Rebellion’s other student

Since 1947, India has been embroiled in numerous ethnic secessionist movements. For these movements, violence was the preferred method; it w...

Since 1947, India has been embroiled in numerous ethnic secessionist movements. For these movements, violence was the preferred method; it was thought that ends justified the means. But as the years dragged by, most of these movements fizzled out. Where they still exist, they are a pale shadow of their past.

In ‘Rebellion’s learning curve’ (IE, January 18), Shekhar Gupta has argued that these rebellions are destined to fail, as they cannot match the power of the state. This lesson, he goes on to say, is learnt the hard way; after blood has been shed and bodies counted. But rebels are not the only students learning a lesson here. The student that is often overlooked because of its size, power and potential is the government of India.

It is a matter of debate just where this lesson was first learnt, but the folks in New Delhi are now content to sit out any separatist revolt. They know that any revolt can shed only so much blood, and kill only so many people, before the rebels themselves tire of the bloodletting.

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While every rebellion follows a predictable curve, New Delhi’s response follows an even more predictable straight line. And that should alarm us more than the failures of the separatists. The state power that we talk about is not an iron wall impossible to scale. Rather, it is the endless supply of soldiers and citizens that can be sacrificed. The bet is that the killers will tire of the routine. Meanwhile, there are those extra-judicial methods, to break the will of the people that support the separatists.

Ramming a settlement through the heart of a defeated and beleaguered separatist movement can never be the flexibility of politics and liberal constitutionalism that Gupta talks about. This is nothing more than the politics of imperialism that we should be familiar with.

Flexible politics and liberal constitutionalism would mean New Delhi is willing to take steps to address the genuine demands of the people. Can we look at Mizoram, Assam or Punjab and claim that we addressed the concerns of the people? The conditions that fuelled demands for secession still exist. They have only been bought off by subsidies and power.

New Delhi prefers to extend an olive branch after suffocating all opposition. Had the olive branch been extended before the insurgencies began, vast numbers of Mizos, Assamese, Sikhs and Kashmiris would not have defected to become rebels. India needs to genuinely address the issues that snowball into a rebellion. Merely adopting a position that seeks to dismantle that snowball does not display leadership. More, it does not bring back the dead — the people who perish on both sides in such insurgencies.

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Today, militancy in Kashmir is on the wane. Tired of bloodshed, Kashmiris will settle for peace. Their quest unfulfilled, their suffering will silence them into submission. But not too far into the future, there will arise another generation that has not seen the suffering and will again challenge the power of the state. Rebellion’s learning curve will relive itself.