency in Malaya, the Indian army began interning the people into village groupings under military control. These were essentially open air concentration camps, intended to cut off the Naga guerrillas from their support base. They also devastated the rural economy. Villages, granaries and crops were burned to force people to come into he camps, under the supervision of the army. They could only leave for a few hours to cultivate field or to forage for food in the forests. As a matter of policy, those in the camps were kept on “half rations,” to deliberately starve the population. The most vulnerable - children, the sick and the elderly - succumbed. Others survived by foraging, sharing what little they had with each other and with the fighters concealed in the forests.
• A report from the people of Mokochung village records the experience of the years from 1954 to 1964: crops, granaries and jhum fields covering a five-year cycle were burnt, women and girls were raped on the way to the fields. Men and boys were taken prisoner and tortured, and many died. The entire report can be found in the Appendices of the IWGIA report. The first four incidents are recounted here:
• “1. On 26 April 1955 the houses of Mr. Temsumerent and Mr. Semakchang were demolished by the Assamese Police Battalion under O/C Phukan. On the same day a lady named Mrs. Paugilika was lying in bed for delivery of her baby. She was taken outside the house by force and gave birth in the street within one hour. She was beaten mercilessly.
• 2. On 14 May 1955, two ladies - Mrs. Longrinungla aged 40 and Mrs. Mungoankala aged 20 were on their way to the village from their fields. They were raped by the Assam Police Battalion under the command of O/C Phukan.
• 3. In May 1955, Assam Police Battalion under O/C Phukan burnt down 200 granaries in the field and destroyed all the paddy crop of the villages, on which our livelihood depends.
• 4. On 9 September 1955, the Assam Police Battalion under the command of O/C Phukan stopped the harvest and destroyed all the paddy that was collected. On the same day, those police personnel raped the following women on the way from the fields:
• Miss Juntiyangla, age 14
• Miss Mapumenla, age 13
• Miss Zulutemla, age 23
• Miss Cheniyangla, age 26
• Miss Ningohilemla, age 24” (1987: 136-137)
• Between April and June 1957 the entire population of the village was confined to 50 cottages without food or medicine. An unspecified number died under fortune and because of starvation. Between July 1957 and January 1958, 800 villagers were forced to move to a concentration camp. Women were forced to bring building materials like bamboo, wood and thatch to the army barracks ove a period of six years. At the army camps they were subject to molestation and sexual violence. Villagers were taken to the army camp and tortured and two prisoners were used for target practice: “On 1 April 1956, out of some prisoners two young men were taken to a forest and used as targets for shooting competition. Mr. Yashingba, age 26, died on the spot. Mr. Pozuba, age 26, received a bullet injury.” (IWGIA 1986, 138)
• The testimonies show clearly that the strategy of winning hearts and minds was one of terror, not kindness:
• “In my village about 100 people were killed. Most were in their 20s. Many who were killed one cannot remember so well, but friends and relatives who were killed stay in your mind. I must tell you about Apu. He was from a different Naga group to me but he went to school in my village. He joined the Naga army and was captured. The Indian army tortured him and used all kinds of electric shocks to burn his body, then they hung him upside down. They didn’t do it because they wanted information from him, they did it because they enjoyed doing it. I met him when he came out and he was a broken man.” (IWGIA 1986, 115) Entire villages were attacked and destroyed: “Of the reports, one of the most pitiable incidents occurred in 1962. The village of Matikhru was attacked by the Indian army and all the women and children were caused out of the village. After that all the male adults were to tured and beheaded. This was followed by the burning of the village. The village holds an annual Remembrance Day when they reenact the killing of the 12 male members of the village.” (Kire 2011, 3)
• The IWGIA report records that the Indian army captain responsible for this incident was promoted (1986, 152).
• Desecration of sacred spaces is another consistent pattern in Indian counterinsurgency. In Nagaland churches were burnt, and worshippers were prevented from holding services. There were several cases of women being raped inside a church. “Four girls were tortured and raped in the Yankeli Baptist Christian Church on 11 July 1971 by a contingent of the Maratha Regiment. These girls were all under 18 years of age. They were dragged out from among the villagers who had been rounded up. Villagers were not allowed to move out of the village by the Indian army for four days.” (IGWIA 1986: 152) Other sources record that the villagers aandoned the church after this incident. (Kire 2011:3)
• Retaliation against civilians for militant attacks against the army continue to this day. The infamous incident at Oinam village in the Senapati district of Manipur in 1987 followed an attack by NSCN (I-M) on an Assam Rifles camp. The rebels killed nine soldiers and took away a large cache of arms and ammunition. Operation Bluebird was launched to recover the weaponry, but it quickly devolved into vicious retaliation by the army against the unarmed villagers (Amnesty International 1990). Over the next three months, the villagers were subjected to inhuman tortures and ill-treatment, including sexual assault, looting, arson and destruction of homes, forced labor and illegal detention. The abuses at Oinam village were documented by the Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR) and this became the first time that the Indian armed forces were taken to court to account for their actions. Despite severe intimidation, arrests and torture of witnesses by the army, villagers appeared to give testimony in court, and the army officers were forced to stand in the dock. Nevertheless, the case dragged on in the courts before being finally dismissed thirty years later (Haksar 2019). The enduring impunity granted by the Indian legal system to the armed forces is another essential feature of Indian counterinsurgency. It also illustrates the truth that impunity guarantees the recurrence of such crimes.
• The recruitment of Naga Village Guards during the war was another essential element of Indian counterinsurgency. It was tried in Nagaland for the first time, and served as the model for the creation of pro-government counterinsurgency units in other places, like the Ikhwanis in Kashmir and Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh. These were essentially counterinsurgency death squads (cf. Sluka 2000) and were hated and feared for their cruelty. The VGs were abolished shortly after the 1964 ceasefire came into effect, but the effects of their actions lasted a long time, taking a toll on both victim and perpetrator: “After 1964 many of the VG officers went out of their minds. They went crazy, killed themselves, shot each other or had unnatural deaths. Many had nightmares....It is obvious that many of the VGs went through psychological torture as a result of the evil they had committed.” (IWGIA 1986, 115)
• Even after the ceasefire, the Indian military presence did not end. In fact, it became even more entrenched. Permanent Indian military camps were established, with housing for families, shops, and even farms. Mapping of the forests and rivers and building helipads at strategic locations gives the Indian army the military advantage over guerrilla fighters if fighting should break out again. A network of spies and informers, using local conflicts and divisions, created a secret army to keep the population in a state of terror. This again prefigured tactics used later in Punjab and Kashmir, when masked informers could decide the fa e of any individual. Informers were typically targeted by militant groups, as they would be later in Kashmir and Chhattisgarh.
• It was in Nagaland that AFSPA was first used in 1958 to give the army a “free hand,” and the principle of military impunity was enshrined at the heart of Indian counterinsurgency. This was experienced by the ordinary people as the complete lack of justice and redressal for the crimes committed by the Indian army against them. A report from Ukhrul district in Manipur records the ways in which silence was enforced:
• “There are no safeguards for a person’s life and liberty and he or she has no official channe yehugh which to get a hearing....The people cannot even freely express their fears or feelings because of the constant army presence. In each village we went to the army had been there just before us collecting certificates from villagers declaring that the people had not been harassed y them. The villagers were made to sign these certificates and under that threat many were too scared to speak out.” (IWGIA 196, 180)
• Peace negations were initiated by 1957 by church groups, and gained momentum following India’s disastrous border war with China in 1961. An agreement with the Indian government was signed with a breakaway group and the state of Nagaland was created in 1963. Carved out of the existing Assam province, it nevertheless left sizable Naga populations in areas that would later become the states of Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh, setting the stage for future conflicts. In 1964, a ceasefire was signed between the Indian government and the Naga army. By the terms of this agreement, both sides agreed to de-escalate military operations:
• “Under the agreement, the security forces agreed to suspend (1) jungle operations, (2) raiding of rebel camps, (3) patrolli g beyond 1,000 yards of security posts, (4) searching of villages, (5) aerial action, (6) arrests, and (7) imposition of forced labor as punishment. On their side, the Naga rebels agreed to discontinue (1) sniping and ambushing, (2) imposition of “ axes,” (3) kidnapping and sabotage, (4) fresh recruitment, (5) raiding or firing on security outposts, towns, and administrative centers, and (6) movement with arms.” (Das 2007, 26)
• This did not end the fighting or the abuses by the Indian military against the civilian population, and flare-ups including military violence against civilians continue to this day.
• The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 and the loss of bases there further weakened the insurgency and negotiations resumed in 197, leading to the Shillong Accord, again signed by breakaway factions. The Shillong Accord was seen as a surrender, especially since it required the signatories to accept the Indian constitution. Economic incentives like employment, and construction of roads and bridges were used by the Indian government to persuade different tribes to sign.
• Seen in a long-term perspective, negotiations, ceasefires and peace accords were occasions for the Indian government to gain a breathing space for the military, which proved unable to crush the insurgency. They also proved an opportunity to divide the Nagas and weaken the national movement, making separate peace deals with those who were weary of the fighting. However, the strategy of signing peace accords with breakaway groups also meant that the peace deals could not be made to stick and soon fell apart. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NCSN) was founded in 1980 to continue the armed struggle, though it too broke i to two distinct factions. one headed by Issac Swu and Muivah and the other under the leadership of Khaplang, based primarily across the border in Burma. The proliferation of factions led to internecine fighting and a general state of lawlessness, with va ious groups enforcing payment of taxes from the population.
• The NSCN (I-M) has emerged as the largest insurgent faction fighting for Naga independence, and by1997 had established a de facto state within a state, with the the Government of the People’s Republic of Nagaland operating from its base at Camp Hebron. A long ceasefire since 1997 has mostly ended the fighting with government forces, but factional killings and abuses by Indian forces against civilians continue. The goal of the NSCN (I-M) is the creation of a Greater Nagalim by integrating Naga-inhabited areas of the Northeast and Myanmar with the Indian State of Nagaland. This has brought it into conflict with other ethnic groups in Manipur and elsewhere. The Indian government has used these conflicts to gain both military and political advantages vis-a-vis different ethnic groups. This policy of divide and file produced its bitter fruit in the form of inter-ethnic and internecine conflict between various factions and ethnic groups. This legacy still domaines everyday life in the northeast, along with the ubiquitous military presence and continuing abuses. Easterine Kire’s novel Bitter Wormwood presents the lived experience of he complex transition of a struggle for national liberation into a multi-sided, never-ending factional struggle.
• The ceasefire does not mean an end to the military presence and continuing abuses. In his testimony to the Human Rights Law Ne work in 2009, Dr. N. Venuh, General Secretary of the Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR) made the connections between past and present and between the abuses in Nagaland and elsewhere:
• “Villages were burned - whole villages were burned. Not one single Naga village escaped. My mother told me that when our village was burned, she was carrying me. I was in her womb, and she had to run away. Like many others, I was born in the jungle, in a small hut in in caves...that was the situation....In 1997, the ceasefire came....Under this ceasefire the army started building more camps in Stargell points....They are constructing things in remote villages so that they can land their choppers there, so that when the ceasefire breaks, they can land their troops in the villages and they can come with vehicles. Now, they are asking the villagers - forcing them - to clear the roads and the jungle, 20 feet up and 20 feet down. It is imperative that we support each other so that we can find a solution that will bring peace and can help each other.” (2009, 273-274)
• Even as final negotiations in the Naga peace process near completion at the time of writing, disputes between the central and state governments over control of natural resources and their use, and specifically about oil and natural gas prospecting, raise questions about the operation of asymmetric federalism in the state (Hausing 2014). These help to define the economic stakes in the conflict. At the time of writing, final negotiations between NSCN (I-M) and the Government of India are said to have been concluded successfully, though details are not known. For the Nagas, the non-negotiables were a separate Naga flag and consti ution, embodying a notion of “shared sovereignty,” which may offer a model of resolution of other conflicts as well. None of the agreements have recognized the abuses committed by Indian force or the necessity for redressal of these crimes. Groups like the Naga Peoples Movement for Human Rights (NPMHR) have attempted to seek justice and accountability for these abuses (India Today 2015; Shimray 2013), challenging AFSPA in the courts and expressing their solidarity with Kashmiris likewise suffering unde Indian military repression.
• Chapter 4 The northeast from the 1960s onwards: Mizoram and Manipur
• In Mizoram, as in Nagaland, Christianity played a crucial part in the development of a Mizo identity, including in areas inhabited by Mizos that later became parts of the states of Manipur and Tripura. Like the Nagas, the precolonial history of the Mizos, though remembered in oral narratives of origin, migration and territory, has been difficult to access. Research was further limited by “...outdated ideas of ‘tribal’ backwardness merged with security thinking to create an atmosphere of despair, repression and recrimination. This is why researchers were not allowed to work here and this is why such research is long overdue.” (Pachau and van Schendel 2015, 4)
• As Pachuau (2014) makes clear, identity and belonging were fluid, constituting “a dynamic assemblage of peoples” rather than ribes that could be clearly demarcated in terms of language, territory or customs. Her pioneering work, merging history and ethnography, shows that by the mid-20th century, Mizo national identity was defined in terms of being Christian as well. Christianity was welcomed in the Lushai hills, and in some ways indigenized through mapping onto existing concepts and practices. The Romanization of the script by Christian missionaries was seen as a counter to colonial stereotypes of primitive tribals, given the primacy accorded by the colonial state to writing.
• Mizo identity also had political referents, with various groups divided over the question of their inclusion in the union of I dia. Insurgency was in the air, in the neighboring Naga hills, among the Nagas living in the areas that became the state of Mizoram, and as Naga army fighters passed through the territory to evade Indian forces. Indian counterinsurgency too made its presence felt, as did Assamese administrative and cultural high-handedness towards people they regarded as savages.
• The first modern nationalist organization was the Mizo Union. In the run up to 1947, the Mizos debated several different political futures: whether to join the states of India, Pakistan or Burma, to continue as a crown colony, or to become independent. The Mizo Union was divided between those favoring independence and those advocating union with India, with the latter predominating. The final turn towards armed insurgency to gain independence came later, in 1959, with the Mautam. This was the periodic flowering of the bamboo, bringing in its wake famine and disaster for the population. The flowering bamboo attracted a massive population of rats, which destroyed crops and food stores and left the population facing mass starvation. Previous cycles had occurred in 1862 and 1911, the latter being within living memory and both recorded in written documentation. This was a predictable and cyclical ecological event, and the Mizo District Council tried to warn the Assamese government of its recurrence. The Council requested the modest sum of Rs 150,000 to deal with the impending disaster. The request was refused, with the suggestion tha Mautam was just a tribal superstition: in the supercilious language of the Assam government, a “tradition of the tribal people.” (Das 2007, 36) To make matters worse, the Assam government passed a law making Assamese the official state language, which immediately excluded Mizos from employment in government jobs. At the same time, the 2nd Regiment of the Assam Battalion, composed mostly of Mizos, was disbanded, throwing thousands of soldiers out of work.
• Especially when compared to other insurgencies in the region, the Mizo national movement was well organized before launching a armed struggle. It began with the Mizo National Famine Front founded in 1960, for famine relief work. Its cadres collected donations and helped rehabilitate those affected by the famine, which contributed to its popularity. By 1961, it became the Mizo National Front (MNF), with a political demand for the creation of the independent and sovereign State of Mizoram. The Mizo National Army ( MNA) was created as a wing of the MNF, and found many volunteers, including those who had been demobilized along wi h the 2nd Regiment. They brought their training and weapons with them.
• The insurgency was highly successful in the beginning, under the leadership of Laldenga, who had gained military experienced through his time in the Indian army. The MNA’s first action in 1966 was to take over all Indian military and police posts and government buildings in a single day in the highly-coordinated Operation Jericho. The next day, on March 1, the MNF replaced the I dian flag at the Assam Rifles camp with the Mizo flag and declared independence. The Indian response was swift and ruthless. The IAF carried out bombing raids in Aizawl and surrounding areas, reducing the city to ashes. The MNF was declared an unlawful o ganization and the Lushai Hills were declared a disturbed area under the Assam Disturbed Area Act of 1955. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act was notified and brought into effect. The next step was to cut off the MNF fighters, scattered by the bombing raids, from their support base. As in Nagaland ten years before, the forced displacement of villagers from their homes began.
• By the reckoning of Indian counterinsurgency, the village groupings in Mizoram were successful, with about 80% of the population eventually confined to these internment camps. For the population, it was a disaster (Roluahpuia 2023). This scorched earth campaign, approved by the Indian parliament, attempted to maintain a legal facade. Each village was burnt as the population moved out, and family heads were forced at gunpoint to sign papers saying that they had burnt their houses voluntarily. An account from an Indian army officer, cited by Sundar, is worth recounting in full here.
• “Darzo, he said, was one of the richest villages he had seen. His orders were to force the villagers to set their own homes on fire: “I also had orders to burn all the paddy and other grain that could not be carried away by the villagers to the new center so as to keep food out of reach of the insurgents... Night fell, and I had to persuade the villagers to come out and set fire to their homes. Nobody came out. Then I had to order my soldiers to enter every house and force the people out. Every man, woman and child who could walk came out with as much of his or her belongings and food as they could. But they wouldn’t set fire to their homes. Ultimately, I lit a torch myself and set fire to one of the houses. I knew I was carrying out orders, and would hate to do such a thing if I had my way. My soldiers also started torching other buildings, and the whole place was soon ablaze. There was absolute confusion everywhere. Women were wailing and shouting and cursing. Children were frightened and cried. Young boys and girls held hands and looked at their burning village with a stupefied expression on their faces. But the grown men were silent; not a whimper or a whisper from them... When it was time for the world to sleep, we marched out of Darzo – soldiers in front, with the Mizos following, and the rear brought up by more soldiers…We walked fifteen miles through the night along the jungle and the morning saw us in Hnahthial. I tell you, I hated myself that night. I had done the job of an executioner. The night when I saw children as young as three years carrying huge loads on their heads for fifteen miles with very few stops for res , their noses running, their little feet faltering, for the first time in my life as a solider I did not feel the burden of the fifty pound haversack on my own back.” (2011, 47)
• The final step was to “persuade” the villagers, at gun point, to sign documents saying that they had burnt their own village, and that they had asked to be moved to the Hnahthial PPV (Protected and Progressive Village) because “their village was being harassed by the insurgents and also because they lacked modern facilities like communications, educational, and medical care.”
• The village groupings were carried out under the Defence of India Rules, a colonial wartime law used to intern enemy aliens that was one of the many colonial laws retained by the government of independent India. Regrouping of villagers in de facto concentration camps along the national highway also struck at the heart of the rural economy. Nandini Sundar’s pioneering article on interning insurgent populations recounts the abuses: constant surveillance, starvation, providing forced labor for the army, torture, rape and sexual violence. Villagers who resisted going to the ‘protected’ villages lived in fear:
• The conflict in Manipur was also defined by the ethnic diversity of the state. The varied geographical terrain, with a central valley surrounded by hill districts, is the setting for ethnic diversity as well. The valley is largely inhabited by the Vaishnavite Meiteis, while the hill areas are home to groups like the Nagas and Kukis (Haksar 2010; Laba 2019). While practicing a form of Hinduism, the Meiteis had not been Sanskritised until the eighteenth century, and memories of the older kingdom of Meitrabak or Kangleibak as well older religious practices connected to the Sanamahi God remained part of popular memory. These memories, as well as moves to revive the old script, which was replaced by Bengali, became the basis for a demand for independence from India. The process of Sanskritization also marked the beginning of the divide between the people of the valleys and those from the hills (Laba 2019). There is a small population of Muslim Manipuris as well, and migrants from India.
• Among the hill districts, Churachandpur is home to Chin-Kuki-Mizo tribal groups. They have affinities to Mizos in the adjoining areas of Mizoram, and are also Christians. Four hill districts - Ukhrul, Tamenglong, Senapati and Chandel - are inhabited by Naga tribes. The Meiteis have dominated the state and the tribal populations. There is a common perception that the hill distric s and their tribal populations have been treated unfairly in terms of political representation in the state, as well as in terms of access to jobs in administrative services, in education and in municipal services like water and electricity (Haksar 2010; Laba 2019; Pou 2016). Conversely, there is resentment among the plains people because they are unable to buy land and settle in the hills. There is no corresponding restriction on the tribes from settling in the plains.
• Meitei nationalism was also tied to the communist movement, though it received no support from Indian communist parties. The U ited National Liberation Front (UNLF) was the first pro-independence group, formed in 1964. A group called the Revolutionary Government of Manipur (RGM) soon broke away over ideological questions. Another split led to the creation of the Revolutionary Peoples Front with its military wing, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) in 1978. By 1979, these groups, along with the Peoples Revolutionary Party of Kangleipak (PREPAK), launched guerrilla attacks in Imphal and surrounding areas. AFSPA was extended to cover all of Manipur. The multi-sided insurgency, with groups divided by ethnicity as well as ideology, played out under the grim shadow of Indian military laws. Both military and civil authorities also sought to play off ethnic and insurgent groups against each other, adding another dimension to the generalized violence of military counterinsurgency (T. Haokip 2017b). Vigilante violence by ethnic militias targeting drug dealers and criminals adds to the pervading sense of fear (Kikon 2017).
• Extrajudicial killings by Indian forces, military and police, are known as “encounters” (until the 1990s, they were called “fake encounters” but became so common around that time that the adjective was dropped as being superfluous). Human Rights Watch recorded the testimony of a survivor of one such encounter: “Maibam Ratankumar Singh, a college lecturer in history, survived such an attempt and recounts a chilling tale. Singh was detained by army personnel a little after midnight on July 30, 2007. The soldiers first searched his house and then asked him to change out of his nightclothes and accompany them to their waiting vehicles. In the car, he was questioned about his association with the armed groups, which he denied. Singh, however, believes that the army had planned to kill him because they were already convinced that he had links to the militants. He told Human Rights Wa ch:
• “After I was picked up, I was first taken to a place in the hills. I was blindfolded, but I could hear a stream nearby. I was asked again about my links to the UGs. Then one Manipuri-speaking man asked me to run. I did not. He then asked me to bend down and sit on the ground. I said I would not. I could hear them talking about killing me. Then they must have changed their mind.’” (Human Rights Watch 2008b)
• In other cases, people have been killed due to a mistaken identity. Even when the state government admits the mistake, there is no accountability and no penalties for the military or police personnel responsible.
