(Home Minister Amit Shah announced about the move to enforce border sealing between India and Myanmar.
It impacts indigenous tribes like Nagas and Mizos who share faith, ethnic and kinship ties cutting across political border.)
The northeast Indian region has generally proved an administrative nightmare. The description applied to earlier regimes in New Delhi and the incumbent Narendra Modi-led dispensation is no exception.
The ongoing clashes between the tribal Kuki Christians and the Hindu majority Meitei in Manipur state that started in May 2023 have resulted in a large number of people fleeing the state. Manipur, which is ruled by Modi’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, has 41.39 percent Hindus while Christians, mostly tribal people, are 41.29 percent, according to the 2011 census.
Tribal Christians form a majority in Mizoram and Nagaland, while they are in sizeable numbers in Arunachal Pradesh. Their shared faith, ethnic and kinship ties, especially with the people from Myanmar’s Chin state, prompt the tribal Christians to welcome refugees with open arms. Mizoram state alone has some 30,000 Maymar refugees sheltered in camps with the state government allocating funds for them in open defiance of the federal government’s ban.
Similarly, around 6,000 refugees from Myanmar have taken shelter in Manipur state, authorities confirmed in December 2023. At the height of the ethnic violence in Manipur year, Shah blamed the influx of Kukis from Myanmar. This was creating “insecurity among the Meiteis,” the federal home minister told parliament on Aug. 9, 2023.
New Delhi is concerned that the problem might just grow bigger.
The Nagas have been demanding a “Greater Nagalim,” a homeland for Naga people spread across contiguous Naga areas, both in India and Myanmar. Similarly, a demand for “Greater Mizo land” was raised by Mizo leaders in the 1980s.
Considering their demographic spread in the region, both Naga and Mizo communities may have a valid point in wanting to live in a common administrative area. But this is easier said than done considering the geo-political and security situation that prevails now.
Mizoram Chief Minister Lalduhoma appears to have grasped this situation well and hence expressed his helplessness on the issue of sealing the border. Lalduhoma, a Mizo tribal Christian, said that the state has "no authority and we cannot stop it” if the federal government goes ahead with its plan. Foreign policy matters and border security are federal responsibilities.
 |
| File snap: Blogger, Nagaland |
Politicians like Lalduhoma know that many organizations in his state are likely to oppose the fencing of the border and scrapping of the FMR as Mizos share ethnic ties with the people of the Chin community in Myanmar.
The Mizoram chief minister had sensed trouble a week before Shah’s announcement and flew to New Delhi. He met both Modi and Shah and urged them not to go ahead with the proposal to seal the borders. His stand was that the border with Myanmar was “imposed” by the British, and the Mizo people living on both sides of it “do not accept it.”
The central government's plan “to fence the India-Myanmar border” and “reconsider the Free Movement Regime (FMR)” was made public by Federal Home Minister Amit Shah on Jan. 20 in Guwahati city in the north-eastern state of Assam.
Shah is a close confidante of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and is considered the second in command in his government.
“I want to tell my friends [in the northeast region] that the Narendra Modi government has decided to fence India's open border along with Myanmar just like we have fenced the country's border along with Bangladesh," Shah said.
The government is also rethinking the FMR by which India and Myanmar agreed in 1950 to allow natives to move freely into each other's territories without passports or visas, he revealed.
India and Myanmar share 1,643 kilometers of land border covering four Indian states – Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh. The 1950 agreement underwent several changes over the years, and in 2004, India limited the free movement to 16 kilometers into India from the earlier 40 kilometers.
In 2018, India and Myanmar signed the Agreement on Land Border Crossing to “facilitate regulation and harmonization of already existing free movement rights for people ordinarily residing in the border areas of both countries,” according to an official statement.
A social activist from Nagaland agreed. “The FMR allowed free movement of people wanting to visit and meet their families. The international border cannot keep them away from blood brothers. We are Nagas by blood, political boundaries cannot divide us,” he said on the condition of anonymity.
Shah’s announcement would have been treated as a routine affair in another border region. But in northeast India, it could trigger a raw nerve among multiple groups of people. India has been cautious since the 2021 coup in Myanmar. As the military junta that took power fought with armed Chin rebel groups and the civilian population, hundreds have been sneaking into northeast India.
New Delhi has economic interests in maintaining cordial relations with its neighboring country, which also serves as a bridge between south and southeast Asia. Keen observers of the troubled region feel the situation requires a careful and nuanced approach to address issues arising out of the concerns of the local people and the influx of refugees.
ends
Ram Mandir inauguration at Ayodhya, Jan 22, 2024
Some comments/remarks/edit advises etc etc :
"The BJP benefited from stirring up Hindu nationalism around the Babri Masjid, and in 2014 swept into power, displacing the more pluralistic Indian Congress Party. The BJP then began to remake democratic India into a Hindu supremacist state.
Following a second BJP national victory in 2019, India’s Supreme Court—whose autonomy has been undercut by the Modi government—issued its final judgment that decided the fate of the Babri Masjid site. The court called the mosque’s destruction “an egregious violation of the rule of law,” but nonetheless ruled that a Hindu temple could be built on the mosque’s rubble." --- Time magazine
A Seminal Milestone ...... January 22 asks nation nothing less than a self-description.
Jan 22. 2024 will no more be just another day in the life of a nation. -- 'Indian Express' in edit (Jan 23, 2024)
"Ram is one of the most revered gods among India’s Hindus, who make up about 80 percent of a total population of 1.4 billion. As the hero of the Ramayana epic, he is a king and a paragon of virtue, exiled from his native Ayodhya, who comes home for a jubilant coronation.
Islam does not appear in the Ramayana, having arrived in India only 1,000 years ago. But it is cast as the primary villain in the Hindu-nationalist telling of India’s history. Now, with a kind of spiritual and political homecoming for Mr. Modi, the Ram campaigners have the temple they had sought for decades." --
'New York Times'
**
"Hindu nationalist allies of Mr. Modi tended to look forward to Jan. 22 as a day of ultimate vindication, or even revenge — against India’s medieval Muslim rulers, and against the country’s independence leaders, who sought to stay neutral with regard to religion.
Naturally, India’s secularists see the rise of a Ram temple on the site of the Babri Mosque as confirmation of their own defeat, if not as a blasphemous conflation of Mr. Modi with Ram. India’s 200 million Muslim citizens feel by and large alienated, which may be the point.
But many Hindus, especially in the so-called cow belt in the country’s north, just think it’s nice that Ram will finally have a temple in the holy place where he was born. They were celebrating its inauguration at live screenings, as at a once-a-millennium holiday. " -- New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment