A crisis is brewing in Northeast India. The region, which has seen decades of violent armed insurgencies, repeated bouts of ethnic cleansing, and a deepening corruption of its society and polity as an indirect consequence of the conflict, had turned a corner in recent years – or so it seemed.

Peace had returned as a result of a combination of factors including dialogues with many of the groups, a hardening of state response against the holdouts, a reduction in popular support for separatism, and a change of government in Bangladesh in 2009 that landed some of the top leaders of various regional insurgencies in Indian government’s hands. Now, however, the situation once more is fraught. The first bullets to announce this new reality were fired last week in a place called Maibang in the Dima Hasao area of Assam. The shooters were men of the Assam Police. Two young men from the Dimasa tribe, Mithunjoy Dibradege and Probanto Hakmaosa, both in their 20s, died in the firing.

The confrontation that led to these deaths had occurred as a result of news that appeared in The Wire titled, “Revealed: RSS Draft Plan for Nagaland Accord”.

The article quoted a veteran RSS pracharak who works in Northeast India, Jagdamba Mall, and presented excerpts from a “draft agreement” that he said was his “personal effort”. A paragraph in the article mentioned that “Mall’s ‘draft agreement’ has suggested ‘separate development authorities (to be) constituted for a period of ten years to execute the development programmes in seven Naga inhabited districts of Manipur’, ‘two Naga inhabited districts of Arunachal Pradesh, Changlang and Tirap’ and ‘one in Assam, the Dima Hasao (North Cachar Hills district)’.”

It was this news that set Dima Hasao alight.

After news of Mr Mall’s ‘draft agreement’ spread in the North Cachar Hills, on January 22, a few youths tried to set the RSS office in Haflong on fire. Earlier in the day a bandh and protest march had been called that shut down the only towns of note in the area, Haflong and Maibang.

Men and women holding placards that demanded immediate disclosure of the details of the Naga Accord (of which a framework was signed in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim chief Thuingaleng Muivah in 2015) marched down the streets. Among the slogans they raised was a rather unusual one: “RSS gu khao”. RSS, eat shit. The Silchar-Guwahati fast passenger plying between Guwahati and Silchar was halted by protestors who blocked the rail tracks in Maibang. Local police and railway officials reached the spot to try and persuade the protestors to allow the train to pass. By noon, fearing that the railways men were planning to start driving the train, some protestors began to uproot a segment of the tracks.

Following this, Deputy Commissioner Dibyajyoti Hazarika arrived on the scene between 2.30 and 3.00 pm to break the bandh that was due to end at 5.00 pm, according to a Dimasa activist who declined to be named fearing reprisals.

The police, which had been at the scene of the daylong protests since morning, began firing, the activist says. “There was no lathi-charge, tear gas, or other such measure”. The two young men died, one with a bullet to the head, the other shot below the neck. Eight others are in hospital with wounds. There is great popular anger at this.

Effigies of Mr Mall were already burning before the shooting. On Republic Day, January 26, there was a total boycott of celebrations. Daniel Langthasa, a musician who goes by the moniker Mr India, posted his sentiments on Facebook in a public status message. “Karni Sena, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal, RSS destroys public property all over India for stupid reasons like Bollywood movies, Pakistan cricket teams, Valentine’s day, beef etc. No bullets are fired at them.

Citizens of Maibang town in Assam stops a train for a couple of hours to demand answers from the government and to remove Assam from Nagalim’s framework which is creating communal tensions because of an irresponsible statement by an RSS member. Police fire bullets and kill and injure innocent women, children and men.

Not my Republic Day!”

Like most communities in Northeast India, the Dimasas had several armed insurgent groups of their own. They saw years of violent insurgency, but their demand, like that of the Bodos, was for a separate state to be carved out of Assam – not independence from India, which used to be the demand of many insurgent groups in the region. The aspiration for this state, called Dimarji, included the restoration to Dimasa control of the erstwhile capital of their ancient kingdom. That capital is now the town of Dimapur in Nagaland’s plains belt – the commercial capital of Nagaland, 35 km away from which the most powerful Naga insurgent group, the NSCN (I-M) has long had its India headquarters.

Despite their clashing demands, the NSCN(I-M) and the Dimasa militant outfit Dima Halam Daogah (DHD) enjoyed fraternal relations, with the Naga group providing training to the DHD. However, the splintering of the Naga and Dimasa insurgencies had created factions and a complicated array of alliances and rivalries and eventually there were clashes between the Naga and Dimasa insurgents that spilled over into rioting and ethnic conflict.

Complex links between different underground groups, mainstream political parties, the bureaucracy, and even security agencies is a part of life in Northeast India. An illustration of how this works emerged during a National Investigation Agency probe into a case of terror funding involving the DHD.