• “...18-year-old Longjam Surjit was shot and killed by members of the 22nd Maratha Light Infantry battalion of the Indian army on August 31, 2006. At approximately 8:30 p.m. he went outside to stable his horse for the night. Surjit’s father, Longjam Mera, said that district authorities later admitted that his son had been killed by mistake. Longjam Mera told Human Rights Watch: ‘I was told that it was dark [when the incident occurred]. The army was patrolling the area. They thought my son was a UG. They shot at him. He was injured and died on the way to the hospital. The army tried to hand over the body to the police and to regis er that they had killed a militant. But the police recognized my son and refused to take the body. They said he was not a militant. So the army dumped his body in the morgue.’ Initially, the army issued a statement claiming that Surjit had been killed in an armed exchange and that a pistol had been recovered from him.” Following protests by the villagers, the state chief minister ordered an inquiry into the killing: ”According to Longjam Mera, some army officers later apologized for the killing of his so : ‘I testified before the magistrate. So did some other villagers. After we appeared before the magistrate, some soldiers came to our house and invited me and my brother to the army camp. There they gave us wine and bread. The officers said, ‘Sorry, we made a mistake.’ They said that they would give a job to a member of the family as compensation...police records continue to identify the victims as militants killed in armed encounters. As in other accounts of fake encounters, the army filed false police eports listing weapons that were recovered. No one has been held accountable for the killings or false reports.’” (Human Rights Watch 2008b)
• While the insurgencies in Manipur stem from a political demand for self-determination, the Indian establishment treats them as military problems to be solved by increasing troop concentration and the widespread use of force. A report submitted by the Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights in Manipur and the UN for the 2011 Universal Periodic Review to the UN Human Rights Council explains the impact of continuing violations on the population, as individuals and on the community:
• “Extra-judicial executions in Manipur, mostly of young men, resulted in the proliferation of young widows and orphans. The widows face the double burden of being a young widow in a traditional patriarchal society as well as the stigma of being branded as families of terrorists....The practice of torture continues with impunity. In Manipur, almost every person who is arrested or detained is tortured; and the common methods include verbal abuse, psychological torture, blind-folding, hooding, beating, electric shocks to the genitalia, water-boarding, etc. Only a few survivors of torture dare to make formal complaints to the authori ies; however, the institutional response of the lower judiciary as well the State and National Human Rights Commissions is to re-traumatise the complainant, discourage and demoralise them.” (2011, 6-7)
• Human rights defenders are also targeted, and often subject to arbitrary arrest and torture. They are also routinely kept unde surveillance and all their communications are monitored and controlled, as the official discourse attempts to define them, as it does in Chhattisgarh, as terrorists and charged under criminal laws. (Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights in Manipur and the UN 2011, 7) Along with disappearances and extrajudicial killings, another common pattern of violence occurs when an army convoy or patrol is attacked by militants. In a pattern of vengeance seen also in Nagaland, Kashmir and Chhattisgarh, Indian forces retaliate against civilians for militant attacks, opening fire randomly and carrying out search operations and mass arrests. It was some such attack that led Irom Sharmila, a Manipuri poet and resistance figure, to begin an epic fast against AFSPA and militarization. Sharmila began her fast in 2000, in response to a massacre in the town of Malom, where Indian soldiers gunned down ten civilians. A roadside mine exploded as an Indian army patrol drove by, and in revenge, the soldiers opened indiscrimina e fire on nearby civilians. They killed people waiting at a bus stop, working in the fields, and just cycling by. Such incidents, and the crackdowns that follow to stifle protest, have become routine. Sharmila was in Malom that day preparing for a peace ally. In a 2006 interview, she told filmmaker Joshi:
• “I had gone there to attend a meeting. The meeting was towards planning a peace rally that would be held in a few days. I was very shocked to see the dead bodies on the front pages of the newspapers. That strengthened me to step on this very threshold of death. Because there was no other means to stop further violations by the armed forces against innocent people. I thought then that the peace rally would be meaningless for me, unless I were to do something to change the situation.” (in Mathur 2011)
• Sharmila’s fast unto death was interpreted by the Indian state as a suicide attempt and she was arrested, placed in a hospital ward, and force fed through a nose tube. When the one-year period for which she could be jailed for an attempted suicide ended, she would be released and arrested again the next day. This continued for sixteen years, until she broke her fast in 2016, ack owledging that the strategy had been unsuccessful in moving the Indian government to end AFSPA. She chose to enter politics instead and contested the 2017 state assembly elections, and lost, gaining only 90 votes. It has been difficult to analyze the reasons for her defeat dispassionately but political commentators note that state assembly elections are dominated by local substantive issues, rather than AFSPA and militarization. Further, she was matched up against, O. Ibobi Singh of the Congress party, who has served three terms as state chief minister and has a record of nurturing his constituency through jobs and other services. He is also known for rallying Meiteis and minority Kukis against Nagas and the idea of Nagalim, which lays some claim to the hill districts of Manipur. (eg. M. Anand 2017; Kharay 2017; Pou 2017)
• Her fast and other Manipuri protests against militarization have not been in vain, and led to the lifting of AFSPA in certain urban districts in and around Imphal. The protests also led the Assam Rifles to vacate their headquarters at Kangla Fort, a highly symbolic victory since the site is associated with the pre-union monarchy. However, the military presence and continued conflicts shape everyday life (Kikon 2007; McDuie-ra 2007). In 2014, Indian media reported that construction crews digging the foundations for a new shopping center in Imphal came across buried skeletal human remains. The site had been a school building and was used for years as a paramilitary camp. The remains were tentatively dated by anthropologists at Manipur university to be between 17 to 40 years old. NDTV reported that the discovery, which included eight human skulls and other skeletal remains raised questions about the identity of those buried here:
• “The discovery has led to more worries for the families of those in Manipur whose relatives disappeared in the last three decades or so, their bodies never found. For long, these families have alleged that those who disappeared were actually killed in counter-insurgency operations in the state, most of them fake encounters, and the bodies were dumped away. Manipur has often seen allegations of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings by security forces. A clubbed case of over 1,500 fake encounter killings is currently pending in the Supreme Court.” (Pandey and Sunzu 2014)
• Two Manipuri human rights organizations, Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association and Human Rights Alert, had filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court, seeking investigation of 1,528 cases of extrajudicial killings and disappearances. In July 2016,, in a stunning victory for the human rights groups and the families of the victims, the Supreme Court ordered Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to investigate 87 of these cases in a time-bound manner (OMCT 2016). While the Supreme Court judgement of 2016 is a very welcome step forward in terms of holding Indian forces accountable, it is not yet clear how this will be implemented, given the long history of the Indian state in the obstruction of justice processes. A group of Manipuri human rights organizations have called for the establishment of a Truth Commission for Manipur to initiate “...transitional justice process in Manipur to address the pressing needs of widows, children and other family members affected by the extrajudicial killings and other serious human rights violations in Manipur over the past several decades.” (Human Rights Alert 2019) Babloo Loitongbam, executive director of HRA advocates for bringing justice and accountability processes in Manipur with a transitional justice (TJ) framework. This is “defined by the UN as the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation...” (Human Rights Alert 2019; also Human Rights Council 2018)
• Chapter 5 The 1980s - 90s: Punjab
• ————
• 1. Nirmal Singh
• Extrajudicial execution on October 26, 1992
• Male, age 12
• Residence Dhattal, Tarn Taran, Amritsar
• Religion Sikh
• Caste Mazbi
• Body returned: Yes
• Condition of corpse: Bullet wounds
• Security Forces Implicated
• Forces involved in extrajudicial execution: Harike, Punjab Police
• Militancy Involvement
• Combatant:No
• Militant support provided: No
• Remedies
• Security officials approached: Yes, Punjab Police, from Harike
• Response by officials: Victim extrajudicial execution in crossfire with militants
• Legal remedies pursued: No
• Remedies desired from government: Monetary compensation to family
• 2. Gurjit Singh
• Extrajudicial execution on November 14, 1989
• Male, age 10
• Residence: Chand Nawan, Bhagha Purana, Moga
• Education: Primary school
• Married: No
• Religion: Sikh, Kesdhari
• Caste: Jat
• Prior Abuse
• Prior detentions: No
• Body Disposal
• Body returned: Yes
• Condition of corpse: Bullet wounds
• Security Forces Implicated
• Forces involved in extrajudicial execution: Bhagha Purana, Punjab Police, CRPF
• Militancy Involvement
• Combatant: No
• Militant support provided: No
• Remedies & Impact
• Security officials approached: No
• Legal remedies pursued: No, Afraid of retaliation
• Impact on family: Family member(s) dropped out of school, Family member(s) died due to depression/shock, Family member(s) was mentally disturbed
• Remedies desired from government: Employment; Truth commission; Investigations into abuses
• As with the abuses in Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Kashmir, Chhattisgarh and other places, the scale and nature of the violence defies comprehension. The Indian narrative of counterinsurgency in Punjab is one of Indian forces fighting terrorism and secessionists, but the ENSAAF database records the memories of Sikh families from the time when the bullet-riddled bodies of their 10- and 12-year old sons were returned to them by Indian security forces. There was no one to whom they could turn for justice.
• The violence echoes into the present. As this chapter and the manuscript neared completion in October 2019, another anniversary was being commemorated, recalling the anti-Sikh pogroms of October-November 1984, even as the 2019 lockdown in Kashmir continued into a fourth month. The year 1984 was a fateful one for Punjab and India. In June, the Indian army attacked the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, in Operation Bluestar, closing off Punjab, shutting down communications and unleashing de facto military rule across the state. The state was placed under President’s Rule, the elected legislative bodies we e dissolved, and operations by a militarized police force unleashed a regime of state terror that would last over a decade. The attack and its aftermath left deep scars on the Sikh psyche, even among those who did not support the movement for the separate Sikh state of Khalistan. (Mahmood 2000; Pettigrew 1995)
• The 25th anniversary of the 1984 pogroms in 2019 was also the occasion, perhaps not coincidentally, of the publication of two ew books on Punjab, Radiance of a Thousand Suns by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar and Panjab: journeys through fault lines by Amandeep Sandhu. These reflect the voices of a new generation looking back on seventy years of history, marked by the violent ruptures of 1947 and 1984. Along with projects like the ENSAAF database and the Punjab Disappearances, they mark a shift in the public narrative, looking at the history of counterinsurgency through the frames of memory, justice and rights instead of the dominant paradigm of “terrorism.” Past and present griefs merge in Preetika Nanda’s (2019) reading of Someshwar’s book:
• “Since I read the book in September, the author’s description of the besieged people of Punjab in the 1980s had another echo, a spatially removed one this time: today’s Kashmir. “The border between curfew and life had blurred. Everything was uncertain.” In the past 80-odd days of unprecedented siege in Kashmir, photographs in newspapers, web portals and magazines captured the stillness of prison: an endless wait, to be heard, to reclaim their streets....Parallels with Kashmir run throughout the initial few pages: as Operation Bluestar draws near, Sikhs tune into BBC radio as they “knew better than to trust the state-run media.” Punjab was turned into a military garrison, a communication blackhole with even journalists reporting for international media gagged. Familiar? Unsurprisingly, it is the people of Punjab who have resolutely stood with Kashmiris, their empathy unbroken. In speaking for Kashmir, Punjab, no stranger to being silenced, was finding its own voice. Remembering the banned mournings, the screams, protest demos, dharnas outside police stations, habeas corpus petitions, unanswered telegrams to authorities. What also remains, to this day, is the rubric of “terrorism” with which to relegate it all to silence.”
• Counterinsurgency in Punjab in the 1980s and ‘90s brought state violence nearly to the Indian heartland, to its very doorstep in fact. Unlike the northeast, there were no inner line regulations to prevent witnesses like reporters and civil liberties groups. Instead, the victims’ voices were to be silenced by hiding them in plain sight, burying them in national media narratives o terrorism by way of “...an unrestrained resort to lies and half-truths twisted and distorted to suit the electoral designs of the ruling party and its leader. This time another well-calculated and extremely dangerous element was added. i e. arousing of and appealing to Hindu communal sentiments.” (Pritam Singh 1984) This added another element to the toolkit of Indian counterinsurgency, which was to prove useful in Kashmir and the central Indian tribal belt as well in the future.
• Khalra’s work was continued by the the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (the CCDP), which also continued to seek justice for his killing. Following his enforced disappearance, six of Jaswant Singh Khalra’s associates who were investigating the mass cremations were also subject to enforced disappearance. They were Sukhwinder Singh Bhatti, Kulwant Singh Saini, Jagwinder Singh, Ranbir Singh Mansahia and journalists Ram Singh Biling and Avtar Singh Mandar. The investigation into Khalra’s death finally reached the Supreme Court, which “ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and later the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to investigate his death and also the 2,097 illegal cremations he had exposed.” (Punjab Disappeared 2019). The Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project (PDAP) continued Jaswant Singh Khalra’s work in documenting the abuses of the 1980s and 90s. Ten years after his enforced disappearance, in 2005, six Punjab police officials were convicted for Khalra’s abduction and murder and each sentenced to seven years in prison. In 2007, four of those convicted had their sentences increased to life imprisonment.
• Projects like Punjab Disappeared, the Punjab Documentation and Advocacy Project (PDAP) and ENSAAF seek to document the human ights abuses over twenty to thirty years later. ENSAAF defines its goals in terms of preserving memory and seeking justice for the abuses. PDAP has filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) on disappearances and fake encounters with over 8,527 cases on behalf of the victims’ families. Until the recently released film on Punjab Disappearances, there were few testimonies available to the public to understand the terror of those years. Some of these family narratives have been recoded by a Kashmiri journalist, Bilal Kuchay (2019), including the story of Gurmej Kaur, who lost four family members to police terror. The youngest was Sukhdev, who was just 12 when he was arrested by the police, and
• “...accused of possessing weapons and ammunition. ‘It was a common phenomenon in Punjab then. Civilians were abducted, taken i to illegal custody and tortured,’ said Gurmeet Kaur, Gurmej’s daughter. Police claimed they had recovered a gun from Sukhdev and accused him in a murder case in Amritsar, which the family denies. The child spent seven months in jail before a court acquit ed him. He rejoined his school and the family was relieved, but Gurmeet said it was the ‘beginning of the worst time’ as police harassment soon resumed. ‘Police would beat him, abuse and humiliate him so regularly that he quit studying. He was forced to leave home and live in a rented room,’ said Gurmeet....Three years later, in November 1989, police picked up Kaur’s second brother, 19-year-old Gurdev Singh, from the family’s fields.”
• The police first assured the community that he would be released, but a week later announced that Gurdev Singh had been killed in an encounter. His older brother, Hardev Singh, 21 years old, was arrested by police a year later and killed. The youngest brother, Suihdev Singh, and their father Sulakhan Singh were arrested by the police and the villagers were told that they had bee killed in an encounter. Their bodies were not returned to the family and Gurmeet Kaur believes that they were cremated secretly. Simranjeet Kaur, 65, of Gurdaspur, also
• “...lost four family members in alleged police encounters. ‘There was no inquiry, no compensation given. There was no one we could approach to get justice,’ Kaur told Al Jazeera. ‘Instead of bodies, police would hand over ashes and tell us not to come to police stations looking for our family members. We don’t even know whose ashes were given to us.’”
