Law, Order and Reportage

Wile four essays from this collection have been published before in journals, Rammohan’s deliberate, stirring essay on Assam (“Assam, the Foreigners’ Agitation and the ULFA”), is a disturbing, carefully-traced history of how the state — the author chose the Assam cadre in 1965 after joining the IPS — degenerated, thanks to the inflow of foreigners from across the border and the incompatible communities from outside violently yoked into place by the British when they came to take over the tea gardens in the 19th century. However, the spine of this text is inevitably the author’s brutal first-hand account of the vicious and bloody elections held in Assam in 1983, a process he claims was prostituted by a venal mix of bureaucratic connivance and the bloodthirst of a scattered, divided insurgent base.

In his foreword to the essay, Rammohan writes, ‘‘It is necessary to make a thorough study of this election and how the bureaucracy behaved and let the people of this country know all the facts, so that such gross errors will not be committed again… I do not think we have ever had to fire in law and order situations with light machine guns anywhere else.’’

Rammohan infuses his spiraling narrative with eyewitness accounts of operations (during Operation Bajrang and Rhino), interrogations of captured militants, and still astonishing descriptions of collusion, interspersed with a riveting parallel history of the ULFA. In an interview to this newspaper shortly after this collection of essays was published, Rammohan said the solution to Assam’s problems were not difficult.

Interestingly, he offers a detailed list of ‘‘remedies’’ to the problems of the states he writes about. The author advocates a specialised and robust monitoring system to see that development funds reach the ground, instead of being eaten away by myriad links of the bureaucratic chain, President’s Rule in some cases, and an incisive restructuring of the public distribution system.

His essay on the Naga insurgency, however, reveals a deeper, far more despondent and bitter view of the how the issue may ever be solved. An honest and rasping critique of the NSCN-IM (which is currently engaged in peace talks with the Government) is coupled with a resounding—and provocative — affirmation that the Nagas have no unique history, but are a divided, warring and deeply divided people. Or, as he said in an interview to this paper, ‘‘They were never a collective people. They have no collective history. They say they want a nation — that is absurd. We need more force to deal with this issue. The ceasefire has to be slowly tightened. Once the guns are removed, they will be confined. How long can they fight? They are an inherently divided society.’’

Possibly unique to these compelling essays on the North-East, on more than one occasion, is the uncanny, sometimes journalistic capacity of the author to define those few minutes that he knows changed the course of North Eastern history when they happened all those years ago — the inexplicable slaying of an ONGC official by ULFA while they released him, the Chief Election Commissioner’s decision to go with the 1977 electoral rolls for the Mangaldoi constituency in Assam which included foreigners, the extortions and lies that progressively blurred the lines between rebels and the powers.

Insurgent Frontiers: Essays from the Troubled Northeast
by E.N. Rammohan India Research Press, Rs 595 The reviewer can be reached at: shivaroor@expressindia.com