The NIA found out that the then chief of the North Cachar Hills Autonomous Council, which has extensive powers to do development works and budgets to match, had been robbing the council’s coffers in connivance with senior government officials and contractors. This man, Mohet Hojai, was an associate of Niranjan Hojai, the chairman of the DHD’s “J” or “Jewel” faction. Jewel Garlosa, the commander-in-chief of the group, himself stayed in Bangalore and made visits to Kathmandu, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur to procure arms for the group using money given by the government of India for social welfare and public health engineering.

The scam was detected in 2009. Arrests followed the same year. In 2010, the NIA filed a charge sheet against 16 persons including Garlosa and the two Hojais. Garlosa was arrested from Bangalore in 2011. The next year, 2012, the DHD(J) was disbanded. In 2013, the former terrorists and extortionists joined the Congress. Two years later, after Himanta Biswa Sarma left the Congress to join the BJP, both Garlosa and Niranjan Hojai joined that party. However, with Assembly polls approaching in Assam in 2016, Garlosa switched to the Congress, only to return to the BJP after it won the polls. Hojai had stayed on in the BJP and become chief administrator of the NC Hills Autonomous Council, from which the NIA had found him to be stealing taxpayer money to buy weapons for funding terrorism. In May last year, an NIA court sentenced Garlosa, Niranjan and Mohet Hojai to life imprisonment for waging war against the state. The former Deputy Directors of Social Welfare and PHE were also convicted and sentenced to jail.

The autonomous council is now headed by Debolal Garlosa, former “deputy commander-in-chief” of the DHD faction headed by Jewel that waged war against the state, and now an honourable BJP member. The Scroll had reported in June last year about a strike by employees of the council who had not received their salaries for nine months.

A Dimasa student activist says neither Debolal nor anyone associated with the government at district, state or national level has visited any of the injured in hospital, or extended any help. “We have always been neglected”, he says. “We are often deprived of our rights. It is not new. It has been going on for decades”. The student leader says he had met and spoken to one of the survivors who took three bullets. The man had been shot in the back from almost point blank range, he says. “He was shot from a distance of around five metres. The bullets entered from his back and came out from front.” The young man who died with a bullet to his head was similarly killed in what the activist called “execution style”, shot at from close quarters.

The people want the DC to be arrested for murder, he says. They also want Jagdamba Mall to be brought to justice for fomenting trouble by releasing his contentious draft plan for Nagaland with Dima Hasao included without taking the people of Dima Hasao into confidence. There are also demands for the resignation of the chief of the district council, Debolal Garlosa, who has failed to support his people. Most importantly, they want written clarification from the government of India on the Naga Accord.

Mall has issued a statement denying his own earlier statement and the existence of any draft plan from the RSS or BJP. “I indeed shared some thoughts with the said journalist, which was however twisted and turned in a mischievous manner, leading to lots of confusion,” he said. However, Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty of The Wire, who had reported the story, produced screenshots of an email sent to her with the subject “Proposed draft of Agreement between Government of India and Naga Negotiation Committee”, from Mall’s email address. Incidentally, similar stories about a draft agreement had surfaced in the Assamese-language media in November, but at that time there were no details or attribution. Protests including a ‘rail roko’ had occurred in Dima Hasao then too, Langthasa recalled.

The RSS has washed its hands of the matter, saying Mall is not their spokesman.

The DC, Hazarika, on his part, said in a telephonic interview that the agitators had damaged railway property and tried to set the train on fire. “There were 806 passengers. The stranded passengers were being rescued. The agitators were threatening to kill them. At this point the firing took place”, he said. He could not say even approximately at what time this incident occurred, or even if it was morning or afternoon, and said he was not present at the site of the incident. “I did not order firing,” he said. An inquiry had been ordered to find out who did, Mr Hazarika added.

Langthasa, who knows several of the protestors and video-graphed part of the protests, however said that the DC had been present in Maibang along with a police team from Haflong, and it was this lot that had done the shooting. Matters had escalated after the DC reached the spot, following which there was an altercation and some pushing and shoving between the men accompanying the DC and some of the protest leaders, he said. He also mentioned that he had spoken to eyewitnesses who saw the police shooting unarmed protestors point blank. Incidents of shooting were not restricted to one spot, he said, because the crowd scattered and the police chased after them and kept firing.

Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal has said the state’s territorial integrity will not be compromised. He also deputed two state ministers to visit Dima Hasao and negotiate a compensation package.

The sudden unrest in Dima Hasao may be contained, for now, but the Dimasas are not the only angry people in Northeast India at the moment. There is a growing unrest again across the region, in most major communities. The balance in favour of peace and progress in Northeast India is looking precarious.

Image credit: Haflong Vlogs