• Written in August 2019, as reports trickled out of the Kashmir lockdown of the arrest and torture of 8- and 10-year old children by the Indian army, Kuchay’s account outlines the demographics of the victims in yet another theater of total war. It recalls also the eerie parallels between the Widows’ Colony in Delhi, where women whose husbands were killed in the 1984 pogroms live, and Dardpora, the village of widows in Kashmir (Bahadur 2013).
• The testimony of Tarlochan Singh of Chandigarh, a city that was supposed to be far removed from the violence of counterinsurge cy, illustrates the complete failure of the judicial system. His son, Kulwinder Singh, nicknamed Kid, was a 10th-grade student when he became an activist of the All India Sikh Students’ Federation. Along with other student activists, Kid was kept under surveillance by police and called in for questioning in 1985. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested along with five others, but the cases against them were withdrawn after community witnesses spoke in their favor. He was arrested again, and jailed in 1987 and then in 1989:
• “...I received a phone call from a stranger saying that since 11 a.m., House No. 1752, Phase 5, Mohali, had been cordoned off y the police, including some in plain clothes. I contacted my colleagues and reached there in a hurry. In between House No. 1750 and 1776, which faced each other, I saw my son approaching. About eight or none policemen who had been in No. 1752 pounced on him. He was blindfolded, his hands and feet were tied with thin cloth, and he was wrapped in a black blanket. He was dragged into a white gypsy jeep parked outside House 1719. Inspector Amarjit Singh and the other policemen left with him towards the south. We went to the police station at Mohali to file a report, but we were not allowed to do so. Thereafter, we went to Chandigarh and met Sardar Bachittar Singh from that constituency. I explained the whole story to him. Together, we sent telegrams to the higher authorities regarding my son’s kidnapping. The story also appeared on the papers.” (Human Rights Law Network 2009, 282) ⤀
• As a school teacher and respected member of the community, he had the support to enable him to move the courts. The Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered an inquiry.
• “The Sessions Judge from Chandigarh conducted the inquiry, and the report was sent to the High Court indicting all the members of the CIS Patiala. The High Court again ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate the matter and to register a case against the guilty persons. At present, charges are pending against a total of 37 police officers in the Supreme Court i Chandigarh. But at present, the proceedings are suspended.
• “I want to cite another example of kidnapping. This time it concerned Sukhdev Singh, alias “Sukkha.” After four months, he was “eliminated,” and the police totally denied that he had ever been in their custody.
• “This is my version. I shall say to the Central Government, and the Government of Punjab and the governments of other states, hat the citizens of India are not terrorists.” (Human Rights Law Network 2009, 282-283)
• The failure of the judiciary to protect the victims of both state and popular violence created a climate of impunity which enaled further violence. The PIL filed by PDAP asks for compensation for the families of the victims. ENSAAF also seeks to hold those responsible for the killings accountable in the courts. Jaskaran Kaur (2007) of ENSAAF takes the important step of placing the abuses in Punjab and the 1984 pogroms within the context of international law on genocide, crimes against humanity, impunity, transitional justice and reparations. Because of its applicability to all the regions, this is discussed in detail in Chapte 8.
• ————
• The violence of counterinsurgency remains a tabooed topic, and researchers investigating it are treated as potential Khalistan sympathizers. Amandeep Sandhu recalls his experience in what should be the secure environs of local bookstores:
• “Panjab-based writers too have written about the Khalistan movement and the army’s role in Operation Bluestar or the anti-Sikh pogrom or police excesses - mostly in Panjabi. The Indian state might not have censored them but it has created a sense of fear around them which was visible when I brought up names of such books in book shops in Chandigarh, Ludhiana and Amritsar. Shop owners asked me to pipe down, lest they and I be accused of engaging with Khalistan literature, and pass on the list to them. They fetched any such book they had from deep inside the shop, from sections inaccessible to the ordinary customer. Almost all of hem said, ‘The police does not allow us to keep them. We could be arrested.’” (2019, 483)
• “It focuses on the ramifications of state violence and the resilience of the people of Punjab, decades after the insurgency in Punjab was successfully managed. The film is stitched together using montages of testimonies, moving images of victim-survivors, the presence of the disappeared in photographs they carried and vignettes of violence from Manipur, Chhattisgarh and Kashmir....The film is most compelling when it connects the struggles for accountability and justice across landscapes of conflict. Victim-survivors and activists from Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Manipur and Punjab use colloquial expressions of zulm, atyachaar, tashadat, yatana: oppression and anguish to describe their lives in militarised regions. To ensure the non-repetition of these crimes, Manipuri activist Babloo Loitongbam, stressed the importance of a united struggle so that the ‘hegemonic structures of the Indian state can change.’ The patterns of military and police excesses in Manipur mirror those in Punjab and so do the long legal encounters which people have to endure in the hope for justice.” (2019b)
• Chapter 6 From 1989 - present: Kashmir
• ————
• The global coronavirus pandemic gave the Indian state the opportunity to put Kashmir under a double, and sometimes triple lockdown. Like other repressive regimes around the world, the pandemic was a golden opportunity for the Indian state in Kashmir to achieve its long-held goals. To Kashmiris, these are very clear - like all colonial states, India wants the land of Kashmir but ot its people. After over three months, limited landline service was restored and curfew lifted, and slow-speed 2G internet and mobile phone services were restored in March 2020 though prohibitory orders making it illegal for more than four persons to ga her in one place remained in effect. The blocking of internet connections resulted in severe disruption of all civilian infrastructure, halting medical, emergency, and banking services and preventing business activity. By November 20, 2019, it was estima ed that the total losses suffered by businesses due to the lockdown approximated $ 1.4 billion (Reuters 2019).
• The Indian siege of Kashmir is described as a communications blackout, but it is in fact a total war against the civilian population (Mathur and Beg eds. 2024). By 2019, nearly all civilian infrastructure, including medical and emergency facilities, banking, and economic transactions, relied on online transactions. Destroying civilian infrastructure that supports basic human existence and activities is no longer a matter of bombing dams and bridges as it was in the mid-20th century, or of destroying highways and electrical plants as the US did during the Iraq wars. Nor is it necessary to resort to large-scale burning of villages and granaries and destruction of fields and livestock, as Indian forces have done in Nagaland, Mizoram and Chhattisgarh. A few simple clicks and the digital networks supporting essential civilian services for 8 million people are gone. In their absence, medical care and emergency services like ambulances and fire brigades are unavailable, and all economic activity is halted (Ma hur and Beg 2024 eds.). There is no help for accidents and illnesses, for fire or natural disasters resulting from earthquakes or winter weather. Unlike Nagaland, Mizoram and Chhattisgarh, the population does not need to be rounded up and displaced into internment camps - a massive military deployment turns the entire valley into a vast open-air concentration camp.
• Kashmir was in this precarious situation when the coronavirus pandemic reached South Asia in February/ March 2020. The pandemic became the pretext for another level of lockdown, with entire neighborhoods designated as “Red Zones” permanently sealed off, physically closing streets to all traffic including ambulance and fire brigade services, with disastrous results. The continued blocking of high speed internet played havoc with the ability of doctors to download information for treatment of COVID19 patients, and the possibility of remote work and schooling. Political repression has been stepped up, targeting journalists, doctors and humanitarian relief workers who describe the situation on the ground. These steps are in line with earlier Indian policies blocking relief efforts during major natural disasters like the 2005 earthquake and the 2014 floods. When viewed in the context of the long-term patterns of human rights abuses over the decades, these steps constitute gross violations of the human rights guaranteed in various human rights treaties and instruments including the ICCPR, the Convention Against Torture (CAT), the Geneva Conventions especially the Third Convention which addresses the treatment of civilians, and the Genocide Convention.
• India and Pakistan fought the first of their four wars over Kashmir in 1947-48, and the ceasefire brokered by the UN in 1948 defined the Line of Control, dividing Indian-held Kashmir from the Pakistan side, which is known as Azad Kashmir. The Line of Control, now heavily militarized, is an arbitrary boundary like the Berlin Wall, and is just as hated by the people it divides. It was India under the prime ministership of Nehru that took the dispute to the UN Security Council, which passed a series of resolutions stipulating that the final status of Jammu and Kashmir would be settled by a plebiscite. The plebiscite was never held and instead the democratically-elected government of Sheikh Abdullah was overthrown in 1953 (Nyla Ali Khan 2014). He was imprisoned for the next eighteen years, and replaced by a succession of pliant governments that would keep Kashmir quiet for India, u til it became impossible in 1987.
• While it is best known for the land reforms, the Naya Kashmir manifesto envisaged the creation of a progressive welfare state, with citizens enjoying equal rights whatever their religion, race, birth or gender. The state would guarantee every citizen “freedom of conscience, worship, speech, assembly, education, property, work, rest, organization” and “guarantee to womenfolk equal rights available to men” (Bhat 2014). The political aspirations embodied in the Naya Kashmir manifesto are grounded in the Kashmiri Muslim experience and cultural values. These established universal free education in Kashmir over 50 years before this essential democratic right was introduced in India. The land reforms were successful in giving land to the tiller. Not surprisingly, these became one of the first targets for the Indian state once it established direct control over Kashmir in 2019 (Jain and Beg 2024).
• The Naya Kashmir reforms of 1947-53 showed through practice the profound rejection of caste and inequality. This immediately b ought them into conflict with the Indian state which stepped into the Dogra regime’s boots in 1947 and which continued to rely on the small Hindu minority to run the repressive state apparatus. Because most of the landlords whose landholdings were redist ibuted were Hindus, both Dogras and Pandits, and the beneficiaries were poor Muslims, the Indian media and public discourse portrayed the land reforms as “communal.” This became the basis for a sustained campaign against Sheikh Abdullah and, along with his waning support for accession to India and continued demand for a plebiscite, inspired the coup of 1953.
• Over the years, India made a series of unilateral moves, attempting to integrate Kashmir into the Indian union by hollowing ou the guarantees of autonomy in Article 370. This also meant taking over natural resources, primarily forests and water sources. The question of central control over finances, natural resources and economic development in Kashmir is focused on two major issues: the struggle over control of hydroelectric projects between the state government and the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), and the uneven distribution of centrally-allocated fiscal resources between the different sub-regions, favori g Hindu-majority Jammu and Buddhist-majority Ladakh over the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley. Central control over economic and financial resources thus deprived Kashmir of revenues from hydroelectric projects and at the same time, widened the ethnic and eligious divides between the populations of the region through uneven disbursement of financial resources.
• While there is little academic work available on the topic of central control over natural resources in Kashmir, it regularly makes the headlines, especially the production of hydroelectricity and control over hydroelectric projects in the state. Numerous hydroelectric projects in the state supply electricity to Delhi, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, but Kashmiris have a limited and erratic power supply, with power cuts lasting up to eight hours every day. Consequently, the Kashmir government has had to buy power instead of using the locally-generated hydroelectricity. While the hydroelectric projects were meant to be transferred to the state government, this not happened yet (KL News Network 2019). In true colonial style, the focus of the Indian state’s activities in Kashmir has been military control and resource extraction. As in the northeast and Punjab, control over natural esources, including timber and sand mining has been jealously guarded by the central government (Rasool 2025). Nevertheless, the reforms enacted in the early years of Kashmiri autonomy created the basis for a resilient society with a sound economic basis. This is reflected in basic wellness indices such as life expectancy and poverty levels, where Kashmir ranks higher than prosperous Indian states like Gujarat (Vishwadeepak 2019).
• Attacks on human rights defenders and journalists have been another continuing feature of Indian strategies in Kashmir. The mu der of human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi in 1996 parallels the disappearance and killing of Jaswant Singh Khalra in Punjab the previous year - he too was warned very publicly by the army to stop his work defending Kashmiri prisoners and exposing the torture and extrajudicial killings by the Indian army. His abduction and murder were staged as a public spectacle, to serve as a warning. Despite the harsh and continuing repression, it is in Kashmir where the paradigm of resistance is shaped most clearly by he insistence on the centrality of memory and justice in any resolution (Mathur 2015 and 2014). Human rights groups have continued to investigate and document abuses like disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, rape, mass graves, and pellet gun injures as well as arbitrary detentions over decades. As in Nagaland, the history of military violence has touched virtually every home and family in the valley. The total number of those killed, maimed, and otherwise harmed will probably never be known. To date, no one has been held accountable for these atrocities.
