At the time the Rohingya crisis erupted in neighbouring Myanmar mid-2017, when Bengali speaking Muslim Rohingya population who the Myanmar government as well as most other ordinary people of the country say are illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, faced brutal aggression at the hands of the Myanmar government, aimed at forcing them to leave the country, there were many observers in the Northeast who expressed their uneasy premonition that the energy driving this ethnic crisis was very much a part of the Northeast as well.
Reams have been written on the Rohingya crisis already. While there can be no doubt the Rohingyas are a traditional community of Myanmar, many of them having settled in the Rakhine State (once known as Arakan) adjoining the Chittagong Hills Tracts of Bangladesh for at least 600 years, it is also an established fact that there continued to be waves of Bengali Muslim immigrants pouring into the region and merging with the original Rohingyas, much to the resentment of the local Buddhist Rakhines, a Chakma-aligned community of about two million, who were left insecure by this influx that they may come to be marginalised in their homeland.
Ethnic tension, therefore, was only to be expected, and indeed, there had been several clashes between the Rohingyas and Rakhines before the current crisis. In all these, the Myanmar government unabashedly sided with the Buddhist Rakhines, not even giving citizenship to the Rohingyas and treating them as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, except those who were able to prove their Myanmar ancestry. This being so, it just needed a coordinated attack on 30 Myanmar police camps on August 25, 2017, by a hitherto little heard militant group Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, to trigger the current spate of ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingyas.
All these had then seemed very reminiscent of the situation in the Northeast, and now the premonition is proving true by the violent protests in the region against the CAB. Northeast, too, has been a reluctant host to large scale immigrants from Bangladesh ever since the Partition of India in 1947. It is well known how Partition and politics that preceded it unsettled a composite population and split them vertically along what became impervious religious lines, eventually causing an ethnic cleansing unprecedented in scale in human history. Trouble is, long after these Partition displacements, a steady stream of economic migrants continued flowing into the Northeast from the erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, causing new anxieties of demographic overturns amongst local communities.
Assam is a case in point. It has seen some of the bloodiest ethnic clashes of the nature Myanmar is witnessing now. The Assam Agitation of the 1980s, culminating, among others, in the cataclysmic Nellie Massacre of February 1983, had roots in a similarly complex ethnic conflict dynamics. The nightmare hardly seems over and demonstrated before everybody how sensitive and fragile ethnic relations are in the region.
Long before the CAB issue came to the fore, there were growing demands for the introduction of immigration regulation laws in Manipur and Meghalaya, two Northeast states where the British era Inner Line Permit System was not in vogue. These demands remained unmet, but on the eve of the Rajya Sabha voting on the CAB, when its passage was hanging on a thin balance, this permit system was overnight extended to Manipur to ensure all its four Rajya Sabha MPs voted for the CAB.
A week earlier, ahead of the introduction of the Bill in the Lok Sabha, a clause had been inserted into the CAB that states covered either by the ILP and of by the 6th Schedule of the Constitution would be exempted from CAB, again with the ostensible aim of mopping up the MPs from most of the Northeast states to support the Bill. The strategy, as we have seen worked, and all non-Congress MPs from the region, except Sikkim’s lone representative, supported the Bill.
Compulsions of economic migration are nothing trivial and deserve sympathy and compassion. However, this cannot be allowed to cancel out the real anxieties of small host communities of being outnumbered in their homelands by migrants. After all, in such situations, the line dividing migration and colonisation can become extremely thin. The outburst over CAB is the hard lesson and alibi how pretending this as a non-issue can lead to major catastrophes.
These anxieties may seem unreasonable to observers from outside the region, but they are real, and unless they are taken cognizance of and factored into conflict resolution efforts, the nightmares of deadly ethnic frictions are unlikely to be exorcised from the region anytime soon. Migration, when it happens at a pace the host communities can absorb without detriment to their own social organisms, is unlikely to cause any problem, as Nari Rushtomji noted. Indeed, the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Northeast is testimony that migrants and their integration have been part of a single historical reality of the region. Large scale and rapid influx therefore is where the problem is.
These thoughts bring to mind an interesting exchange between some friends in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, a novel that spans just a single day in the life of a young school teacher, Stephen Dedalus, (in 933 pages) and one which has been voted by critics as the greatest Novel of the 20th Century. In this particular episode, Dedalus the Dubliner, has just collected his salary of two crowns and two shillings from Mr. Deasy, a conservative good-hearted middle-aged Englishman. Deasy gives the young school teacher a lecture on money. He asks Dedalus what he thinks the greatest pride of the Englishman is. Stephen guesses it to be that the sun never sets on his empire. Deasy dismisses the suggestion in good humoured contempt, saying that was coined by a French Celt. The proudest word from an Englishman’s mouth is, Deasy tells Dedalus, “I paid my way” or “I owe no one”.
The conversation on money and its powers invariably drifts to very pronounced anti-Semitism on the part of the Englishman. “Old England is dying”, Deasy declares, “the Jews have bought its vitals, strengths and now controls its finances, the press and all its high places. Wherever they are, Jew merchants eat up the nation’s vitals and work up its destruction”, Deasy continues. Uncomfortable as he was Stephen tries a weak defence of the Jews asking rhetorically if whatever Deasy said of the Jews was not the way of all merchants – buy cheap and sell dear.
Deasy disagrees saying there is darkness in the Jews’ eyes and that is why they are wanderers of the earth to this day. At some point, a scandalised Stephen excuses himself and leaves. Deasy in a light-hearted piece of dark humour calls out after him: “Do you know Ireland is the only nation which did not persecute the Jews, and you know why?” Stephen looks at him in askance. “Because she never allowed them in,” Deasy provides the answer, bursting into a fit of phlegmatic laughter. The cruel irony is, it is the seemingly politically incorrect act of preventing or strictly regulating immigration which saved Ireland from descending into overt racism. Authorities in Northeast did not hark this warning and therefore, ugly backlashes against the CAB now.