On January 10, 1929, a memorandum signed by 20 members of the Naga Club was submitted to the Indian Statutory Commission, also known as the Simon Commission, demanding exclusion of the Naga Hills from the Province of Assam. The underlying fear was that the Nagas would be lost in a sea of Indians if they came to be administered by the latter. John Hutton, an anthropologist who was the Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills, even suggested to the commission that a separate North-Eastern Frontier Hills comprising the hills tracts between Assam and Burma be set up.
Hutton’s proposals never materialised, and the Government of India Act, 1935 divided these tracts into Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas. The Assam Governor, Sir Robert Neil Reid, remarked about the 1935 Act, “It (the region) cannot be left to Indian political leadership with neither knowledge, interest or feelings for these areas.” There was no single lobbying group and the only ones who picked up the cause of the ethnic groups of the Northeast were concerned British administrators, whose letters to Viceroys Lord Linlithgow and Lord Wavell went unheeded. The British left, the Naga Hills became a district in Assam, and the Nagas got their apparent safeguard in the form of the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873 (better known as the Inner Line Regulations). But the core issue never went away.
Only last month, the Angami Students Union launched a ‘non-local verification drive’ in Kohima to check the inflow of illegal migrants. The move came in the backdrop of the Dimapur lynching of March 5. What unfortunately happened after the mob violence was that the incident was communalised shamelessly by the Indian media and faux liberals alike, and the issue of illegal migrants was delegitimised and frowned at in public discourse. And, the people came across as communal and xenophobic.
It is true that the local-outsider divide is deep and wide across the Northeast. The people have their own terms to identify outsiders. The Meiteis call them Mayang, Mizos — Vai, Angamis — Tephremia, Khasis — Dakhar, Adis — Nyipak. The names are different, the feeling is not. It is ethnic pride; it is also a deep-rooted identity crisis. Ethnicity may be conceived as a distinct identity, but it is not independent of social processes. So, without placing ethnicity in its proper empirical and historical contexts, a given situation cannot be comprehended or analysed. The question of ethnic identity and conflict in the Northeast has to be seen from a diachronic perspective. And so must be the ongoing agitation in Manipur.
Far too many myths are being propagated about the Manipur demand. First, the British never introduced the BEFR, or the Inner Line Permit system (ILPS) to protect the people of the region. This regulation was introduced prohibiting entry of British subjects within the Inner Line without proper permits issued by a competent authority. The British did not want to meddle with the truculent hill people since political and military disturbances could jeopardise the supply of labour to tea gardens.
The ILPS survived after Independence with the “British subjects” being replaced by “citizens of India” in 1950, but was confined to the Naga Hills and Mizo Hills districts, and the North-East Frontier Tracts (NEFT) which later became the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and finally Arunachal Pradesh.
The second myth is that the ILP issue in Manipur is a new-fangled one. In fact, it is not. On April 17, 1980, an anti-aliens procession by the All-Manipur Students Union (AMSU) was fired upon by the police. Two students were killed. The day is even today observed by AMSU as Realisation Day. In 1994, it opposed the government’s decision to grant photo-identity cards without first identifying foreign nationals. Governor VK Nayyar, since the state was under President’s Rule, signed an agreement with the AMSU agreeing to detect and deport foreign nationals using January 26, 1950 as the cut-off date.
Since then, the foreigners / illegal migrants issue has kept cropping up. And like most emotive issues do in Manipur, this issue too has been rising and ebbing without a pattern. The current conflagration has its roots in the 2011 census, details of which have not yet been released. According to ILP advocates, the number of Meiteis in the state is 7.5 lakh and tribals 6.7 lakh. The number of non-Manipuris stands at 7.4 lakh. But if the Scheduled Castes are excluded, Meiteis trail non-Manipuris by around 13,000. Even critics don’t dispute the numbers. There is no evidence or record of any recent large scale migration into the state, but the absolute numbers are what have triggered the panic button.
There are reasons to be apprehensive. Bengalis have long overrun Tripuris in Tripura, and Nepalis far outnumber Lepchas and Bhutias in Sikkim. Nagaland too went through a scare a decade back. The census figures of the hill districts in 2001 were inflated so that if delimitation was applied to Assembly constituencies, they would lose only one seat to Dimapur district whose population was high and dominated by non-tribals. The Centre deferred delimitation to 2031 to avoid an ethnic outburst. This also explains the decline in Nagaland’s population in 2011 since there was no need to inflate numbers. The growth in the hill districts in 2011 was negative, whereas Dimapur was positive. If delimitation is conducted as per the 2011 census, Dimapur will wrest six seats from the hill districts.
The problem in Manipur is not identical, but the fear certainly is. The Okram Ibobi Singh government has withdrawn the Manipur Regulation of Visitors, Tenants and Migrant Workers Bill, 2015 which was passed by the Assembly in March. It did so after street protests raged on for about a week and resulted in the death of one schoolboy and injuries to hundreds. The issue is not going to disappear.
And to believe that the demand for the ILPS in Manipur has roots in some kind of alienation from the so-called mainstream is actually a mainstream construct of the issue and comes across as a patronising and simplistic assertion. The issue at hand is hardly about integration, it is about what the Naga Club had warned about: small communities getting lost in the sea of Indians.