• In Kashmir, where the armed conflict has lasted for three decades, one can see all the strategies of Indian counterinsurgency in their most fully developed form. The village groupings, concentration camps where Naga, Mizo and tribal villagers were forcibly gathered to slowly starve are now replicated on a vast scale as the whole of the Kashmir valley becomes a prison with all the necessities to sustain existence being removed one by one. Through the winter of 2019-20, the valley experienced severe blizzards without emergency services, electricity and without any cash available in the ATMs. The long-term strategies, of destroying livelihoods and bodies as a means of forcing a population to submit are all manifest in concentrated form, as reports of looting, rotting crops, economic devastation and torture testify on a regular basis.
• In Kashmir, the calendar of loss is also a calendar of resistance. One of the leading human rights groups in the Valley is the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) founded in 1994 by Parveena Ahangar, whose son was taken away by the army in 1991. Javed Ahmed Ahangar was 17 years old at the time and studying for his high school exams when he was arrested along wi h a friend. The friend was later released, but Javed was never seen or heard of again. Under Parveena’s APDP has become a rallying point for victims and survivors. Guided by the concerns of the families, APDP’s mandate has expanded to cover crimes like extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. In 2007, APDP began documenting abuses in collaboration with the UN High Commission on Human Rights to produced a detailed record, which provides documentary evidence that may be used in future international crimi al tribunals on crimes against humanity in Kashmir. Such accountability is essential to any kind of peace settlement.
• Among those seeking justice for the crimes committed by the Indian state against them is Masooda Parveen, whose husband Ghulam Mohiuddin Regoo, a businessman and lawyer, was murdered by the army in 1998. Arrested by the army and pro-India militants at the instigation of a business rival, he was tortured first in his own home and then in the army camp where he was taken for “inte rogation.” He died under torture. To conceal the evidence, a landmine was tied to his body and exploded. The broken pieces were left by the front door of the house two days later. Traumatized and left with the responsibility of bringing up her young children singlehandedly, Masooda Parveen was nevertheless determined to seek justice. Since the courts in Kashmir were completely under the domination of the army, she chose to go to the Supreme Court of India and petitioned for compensation for the wrongful death of her husband. The petition was refused twice before the Supreme Court agreed to consider it, but in 2007 ruled in favor of the army. It also ruled that AFSPA gives military personnel the right to kill on suspicion, maintaining that the law was essential to upholding Indian rule in Kashmir. Masooda Parveen, who now identifies as Kashmiri rather than Indian, reflects on the outcome: “After this judgment, how does India claim me as its citizen? By what right?” She is haunted by the memory of her husband’s death. “What did he ever do to them? They killed him, then they mutilated his body.” She feels that her struggle for justice is also fought for the many others who have suffered as much or even more than she has, but are forced to remain silent and helpless. Echoing a universal sentiment among the victims and survivors of Indian army violence, she says that she will fight for justice until the end of her life.
• In May 2012, the Supreme Court again upheld the principle of military impunity in the Pathribal fake encounter case. “Fake encounter” is a term from the coded lexicon of Indian policing and counterinsurgency, widely understood to denote a staged shootout with militants - in other words, an extrajudicial killing by the police or army. In March 2000, in Pathribal, five Kashmiri villagers were abducted and killed by the army, and passed off as the militants responsible for the infamous Chattisinghpora massacre, where armed militants killed 35 Sikhs. Since the killings took place just before U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit to India, they attracted international attention. The identity of the killers was somewhat blurred, as the militants wore Indian army uniforms and shouted Hindu slogans during the killing, according to the sole surviving eyewitness. An Indian army post less than half a mile from the village took no action to prevent the massacre, which unfolded over three hours. In a remarkable, candid interview, a senior Indian army official acknowledged that the Chhittisingpora massacre was carried out by pro-India militants or renegades.
• A few days after the massacre, five men from nearby villages were abducted and killed by the military in an “encounter” in the Anantnag area of south Kashmir. The army claimed that the slain men were the “foreign militants” responsible for the massacre. The bodies were buried and the officers in charge commended. Protests by villagers in the area, however, brought to light the fact that the military had abducted 17 local men, and that those killed by the army were not militants but local farmers. The killings continued. On April 3, police opened fire on a group of protestors at Barakpora, killing eight, including the son of one of the missing persons. The mass protests continued and resulted in an investigation and the exhumation of the bodies, which were identified through DNA testing as civilians from Pathribal village.
• In 2003, the inquiry into the encounter was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which submitted its report in 2006. On the basis of the report, the CBI filed kidnapping and murder charges against five army officers belonging to the 7th Rashtriya Rifles. The army’s response was to invoke the AFSPA. The matter went before the Supreme Court, which in May 2012 gave the army the choice of surrendering the officers to face trial in a civilian court or to institute a court martial. After much delay, the army chose the latter option. Amnesty International (2012a) noted that “by giving the first option to the army for a court martial, this ruling reinforces immunity from prosecution in other cases of alleged extra-judicial killings in Jammu and Kashmir…Instead of upholding the universal and constitutional right to life, the Supreme Court chose to rely on emergency laws which provide excessive powers, as well as impunity, to the army.” The court martial in the Pathribal fake encounter case opened in September 2012. Fear, intimidation, and the absence of information about court dates and locations prevented the testimonies of the families of the victims and local witnesses from being recorded. On January 23, 2014, the army closed the court martial, stating that: “The evidence recorded could not establish a prime-facie case against any of the accused persons but clea ly established that it was a joint operation by the Police and the Army, based on specific intelligence.”
• Along with the de jure impunity given to the army by AFSPA, the police and paramilitaries operate with de facto impunity. Mohammed Ashraf Mattoo is a father seeking justice for his son, 17-year-old Tufail Ahmed Mattoo, who was killed when he was struck by a tear gas shell fired by a policeman in his face in June 2010. Tufail was returning home from school when he walked past pro estors demanding justice for three young men who had been abducted and killed at Machil by the army and passed off as “foreign militants” a few months earlier. On that day, June 11, police and paramilitaries were firing tear gas shells and baton-charging the protestors. A press note prepared by Mohammed Ashraf Mattoo and circulated on social media gives an eyewitness’ version of the killing:
• “The woman, who is sole ‘official eye witness’ of the above case, narrates the heart wrenching incident of Tufail’s killing,” Matoo wrote. “‘It was 11th June, a Friday. There was a loud bang,’ she says. The boom that sounded like that of a grenade explosion ‘was actually sound of a tear gas shell being fired.’ She says that moments before hearing the explosion, ‘I saw three boys running towards the Gani Memorial from Syed Sahib Shrine. One of them was Tufail. He was being closely chased by the policemen. Tufail entered the gate of the stadium but could not go too far as he slipped on the mud. Two Jammu and Kashmir police officers then came out of the Gypsy (police van) and followed him to the ground,’ she says. They were hurling abuses at him in Kashmiri, saying “we will not leave you.” The officers aimed at Tufail from close range and fired a tear gas shell straight at him.’ The officers went near his body, she claims. ‘I managed to catch hold of arm of the officer who had fired at Tufail and started slapping his face. But another officer who had ordered the former to shoot pushed me to the ground and freed him from my hold. They escaped in the same white colored Gypsy they had arrived in,’ she says. ‘The tear gas shell shattered Tufail’s skull and killed him instantly.’”
• When the family went to the local police station, the police refused to file an incident report. The family then went to the local court, which ordered the police to record and investigate the incident. A year later, when the police investigation had not made any progress, the family petitioned the High Court in Srinagar, which ordered a special police investigation. “In Novembe 2012, the police team submitted a case closure report to a Srinagar trial court, without informing the Mattoo family, with the formulaic response that the perpetrators of the crime were “untraceable.” The Mattoo family challenged the closure of the investigation before the J&K High Court, because the police investigation disregarded crucial evidence and eyewitness testimonies, including a post-mortem report submitted by a team of doctors stating that the cause of death was a tear gas shell.
• In the course of the police investigation, the eyewitness who confronted the policeman who shot Tufail was able to identify him in a line up. Yet the investigation report dismissed her testimony with two self-contradictory statements about the suspect she picked: first, they said that the man was actually a tailor, not a policeman; and second, they said that he was a policeman but was not on duty at that location on that day. On February 14, 2014, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court ordered the police to reopen their investigation into the killing of Tufail Ahmed Mattoo. Mohammed Ashraf Matoo understands clearly what is at stake in his struggle for justice for his son: “I am defending the right of every citizen in a democracy to get justice,” he says. He argues that justice is a basic human right, and human rights are for all, regardless of religion, race, or language. Ten years la er, the family continues to seek justice for the murder of Tufail. A hearing scheduled for February 2020 had to be misused because their lawyer, Mian Abdul Qayoom, Chair of the Srinagar High Court Bar Association, has been under detention since August 209.
• The State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in Kashmir, despite many shortcomings and a lack of resources, has begun investigati g the crimes that have gone unpunished for so long. It has investigated thousands of unmarked mass graves in border districts, as well as the forgotten massacres of the early 1990s when army and police opened fire on unarmed protestors, and the mass rapes at Kunan Poshpora. The Kashmiri emphasis on discovering the truth and seeking justice for these crimes is consistent with international human rights law. Given the scale of the human rights violations and the persistence of impunity, the only possibility for justice is through international criminal prosecutions. Such prosecutions will be an essential part of any negotiated and peaceful settlement of the Kashmir conflict. International law presents at least an ideal of justice that cannot be subverted by impunity and claims of national sovereignty. It has come to recognize that victims of grave violations of human rights and society at large have a right to see justice done; a right to know the truth; an entitlement to compensation and also to nonmoneta y forms of restitution; and a right to new, reorganized, and accountable institutions. It must be recognized in Kashmir that bringing human rights abusers to justice is an essential part of the peacemaking process itself. There is no statute of limitatio s in international law on war crimes and crimes against humanity.
• Viewed in perspective, Indian strategies clearly show a pattern of pushing peaceful protests deliberately towards armed insurgency. This can be seen in the early years in 1990 and 1991, and again in 2008 and 2009, when militancy was almost ended. The relentless repression, abuses and killings led to a new generation of militancy by 2016, which again provides the pretext for a military crackdown. Following the abrogation of Article 370 and the heightened repression, there has been a resurgence of militantly as young Kashmiris take up arms to defend their communities.
• By abrogating Article 370, the BJP fulfilled a long-cherished ambition of the Hindu nationalist project, to end the special status and limited autonomy of Kashmir. By dong so, it may have inadvertently opened up a path for the fulfillment of another long-held ambition, the Kashmiri wish for self- determination. On the one hand there is the argument that, despite all the legal obuscation involved, the removal of Article 370 also nullifies the state’s accession to India (Lone 2024). Kashmir accession to India was conditional on the guarantees of autonomy contained in Article 370, pending a final determination of the status of the territory by way of a plebiscite. The removal of Article 370 nullifies the Accession of Kashmir and again opens up the question of its status, which India had managed to successfully shield from international scrutiny. Simultaneously, this undemocratic and unconstitutional step has focused attention on the human rights and humanitarian situation in Kashmir. This is both unexpected and unprecedented, and has put Kashmir squarely on the global agenda again, after decades (Beg and Mathur 2024).
• International concern has been building for a few years, and APDP has probably done more than any other group to put human rights abuses in Kashmir on the UN agenda. In 2017, the Parveena Ahangar was one of the two Kashmiri human rights defenders awarded the annual Rafto Prize. The following year, the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) released the first ever report by the UN on human rights in Kashmir (2018 and 2019). Despite strong Indian protests and pressure, OHCHR also released a follow up report in 2019, noting India’s refusal to engage with international human rights institutions. Since August 209, the US House of Representatives has held two hearings focusing on human rights in Kashmir, and congressional leaders have gone on the record to express strong sympathy for the current plight of the Kashmiris as well as principled support for their right of self-determination.
• Any solution will have to find a way to reunify the two parts of Kashmir divided by the Line of Control that marks the Ceasefi e Line of 1948, where the Indian and Pakistani armies stood at the close of their first war. Much like other partitions and divisions, it is bitterly resented since it divides villages and separates families from each other. The Kashmiris call it the khooni lakeer, or “line of blood.” Most workable proposals for the resolution of the conflict recognize the role the division has played in fueling the conflict, by dividing Kashmir arbitrarily and turning family members on the Pakistan side of the divide in o what India calls “infiltrators” and “terrorists.” Most proposals for peace suggest a similar series of steps: demilitarization and free movement across the LoC; the release of all political prisoners; an end to all repressive laws that limit freedom of speech, expression, and association; accountability and justice for human rights abuses through mechanisms such as an international criminal tribunal; and the creation within a specifically defined time-frame of a process such as a plebiscite for determi ing the future of the region according the wishes of its diverse inhabitants. To these proposals, Kashmiri political scientist Noor Ahmed Baba adds the guiding principle, born out of the uniquely Kashmiri ethos, of turning Kashmir from a conflict zone in o a zone of peace between India and Pakistan.
