Opinions

Ten years is a numerically compulsive occasion for retrospection. Both for Javed, Teesta and their team, and for those well-wishers like us who have seen them wage a lonely battle since 1993. The introspection bit has to be done by the rest. Communalism Combat (CC) was born out of a need. Ground realities have not changed much since its birth – what has, are the electoral exigencies of those who stoke the communal cauldron. The need remains, and so long as this malaise is not weeded out, the...

The Northeast, environmentally speaking, is singular in a number of ways. The richness of biodiversity is high, and the percentage of endemism - at 33 per cent - is quite high as well. The region, on the whole, merits high priority for conservation. This may not sound good enough in what would merit the region to have its own forest policy, but there is more to it here than meets the eye. The forests and the biodiversity are the life support systems for local communities here much more than...

It is fine to talk of development. It would be, perhaps, be better to talk of some preconditions – transport and communications, for instance. Those living in “mainland India”, cut off by the Chicken Neck Corridor as it were would have the faintest idea about connectivity in the Northeast, is all about. Some four years back, the Shukla Commission had mentioned, “Few realise that the Indian Air Force even today operates what must be the largest civil air supply mission anywhere in the world apart...

My colleagues were exhilarated. They were agitated too. So the woman who, they claimed, had killed hundreds and got away with it, had finally been gunned down. Quite rightly so, they belligerently maintained. Those who live by the sword must die by the sword, was the apology. But they were disturbed as well. What if the man, who had liquidated her and been subsequently nabbed, were to be hanged for the justice he had meted out? It would become a travesty of justice. The boss, barely able to gulp...

For all that might be said to the contrary, the fact is security forces have more often than not failed to come clean as far as counter-insurgency operations in the Northeast are concerned. It is therefore not without reason the "success" of the much-hyped Operation Golden Bird has to be taken with a pinch of salt. In what has been described as the biggest anti-insurgency operation in the Northeast since the Army's deployment there in the 1950s, security forces claimed to have killed a motley...