The Indian experiment pertaining to the Northeast vis-à-vis its militancy must not fail. What has sustained militancy in the Northeast? Are the different militant groups really advocates of any people’s cause? What is their ultimate objective? Do they have a clear vision in their minds as they wage wars against the Indian state? Or are they criminal gangs who have mutated from insurgents to terrorists? Questions like these have never ceased to spring up as the militant groups and security forces remain confronted with each other and the state searches for an end to the stalemate.

In this context, eminent academic-journalist MS Prabhakara, a discerning observer of the Northeast situation vis-à-vis its separatist movements, in his classic book Looking Back into the Future: Identity & Insurgency in Northeast India, makes an interesting remark: ‘‘How seriously do these organizations (militant groups) believe they can attain sovereignty, considering that their adversary is the Indian state? Half a century of ‘armed struggle’ and nearly a decade of direct and indirect talks in foreign lands and in Delhi has not really advanced Naga aspirations for sovereignty. The de facto legitimacy that ‘Nagalim’ has acquired owes little to the protracted negotiations. Even allowing for unpredictability in the international correlation of forces, the Indian state is too big and too powerful to allow it to be defeated in war and occupied by a foreign power — the historically necessary conditions for the disintegration of a nation-state.’’

The fact of the matter, as Prabhakara has rightly pointed out, is that it is impossible for militant organizations, however powerful such as the National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN), to win their wars against the too big and too powerful Indian state. Its armed forces, if given a free hand, can easily defeat such organizations; the only risk being collateral damages and, as a consequence, further alienation of people. Therefore, the government’s engagement with the different militant groups of this region cannot be construed as its weakness. The government’s is an attempt to follow a democratic trajectory — although there are many aberrations.

However, the malaise of militancy afflicting the Northeast must be viewed from a different — and more realistic — perspective. To quote Prabhakara, ‘‘A feature of the present situation in Assam and other areas of the NE region, as indeed in many other parts of the country, is the increasing concern on the part of the various groups that go to make the Indian nation about a perceived threat to their ‘identity’. It is from this concern that demands for protective safeguards, special consideration, and so on flow, which in some extreme cases have also taken shape as demands for the ‘right of self-determination’ and outright secessionist struggles.’’ The threat to their identity from a callous Centre as perceived has stoked rebellion among different marginalized groups in many parts of this region, with the problem compounded by corrupt State dispensations that siphon off development funds. In the case of Assam, for tribal communities like Bodos, Karbis and Dimasas, the threat to their identity stems not just from an apparently indifferent Centre but from an ‘‘indifferent, insensitive and domineering majority community of the Assamese’’ as well, making the threat perception all the more grave.

It is true that there cannot be a military solution of the militancies in the Northeast. Any such all-out military attempt with only add to the perception of fear and threat of different ethnic groups as to the Centre’s attempt to crush all dissenting voices and impose its will by all means possible, which will only serve the purpose of pushing the communities further away from the mainstream and of triggering new armed movements. Therefore, the Centre is making attempts to reach out to the disenchanted groups and armed outfits democratically, with the armed forces only contributing to the civil administration’s endeavour to bring about peace. Nevertheless, the all-important question remains: Has the Centre realized that its tendency to centralize is at the root of the Northeast malady? To put it differently, has the Centre realized that people as unique and diverse would like to evolve in their own ways, and that in a democracy as evolving as ours, such people must be free to evolve in their own ways — within, of course, the framework of the Constitution?

Prabhakara elucidates: ‘‘The major responsibility for this trend towards the increasing fragmentation of the Indian people has to be laid at the door of the Indian state. Under every dispensation it has been governed by, it has refused to acknowledge that the people of the country do constitute a still indeterminate number of fairly well-defined groups who are yet in the process of becoming a nation, and shape its policies accordingly. The process is necessarily a slow, complex and even painful one and can in no way be hustled. No amount of hectoring lectures from the top or centralizing legislations by Parliament will alter the reality.’’

India is a pluralist society. More so is the Northeast, with a marvellous mix of distinct tribal communities that are yet to be part of the national consciousness in the real sense of the term, with them clinging firmly to their own national consciousness, which they think is threatened by the very idea of one Indian state and one national consciousness. This, indeed, is a complex situation in a democracy. But has the Centre responded to this complexity with the desired understanding of the ground reality? And even if it has responded so, has it really worked?

Prabhakara, then, has a point in the epilogue to his book: ‘‘The people are distinct, separate and in some respects, even unique in that they have a history and memories, a language and literature, a culture and an ethos that is their own, though not necessarily in contradiction with and opposition to the larger pan-Indian identity. To acknowledge this, indeed to nurse and nurture these perceptions and be sensitive about them and patiently allow them to be incorporated at their own pace into the larger concept of the Indian nation requires patience, a larger vision of the pluralistic, diverse and highly differentiated Indian — even Hindu — society. But official policy since independence has been to curb and curtail these pluralistic tendencies, subsume them into an enforced-from-the-top Indian identity. The results, as is evident in the progressive escalation of demands from safeguards to preserve identity to the right of self-determination to openly secessionist armed struggles, are there for all to see... The most disturbing aspect of this tendency towards highly centralized, uniform and Hindutva-dominated mores over the whole population of the country is that provoking a section of the Indian people to take the path of extreme assertion of denominational tendencies, it also militates against the unity of India. Thus the proponents of unitarianism and majoritarianism are actually serving the interests of those who have been consistently seeking to undermine and indeed establish the unworkability of the Indian experiment.’’

The Indian experiment pertaining to the Northeast must not fail; else the country’s hostile neighbours will celebrate and make more zealous attempts to destabilize this region and, through this, the rest of the country. But for the experiment to succeed, while the Centre must realize the reality of the problems besetting the region, desist from working on unnecessary centralizing tendencies, and make a sincere and serious  long-term political attempt to respond to the separatist tendencies, it is incumbent on the State governments of the region too to chart out their courses differently — by cracking down on corruption (responsible, to a large extent, for underdevelopment and hence rebellion), reaching out to the different marginalized groups by way of carrying out rapid development, and by solving the problem of unemployment (one of the chief reasons behind the youth taking up arms to sustain their livelihood). All this is quite possible. What is required is the political ability to understand the nuances of militancy in the region and political will, of which, at the moment, there is a serious deficit.