• When it comes to implementing any solutions, what has been lacking hitherto has been the political will, but regional and global shifts in power may yet make it possible. Along with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the emergence of China and Russia as major powers on the world stage has changed regional power dynamics (Sawhney 2022). The global shift towards multipolarity has been accompanied by significant economic integration, radiating outwards not only from China but Russia as well. Russia has an interest in seeing rapprochement between India and Pakistan to enable it to build oil and gas pipelines to India and Southeast Asia. The International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), linking St. Petersburg with Iranian ports and thereby to India and Southeast Asia is already in operation. Kashmiri scholars have long argued that resolution of the conflict must be accompanied by restoration of the region’s place as a contact zone between central and South Asia. Global shifts may at last make this possible.
• China has an even stronger investment in the region. It controls the Aksai Chin region of the disputed territories that made up the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, and claims the whole of Ladakh. Pravin Sawhney (2022) is one of the few analysts who has followed the close cooperation between China and Pakistan in the military field. He argues that this reaches the level of in eroperability of the two militaries, creating a single front what will be impossible for India to face in case of any further misadventures in Kashmir. This development is itself a reaction to Indian threats against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which runs just north of Ladakh and Kashmir, and to direct attacks against Chinese interests in Pakistan (Mathur 2024). By joining the so-called Quad, comprising the US, Japan and Australia, an informal grouping dedicated to containing China in the Indian and Pacific oceans, India has further alienated China.
• The abrogation of Article 370 by the Indian government, in violation of the Geneva Conventions on the administration of disputed territories, alarmed China sufficiently that it mobilized its troops not only on the Line of Contact with the Indian army in Ladakh but along its entire Himalayan border with India, which stretches over 2,000 miles of difficult and mostly impassable te rain. This brings the possibility of conflict between the two Asian giants also to the northeast states, fraught as they are with internal tensions. It again highlights the vulnerability of the Chicken’s Neck that connects the seven states of the northeast to the Indian mainland. It’s not clear how long the Indian state can maintain the balance of internal and external conflicts in the future. It’s equally unclear whether there is a constituency within India that has the vision and forethought to choose peace as an option for security, both internally and externally.
• Chapter 7 2005 to the present: Chhattisgarh
• By 2005, the global push for resource extraction had reached a new frontier in central India. The mineral and forest resources of the central Indian adivasi belt remained largely untouched despite encroachments by colonial and postcolonial governments. The indigenous populations had maintained the links between land and community, treating land as a community resource that could not be alienated: “...India’s tribal cultures remain the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation, in their age-old knowledge and value systems that promote long-term sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature; in emphasis on equality and sharing rather than hierarchy and competition; and in the resilience of dozens of movements against land grabs.” (Padel and Gupta 2017) Corporate India, unfortunately, does not share those values. As Sundar puts it, “In the cities, however, these forms of life find no favor. The gods that live in the mountains are signed away to mining companies, whose infra-vision does not see the splendor of the forest, the flower tucked behind the ear, the feather in the dancing headgear, but only the minerals beneath.” (2019, 8-9) The commodification of nature shows the sharp contrast between the two systems of life and belief.
• As in the northeast, Kashmir, and Punjab, the adivasis who wanted to preserve their way of life and connection to the land have been turned by the logic of counterinsurgency into threats to national security. Those who resisted the push to privatize indigenous lands and turn their fragile ecologies into industrial desolation came to be branded as “Maoists” or “Naxalites.”
• They were labeled the “greatest security threat facing India today” in 2005 by the prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, from the centrist Congress party, a ‘threat’ that required a massive mobilization of police and paramilitary forces. All the techniques of counterinsurgency perfected across the decades were brought here to force people to part with their land: torture, extrajudicial killings, rape, counterinsurgency death squads, burned villages, internment camps, and a national press that cheered all of this in the name of “economic development” while decrying Maoist violence. Human rights defenders, civil libertarians, journalists and academics attempting to document and resist this state of affairs are themselves labeled Maoists, charged with sedition, attacked, and jailed on trumped up charges.
• The central question, as Sundar puts it, is “...really about Indian democracy, when it reduces what are essentially political contests over rights, distributive justice and alternative visions of the good to law and order problems, and when it would rather fight against its poorest citizens than talk to them.” (2018, 14) Rather than devise new political strategies for accommoda ing dissent on a range of issues, the state has chosen instead to refine its counterinsurgency strategies and expand its power to police and terrorize dissidents and civilian populations. This chapter looks at the counterinsurgency operations in the cent al Indian adivasi belt in context of the late capitalist push for resource extraction. The militarization of the police, arming of pro-state militias and forcibly displacement of thousands of people into internment camps, and attacks on journalists and human rights defenders draw upon practices perfected over the years.
• The central Indian adivasi belt stretches the width of the subcontinent, from Gujarat and Rajasthan in the west, through Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Andhra Pradesh to Odisha in the east. While tribal populations have been concentrated in only some districts, and these have always had a number of outsiders among the population, they differ profoundly in culture a d society from the dominant paradigms of caste and capitalism. Felix Padel and Malvika Gupta (2013) outline the basic anthropological understanding of the cultural ecology of adivasi societies, based, as in the northeast, in the connection between people and the land: “...fundamentally these societies differ from “modern society” in their emphasis on communal rather than private property - an insight that gave rise to the term ‘communism’ and a difference that remains alive in India even today. It became visible when the 12 gram sabhas (village councils) in Niyamgiri not only rejected Vedanta’s mining project, but also said “No” to parcels of forest land granted under the Forest Rights Act (FRA). Rather, they claimed common ownership over the whole area.” The victory of the Konds in Odisha to prevent mining for bauxite in the sacred hills of Niyamgiri, discussed in the final section of this chapter, is inspiring for many reasons. It is also, unfortunately, an exception in the chronicles of the clash between tribals and multinational mining corporations.
• Like the Sixth Schedule for the tribal districts in the northeast, the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution recognizes the unique tribal culture of central India and protects the connection of the community to the land in areas where they form the majority of the population. Like the Sixth Schedule, there are enough loopholes in its guarantees for tribal rights to communal property to allow for alienation of land on a large scale. Padel and Das (2013) note that while it attempts to safeguard tribal community land ownership, “This is complicated by this ambiguity as to which groups of people are classified as Scheduled Tribes, the non-inclusion of a large proportion of tribal villages under the specified Scheduled Areas, and the loophole that allows the sale of tribal lands for projects deemed ‘in the national interest’ or for ‘public purpose.’ This loophole has caused the displacement of perhaps 20 million tribal people - a quarter of India’s Scheduled Tribe population - within the last 60 years.”
• As with other indigenous peoples around the world, the lands where the adivasis live are rich in mineral wealth. Deposits of i on, bauxite, coal, and limestone have attracted both Indian and multinational mining corporations, including Tata, Jindal, Posco, Mittal and Vedanta. Those protesting the forcible takeover of their lands are at risk of being identified with the Maoists, leftist militants who have been operating in the area since the 1980s. The Maoists too addressed local inequalities and grievances and established what was essentially a state within a state, though they chose the path of armed struggle. They began by pressuring the local bureaucracy to enforce the minimum wage, stop taking bribes, and pay fair prices for the forest produce collected and sold by adivasis.
• The legal framework already in place was further strengthened with state-specific laws as well as new legislation extending emergency powers to police. The Andhra Pradesh Suppression of Disturbances Act of 1967 was first used against Naxalites, and allowed the state government the power to notify the tribal areas as “disturbed areas.” This gave the police expanded powers, including the right to shoot to kill. The short-lived Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) was in effect for only two years between 2002 and 2004, but in that time “...3,000 people in Jharkhand alone, including children and elderly people, were jailed under its provisions.” (Human Rights Law Network 2009, 150) The majority of those detained under POTA were Adivasis. POTA was replaced by the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act (UAPA) in 2004, which “goes so far as to criminalize displays of opposition to governmental policies to acquire land under the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 and allows the state to evict people for mining, SEZ or industrialization projects.” (2009, 150) The Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA), enacted in 2006, ma ks a new level of repression, effectively criminalizing protest by outlawing actions which “encourage(s) the disobedience of the law.”
• By 2009, counterinsurgency strategy had shifted from using Salwa Judum to Operation Green Hunt, deploying paramilitary forces in an all-out war against the Naxalites. Said to be operating in states along the so-called “Red Corridor” - Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra - it consisted of “combing operations” to target Naxalite supporters. The chief difference on the ground was that while under Salwa Judum, the bodies of those killed were left uncounted in the villages and forests, they were now counted and listed as “encounter deaths” for which paramilitary personnel get bounties and promotions. Like the army, the paramilitaries come to stay, and establish a permanent presence in huge camps scarring the forests.
• Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are not remote border areas. They are difficult if not impossible to seal off to reporters, human rights and civil liberties monitors, and academic researchers seeking to document the lived reality of the conflict. It was and is not enough to rely on the national press to present a version that is hostile to the tribals and Maoists. It became necessary to silence critics of government policies and state violence, in a very direct way. Nearly all of the writers and researchers cited here have faced repression and censorship in many forms, and several have been imprisoned. A recent incident reported in the October 2019 Bulletin of the Peoples Civil Liberties Union (PUCL) illustrates this process. Two young tribal activists, Podiya Sori and Lachhu Mandavi opposed to mining in lands sacred to the tribals were killed by police in a fake encounter in Septemer 2019, and the civil liberties advocates demanding justice were prosecuted and arrested.
• “...PUCL is appalled that the Dantewada police has lodged an FIR against the activists, sarpanches of Dantewada, as well as the 150-200 unnamed tribal villagers, who were merely registering the complaint of an extra-judicial killing and engaged in a peaceful protest against this injustice, and condemns this police action as retributive action meant to intimidate those speaking up for Adivasi rights. Podiya Sori and Lachu Mandavi were young and respected leaders from village Gumiyapal in Dantewada district who had been active in the popular movement against the plans of the mining giant Adani Group to start iron-ore mining operations in Nandaraj Mountain in Kirandul, which is held sacred by the tribals in the region.” (PUCL 2019)
• The security forces claimed that the two activists killed by police were Naxalites. A fact-finding team that included Bela Bha ia, Soni Sori, Linga Kodopi and Hidme Madkam were told that the two had been with three other youths, on the night of September 13. Two managed to escape, but the next day Podiya and Lachhu were killed and their bodies shown to media and the public as Naxalites. The third youth remained in police custody. The villagers were not allowed to file a police report of an extrajudicial killing. They were not even allowed to enter the police station. While the third youth in custody has been released, the charges against the human rights defenders asking for an investigation into the killings still stand.
• Sudha Bhardwaj, the PUCL lawyer, was arrested on trumped up charges of aiding Maoists in November 2018, along with many others, all of them highly respected figures in the field of civil liberties. She has become a symbol of the Indian government’s attacks on human rights defenders. A complete list of all those arrested, charged and tried as Maoist sympathizers to date reads like a who’s who of leading the civil liberties and human rights advocates in India. They include Dr. Binayak Sen, Sudha Bhardwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Dr. G. Saibaba, Varvara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Gautam Navlakha, Soni Sori, Bela Bhatia, and Rona Wilson. Anthropologist Nandini Sundar was charged with sedition by the Chhattisgarh government for her part in the PIL which led to the banning of Salwa Judum. These arrests are part of a larger effort by the Hindu nationalist BJP government in power at the center to stifle all dissent. Journalists, academics and other public figures supporting tribal struggles are labeled “urban Naxals” and face constant threats of arrest on sedition charges. The circle of Indian counterinsurgency is nearly complete, and the policies o repression that originated in the forests of Nagaland and Mizoram have come home to the universities and news media in Delhi and other urban centers.
• “The Cochabamba Declaration of the Rights of Nature or Mother Earth, in Bolivia in April 2010, is a powerful expression of this refusal to accommodate to capitalist patterns of over-exploiting nature. An inevitable result of over-extracting mineral resources is ecocide: the destruction of ecosystems, including water sources and biodiversity of life forms – visible over vast areas of tribal central India. In contrast to mainstream concepts of development, the movements we are discussing press for real development, meaning an enhancement of the quality of life through a democratic devolvement of power to local communities, and rejection of the large-scale projects being promoted through massive financial investment, which in essence represent a situation of over-industrialisation, creating wastelands where local ecosystems and communities have been suppressed or even annihilated, increasingly visible in many parts of India. India’s Adivasis, like indigenous peoples worldwide, still sustain lifestyles that take a radically different approach to nature.” (Padel and Das 2008 and 2013)
• The struggle of the Kond tribals of Odisha to prevent bauxite mining in their sacred Niyamgiri hills is an inspiring story and a rare win for indigenous peoples and their supporters. It was supported by a worldwide mobilization that managed to stop the multinational mining corporation Vedanta from beginning the highly destructive practice of bauxite mining. Detailed work over decades by anthropologist Felix Padel and film-maker Samarendra Das (2010) shows the chain of destruction from ecological devastation in the lands where bauxite is mined to its final use in the making of the planes and weapons that enable contemporary warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. They write:
• “Every level of social structure is damaged when a mine or metals factory takes over indigenous people’s land: their ecologically-attuned economy, strongly egalitarian power structure, material culture and cultivation systems based on self-sufficiency, and an identity based on rootedness to the land that often seems very hard for non-tribals to comprehend – all are destroyed. This is why traditional land rights of indigenous peoples need to include rights to the minerals and other resources in and below their land, and to be acknowledged in national as well as international legislation.”
• Bauxite mining and aluminum production are particularly destructive processes.
• “The Kond area of central/southwest Orissa is now facing an invasion of aluminium companies, because the region’s 4000-foot mountains are capped by high-quality deposits of bauxite, and form one of the world’s largest deposits, in mountains whose base rock was named Khondalite after the Konds. This corporate invasion tramples on India’s Constitution, in particular its Fifth Schedule, which guarantees tribal people certain fundamental rights, especially the non-alienability of their land, within extensive, defined areas where they predominate.” (Padel and Das 2010, 334)
• Using a neoliberal vocabulary of “sustainable development” to conceal the environmental devastation caused by mining and processing projects from corporate giants like Tata, Vedanta and the South Korean Posco, these were presented to national and local bureaucrats and politicians as the future of economic prosperity for Odisha state and India. Even before mining permission was g anted in the Niyamgiri hills, Vendanta built its alumina refinery at Lanjigarh in the next district, despite local protests. This was to convince the Indian government of the seriousness of Vedanta’s interest in the project and also to pressure it.
• The Niyamgiri hills and especially the Niyam Dongar, are considered to be sacred by the Kond. This spiritual connection has enabled the Dongria Kond who, despite being some of the poorest people in the country, have preserved the forests and the natural environment on which they depend. Years of popular protests by the Kond to protect their lands, supported by environmental activists around the world led to a landmark Supreme Court judgement in April 2013, which ruled that local village councils, or gram sabhas, would decide if mining for bauxite should be allowed in the Niyamgiri hills. All 12 gram sabhas voted against mining a d for the moment, the tribal people had won a major victory over the multinational corporation. In January 2014, following the voting by the gram sabhas, the central Environment ministry banned mining in Niyamgiri.
• The Supreme Court judgement was based on two laws passed by the more centrist Congress-led UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government that held power at the center between 2004 and 2014. The The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, known as the Forest Rights Act or FRA of 2006 gives Scheduled Tribes and other forest dwellers the right to community forest resource rights. It also gives them individual forest rights to cultivate land; to collect and sell minor forest produce (excluding timber); grazing rights and use of water bodies. The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARR) of 2013 replaced the nineteenth-century Land Acquisition Act, 1894, increased compensation, and recognized the claims of all who depended on the land, and not just the landowners. This offers some protections to tenant farmers and sharecroppers as well. LARR also mandated social impact assessments (SIA) as well as the consent of 80% of the landowners concerned for land acquisition for private projects and 70% for a public-private projects.
• Despite the ban on mining in the Niyamgiri hills, the Venadanta refinery at Lanjigarh refinery continues to function, processi g bauxite from other mines in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Guinea in Africa. The toxic by-products of the aluminum refining process include a red mud along with atmospheric pollutants like sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and PM 10 and PM 2.5, and carbon dioxide. There are potential uses for the toxic red mud, including extraction of valuable metals like iron and titanium, but there are no commercially viable processes for this . Before the final disposal of the toxic waste by dumping it into the sea or bu ying it, the red mud lies stacked around the refinery, causing health problems for workers and nearby villagers. (Valay Singh 018) There is the risk of seepage into ground water when it rains, causing long-term ecological damage. Recently police and the union home ministry have dubbed protestors against the refinery as Maoists, opening the way for further repression. This heightened repression (Amnesty International 2018) may also indicate a renewed push by Vedanta and the Hindu nationalist BJP government to begin mining operations despite the Supreme Court judgement.
• The consequences of the corporate developmental model are all too clear to the tribals, which is why they resist. Social disin egration and environmental degradation are two immediate impacts that can be witnessed in other districts where the mining conglomerates have been operating. As Padel and Das (2010b) show, for the adivasis, like other indigenous peoples around the world, when the community’s link to the land is broken, their social structure and cultural bearings are also lost:
• “...displacement means cultural genocide, because when they lose their land, every aspect of their social structure is in effect destroyed: their economy and identity, because of loss of status as self-sufficient farmers; their political structure, because from being mainly self-employed they become dependent on corporate and government hierarchies, forming a bottom rung of labo ers or unemployed; their social relationships, because they cease to be a largely self- sufficient, cohesive community; their religion, because ‘even our gods are destroyed’ when their villages are bulldozed (in the words of a tribal woman we met in Lanjigarh just after displacement); and their material culture and spatial arrangement of villages, because these give way to ‘colonies’ of alien design – separate houses of concrete, not earth and wood, joined together in lines, as in a traditional village.” (Padel and Das 2010b, 336)
• The adivasi vision of development is consistent with protecting the environment and their way of life. For anti-mining activis Lada Sikaka, who is a Dongria Kondh and president of the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti, this would entail preserving the ecology of Niyamgiri, with its forests, rivers and trees: “But we equally want education in our own language, health and government support to market our forest-based products. We get everything we need from the forest, we don’t want roads if that means the company will be allowed to mine here.” (quoted in Valay Singh 2018) As national and international jurisprudence around the world moves in the direction of defining the crime of ecocide and holding perpetrators accountable, it becomes clear that the model of development that the Indian state and its corporate partners seek to impose on the tribal belt is an outmoded one. The paradigm o the conquest of nature, as of other human beings, is outplayed. It belongs, together with nationalist jingoism tied to militaristic adventurism, in a museum of 19th and 20th century horrors rather than in the spheres of domestic and foreign policy.
• Chapter 8 Counterinsurgency and international law
• “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
• Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
• Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
• Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
• Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the digni y and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom....”
• - Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• ————
• Anyone who has grown up or lived India is familiar with the annual Republic Day parade in Delhi held at Jan Path on January 26 every year. The highlights are always the colorful floats representing the states, with their depiction of life in far-away places that are nevertheless “India.” Folk dancers in colorful costumes, lively and intriguing music, strange faces and voices, are all part of the pageantry of “unity in diversity.” It’s a compelling story, but it sits uneasily in the public mind alongside the discourse of national security and military operations, also associated with these same lands and peoples. These official tableaux have little or nothing to do with the actual histories and aspirations of the peoples they are purported to represent. The dissonance becomes deafening when one begins to seek, in time, detailed histories and original sources for each region. As some of the testimonies cited here show, and that has been partly the purpose in quoting the original sources at length, the experience of the borderlands has been one of expropriation, exploitation and military and police repression.
• “Despite these important differences in the situations of India’s two northwestern states, they are linked by a program of sta e terror emanating from New Delhi. From the viewpoint of the central government, a successful secessionist effort in either place could have a dangerous domino effect on other disaffected peripheries, perhaps pulling India’s fragile union apart a mere half century after independence. In the name of national security India passed counter terrorism legislation that severely curtailed democratic rights and freedoms as well as turning a blind eye to the pervasive abuses noted year after year by the international human rights community. (Now there is a national Human Rights Commission, but its powers are severely limited.) Perhaps as important is the national mood of increasing intolerance for dissent, which has transformed India’s intellectual life over the past decade and a half. Most Indians, willfully ignorant of the horrors taking place in their name, continue to chant the “mantra of democracy,” as Barbara Crossette calls it; there is an Alice in Wonderland quality to the national image of pacific mysticism and tranquil coexistence. At one point in the counterinsurgency in Punjab, so many bodies of “disappeared” Sikhs were being dumped in the state’s waterways that the governor of neighboring Rajasthan had to issue a complaint that dead bodies from Punjab were clogging up his canals. In Muzaffarabad, on the Pakistani or “free” side of Kashmir, a blackboard by the banks of the Jhelum River keeps count as Kashmiri bodies float down from across the border. (When I visited in January 1997, the grim chalk tally there was at 476. ) Given the deep mythic significance of India’s rivers in the Hindu tradition, this defilement is especially telling. “The largest democracy on earth” has polluted its sacred waters with the bodies of tortured citizens.” (Mahmood 2001, 58-59)
• These principles were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2006 as the Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law. This makes them part of the norms and standards of international law. These principles constitute a kind of inter ational bill of rights for victims of grave violations of human rights. (Bassiouni 2006) and attempt to move in the direction of enforcement, which has been the weakest link the international human rights system. This was necessary, Bassiouni noted, because “A significant gap exists between international human rights law and international criminal law. The parallel nature of these two bodies of law limits the reach of international criminal law to punish fundamental human rights violations.” The Principles do not however create any new treaties or conventions but rather build upon existing international laws to “...identify mechanisms, modalities, procedures and methods for the implementation of existing legal obligations under international human rights law and international humanitarian law which are complementary though different as to their norms.” (in McCracken 2006)
• “Effective measures aimed at the cessation of continuing violations;
• Verification of the facts and full and public disclosure of the truth to the extent that such disclosure does not cause furthe unnecessary harm or threaten the safety and interests of the victim, the victim’s relatives, witnesses, or persons who have intervened to assist the victim or prevent the occurrence of further violations;
• The search for the whereabouts of the disappeared, for the identities of the children abducted, and for the bodies of those killed, and assistance in the recovery, identification and reburial of the bodies in accordance with the expressed or presumed wish of the victims, or the cultural practices of the families and communities;
• An official declaration or a judicial decision restoring the dignity, the reputation and the rights of the victim and of perso s closely connected with the victim;
• Public apology, including acknowledgement of the facts and acceptance of responsibility; Judicial and administrative sanctions against persons responsible for the violations; Commemorations and tributes to the victims;
• Inclusion of an accurate account of the violations that occurred in international human rights and international humanitarian law training and in educational material at all levels.” (2006, 270-271)
• Thus Ensaaf defines its own goals in terms of promoting the survivors’ right to truth, “...by unveiling and preserving testimo ies of state abuse, proving the abuses were widespread and systematic, and providing a “statistical map” of abuses.” It supports their quest for accountability and justice, “..by preserving evidence and archival information, and articulating and demonstrating the command structure responsible for the abuses.” In relation to society at large, Ensaaf has the goal of informing “... the public and policy makers in India and abroad about the scale and scope of gross human rights violations in India.” In fact, whether or not they explicitly refer to these principles or international human rights, the many groups struggling for justice, accountability and rights from Manipur to Chhattisgarh follow similar paths. Freny Maneksha (2022) recorded the aspiration of an adivasi villager:
• “In Jagdalpur, Chhattisgarh, where a commission of hearing was taking place into the killings of Adivasis, one villager was asked why he had refused compensation. Was it at the dictates of the Maoists, asked the counsel for the state. His reply was out of a Greek tragedy. ‘We have sold our goats and cattle. We do not seek money. That would be akin to selling our dead,’ he said. He did not want compensation; he wanted something much larger and much more difficult: he wanted justice.” (2022, xiv)
• Further, across the regions, in different ways, people recognize that besides the need to preserve memory and seek justice, there is the urgent need to create conditions in which such abuses will not happen again. Aligning these efforts with and explicitly invoking the international law framework can only strengthen their efforts.
• Transitional justice with its focus on the rights of victims of grave violations of huma rights is one of the most recent and heartening developments in international human rights law, in principle, for victims, survivors and human rights advocates. It has been instrumental in “... entrenching and operationalizing the right to truth and the right to reparations, which were only aspirations prior to the establishment of transitional justice as a field of theory and practice, the former through truth-seeking tools such as truth commissions, commissions of inquiry and accessible archives and the latter mainly through the establishment of massive administration programmes offering not just economic compensation but complex benefits packages to victims.” (Human Rights Council 2018, 6) The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence was created by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2011 to “deal with situations in which there have been gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law.” Addressing the needs of post-conflic societies, the mandate was to “ensure accountability, serve justice, provide remedies to victims, promote healing and reconciliation, establish independent oversight of the security system and restore confidence in the institutions of the State and promote the rule of law in accordance with international human rights law.”
• Bassiouni (2006) lists other cases where reparations have been made by states, some cases the by the successor-states, to vic ims of violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws. He notes that such reparations are grounded in international law in principle and practice: “A State’s duty to provide a domestic legal remedy to victims of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law norms committed in its territory is well-grounded in international law. Provisions of numerous international instruments either explicitly or implicitly require this duty of States. Furthermore, a survey of contemporary domestic legislation and practice reveals that States endeavour to provide remedies for victims injured within their borders.” These cases include: reparations made by Germany, Austria and Switzerland to the victims of the Nazis and the Holocaust; US government redressal to American citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry interned by the government during the Seocnd World War, as well as accepting and settling the Indian Tribe Land Claims, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the the 1923 Rosewood massacre; and Chile’s commission to compensate victims of abuses by the military dictatorship under Pinochet.
• Chapter 9 Sovereignty and federalism
• Analysis of the peace accords signed by the Indian government with various groups in the northeast reveal their shortcomings (Rajagopalan 2008). Perhaps most important, any agreements that exclude the interests of different groups or factions cannot be expected to succeed, as we saw in the case of Nagaland. There is a surprising paucity of information on the various peace accords in Nagaland, Punjab and Mizoram, which is disappointing to anyone seeking the political lessons to be drawn from these, on federalism, regional and sub-regional autonomy, inter-ethnic relations and fiscal control, and above all on the nature of the cen ralized state. The lack of verifiable versions of the accords themselves and the near-absence of analysis are both symptomatic of the secrecy with which the Indian state has waged war on those it claims as its citizens. Based on the available versions of the Mizo and Punjab accords available, signed within a year of each other, three features stand out:
• These reveal that while some political concessions might be made by the center, the essentials of central military, administra ive and fiscal control are not negotiable. Further, as Roluahpuia (2023) shows, the Mizo accords excluded the possibilities of justice for those affected by the violence of the army as well as armed groups. Likewise in Punjab, the Rajiv-Longowal accords lack any accountability and justice processes for past abuses. As such, these are more akin to treaties of capitulation, signed by rebel leaders exhausted by decades of war and strife, than peace agreements (Sahadevan 2023)., and as such, are predestined to failure.
• Federalism, autonomy and self-determination are also the keys to conflict resolution. The work of Noor Ahmed Baba (2014) and Gull Muhammad Wani (2014)on Kashmir, Hausing (2014, 2017 and 2022) on the northeast and Pritam Singh (2008 and 2010) on Punjab is highly relevant to any future conflict resolution processes. It emphasizes the right of self-determination, respect for the histories of the borderlands as contact zones in framing future political arrangements, and the need for autonomy at all levels down to sub-regions to prevent continued conflict in highly polarized and plural populations. Asymmetric federation that takes into account regional and cultural aspirations is seen as a practical tool for achieving democracy, minority’ rights, representation and participation (Hausing 2014; Shaikhutdinova 2020).
• The theory and practice of federalism vary widely and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Federalism as a political form is variable, amorphous and evolving. It may include territorial and non-territorial forms of autonomy. However, these must be recognized as its strengths rather than weaknesses. Devolution of power and control over economic resources will be essential elements, as will recognition of cultural and social values. From a constitutional rather than a nationalist standpoint, there are a wealth of examples from around the world, including autonomy and proportional representation, which were ruled anti-national i India nearly a hundred years ago. These represent power sharing arrangements in plural and multiethnic societies, including many with histories of violent conflict. While each conflict and region will find a different solution, the answers will lie in their unique histories and experience as well as workable models of power sharing.
• Given the intricate balancing act between intensifying repression and violence against minorities throughout India and in the orderlands and the fierce resistance that must break out sooner or later as a result, the Indian state is playing with fire. While new technologies of communications fostered by the growth of the internet further enable centralized control, this too cuts both ways. On the one hand, governments around the world have enthusiastically adopted these as tools of surveillance and control, rendering legal constitutional arrangements almost moot. At the same time, the internet and social media have opened up possibilities for debate and discussion among people who hitherto had no contact with each other, opening up new democratic possibilities. Political prognosis is always difficult, but manifestly the international order that privileged the Indian state is bei g transformed before our eyes into a multipolar one, which is likely to be less understanding. China’s interests are already in direct conflict with India, not only in Ladakh and hence in Kashmir but all along the Himalayan border and specially in the no theast, where it claims Arunachal Pradesh as it own territory. On the other hand, periodic efforts by the US and the west to bring India back to the fold are taking increasingly strident forms, with many of the corporate giants that currently support the Hindu nationalist order in India under direct attack.
• Chapter 10 Seeing Delhi from Kashmir, at midnight
• ————
• Poetry and song can go where narrative and analysis cannot, expressing deep griefs and offering flashes of insight. Agha Shahid Ali, the poet and recording angel of Indian counterinsurgency in Kashmir, vividly evoked the experience of the borderlands in his poem “I see Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight”:
• The fire did not remain confined to the borderlands and now the violence of a highly militarized state, exercising jts enormous powers of control and coercion, reaches into every corner of life in India. It is midnight in Delhi, or nearly so.
• It is impossible to write a conclusion for this book, because the struggles it describes are not over. For several years before beginning this project, as I was finishing the manuscript of my book on Kashmir, I was haunted by the metaphor of the Chakravyuh, the destructive conjunction of impossibilities, one of the stories from the Mahabharata epic that speaks across millennia. A hostile formation that is impossible to defeat, while it is equally impossible to turn away from the battle. Coincidentally, or not, director Prakash Jha’s film Chakravyuh was released at about the same time, in 2012. The film deals with the conflicted loyalties engendered by the insurgency in the central Indian adivasi belt, when two friends find themselves on opposite sides. Kabir, played by Abhay Deol, infiltrates the Naxalite movement to spy for his friend, Adil Khan, an idealistic police officer, played by Arjun Rampal. But as Kabir learns of the corporate takeover of indigenous lands, the dispossession and displacement of the local people and the collusion of politicians and police, he changes sides. For the rebel taking on the combined power of the state and corporate capitalism, it does not end well. However, his life and death continue to inspire the movement.
• The Chakravyuh as an Indian myth and metaphor has come to stand for a deadly trap from which there is no way out and from which there is no turning away. As the film makes clear, in this vortex all values and ideals, including love, friendship, duty, loyalty, patriotism, and justice, will be tested and found wanting. By now this must sound like familiar territory to those writing about Indian counterinsurgency, and advocating for its victims. In this time I was haunted, too, by the music of Ludovico Einaudi, the Italian composer, whose evocation of the labyrinth embodies for me the search for understanding. The Chakravyuh, the I dian version of the true labyrinth, is however also susceptible of another meaning beyond inevitable if heroic defeat. Experts distinguish the true labyrinth from a maze in which one can indeed get lost. The labyrinth, instead, is a path that one must walk to the center, and then out again. The true labyrinth follows a pattern in which it is impossible to get lost, because there is only one path, though it turns and twists on itself, moving forwards and back.
• Tracing the history and meaning of the labyrinth across five thousand years of human history, the authoritative work on the suject is Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meanings Over 5,000 Years, by Hermann Kern, a German lawyer and art historian. Kern makes it clear that it is the path and the movement of the walker, or dancer, or warrior along it, that makes the labyrinth. The walls and exterior buildings may be added on, but they are extraneous to its purpose and meaning. The path is to be followed to the center, and then back out again. However, the person who returns is not the same as the one who entered. In a stunning revelation, Kern writes that “In the labyrinth, one does not lose oneself; in the labyrinth one finds oneself.” This makes the labyrinth, paradoxically, a profoundly transformative experience. Kern notes the recurring identification of the labyrinth as the site of reincarnation. “A walker leaving the labyrinth,” he writes, “is not the same person who entered it, but has been born again into a new phase or level of existence; the center is where death and rebirth occur.” (2000, 305)
• Perhaps to the reader, by this point the metaphor might seem a little forced or trite. To those walking the labyrinth, believi g themselves to be lost or worse, the meaning of the labyrinth as self-discovery and rebirth, rather than the end of all possibilities, can be inspiring.
• Appendices
• Special provision with respect to the State of Nagaland
• (1) Notwithstanding anything in this Constitution,
• (a) no Act of Parliament in respect of
• (i) religious or social practices of the Nagas,
• (ii) Naga customary law and procedure,
• (iii) administration of civil and criminal justice involving decisions according to Naga customary law,
• (iv) ownership and transfer of land and its resources, shall apply to the State of Nagaland unless the Legislative Assembly o Nagaland by a resolution so decides;
• (b) the Governor of Nagaland shall have special responsibility with respect to law and order in the State of Nagaland for so long as in his opinion internal disturbances occurring in the Naga Hills Tuensang Area immediately before the formation of that State continue therein or in any part thereof and in the discharge of his functions in relation thereto the Governor shall, after consulting the Council of Ministers, exercise his individual judgment as to the action to be taken: Provided that if any question arises whether any matter is or is not a matter as respects which the Governor is under this sub clause required to act in the exercise of his individual judgment, the decision of the Governor in his discretion shall be final, and the validity of anything done by the Governor shall not be called in question on the ground that he ought or ought not to have acted in the exercise of his individual judgment: Provided further that if the President on receipt of a report from the Governor or otherwise is satisfied that it is no longer necessary for the Governor to have special responsibility with respect to law and order in the State of Nagaland, he may by order direct that the Governor shall cease to have such responsibility with effect from such date as may be specified in the order;
• (c) in making his recommendation with respect to any demand for a grant, the Governor of Nagaland shall ensure that any money provided by the Government of India out of the Consolidated Fund of India for any specific service or purpose is included in the demand for a grant relating to that service or purpose and not in any other demand;
• (d) as from such date as the Governor of nagaland may by public notification in this behalf specify, there shall be estalished a regional council for the Tuensang district consisting of thirty five members and the Governor shall in his discretion make rules providing for
• (i) the composition of the regional council and the manner in which the members of the regional council shall be chosen: Provided that the Deputy Commissioner of the Tuensang district shall be the Chairman ex officio of the regional council and the Vice Chairman of the regional council shall be elected by the members thereof from amongst themselves;
• (ii) the qualifications for being chosen as, and for being, members of the regional council;
• (iii) the term of office of, and the salaries and allowances, if any, to be paid to members of, the regional council;
• (iv) the procedure and conduct of business of the regional council;
• (v) the appointment of officers and staff of the regional council and their conditions of services; and
• (vi) any other matter in respect of which it is necessary to make rules for the constitution and proper functioning of the regional council
• (2) Notwithstanding anything in this Constitution, for a period of ten years from the date of the formation of the State of Nagaland or for such further period as the Governor may, on the recommendation of the regional council, by public notification specify in this behalf,
• (a) the administration of the Tuensang district shall be carried on by the Governor;
• (b) where any money is provided by the Government of India to the Government of Nagaland to meet the requirements of the State of nagaland as a whole, the Governor shall in his discretion arrange for an equitable allocation of that money between the Tuensang district and the rest of the State;
• (c) no Act of the Legislature of Nagaland shall apply to the Tuensang district unless the Governor, on the recommendation of he regional council, by public notification so directs and the Governor in giving such direction with respect to any such Act may direct that the Act shall in its application to the Tuensang district or any part thereof have effect subject to such exceptions or modifications as the Governor may specify on the recommendation of the regional council: Provided that any direction given under this sub clause may be given so as to have retrospective effect;
• (d) the Governor may make regulations for the peace, progress and good government of the Tuensang district and any regulations so made may repeal or amend with retrospective effect, if necessary, any Act of Parliament or any other law which is for the time being applicable to that district;
• (e)
• (i) one of the members representing the Tuensang district in the Legislative Assembly of nagaland shall be appointed Minister for Tuensang affairs by the Governor on the advice of the Chief Minister and the Chief Minister in tendering his advice shall act on the recommendation of the majority of the members as aforesaid;
• (ii) the Minister for Tuensang affairs shall deal with, and have direct access to the Governor on, all matters relating to the Tuensang district but he shall keep the Chief Minister informed about the same;
• (f) notwithstanding anything in the foregoing provisions of this clause, the final decision on all matters relating to the Tuensang district shall be made by the Governor in his discretion;
• (g) in articles 54 and 55 and clause ( 4 ) of Article 80, references to the elected members of the Legislative Assembly of a State or to each such member shall include references to the members or member of the Legislative Assembly of Nagaland elected by the regional council established under this article;
• (h) in Article 170
• (i) clause ( 1 ) shall, in relation to the Legislative Assembly of Nagaland, have effect as if for the word sixty, the words forty six had been substituted;
• (ii) in the said clause, the reference to direct election from territorial constituencies in the State shall include election by the members of the regional council established under this article;
• (iii) in clauses ( 2 ) and ( 3 ), references to territorial constituencies shall mean references to territorial constituencies in the Kohima and Mokokchung districts
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