Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land
Sudeep Chakravarti
4th Estate (an imprint of HarperCollins), 2012
INR 450, 420 pages
Paperback/ Non-fiction
The story of what led me to Highway 39: Journeys through a Fractured Land began when I was a young man, and India’s wars with itself were already old. These wars were, of course, the result of India blindsiding itself with what could be called attitudes of geography and demography.
I encountered the angst derived from such administrative arrogance and apathy first-hand from friends and acquaintances from the Northeast at university in Delhi, in the mid-1980s. Such encounters continued through the ’90s, the capital by then my place of work. It was an eye-opener to see several Naga, Manipuri and Mizo acquaintances, for instance, speak freely to foreigners but not to my Indian friends and me. It jolted the sense of Indian-ness that my generation, born a couple of decades after India became independent in 1947, was conditioned from our childhood to take for granted.
I began to dig deeper — and fell headlong into sordid recent history. I discovered from conversations, books and articles that soldiers from my country had for three decades killed, maimed, raped, tortured and scarred — both physically and mentally —tens of thousands across this region; most victims indiscriminately civilian, not armed rebels. (Here, I am not counting the to-my-mind pointless deaths of several thousand police, paramilitary and military personnel.) I learnt that India has the dubious distinction of being a post-World War II country to strafe and bomb its own people — as happened with the Mizoram rebellion in 1966, in addition to Xeroxing the brutal land campaign in Nagaland for Mizoram.
My deconstruction of India’s immediate past and India’s political pantheon made me realise that Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Govind Ballabh Pant, and Indira Gandhi had done much wrong to many they claimed as fellow Indians, alongside their doing right — dazzlingly right, as we were taught through school textbooks prepared by government agencies.
Such things partly explained why many folk I met from the Northeast were so angry and hurt. Why many hesitated to call themselves Indian even as they could not deny India’s proximity and the gradual, impelling — even compelling — mesh of the modern day in which Indian politics and the Indian economy offered their undeniable attractions.
It took effort and time for my northeastern friends to accept that ‘mainland’ Indians weren’t the enemies of the ‘Northeast’. As I grew into my profession, I promised myself — as I did to some friends — that someday I would try to add to the telling of their stories, bring more of these stories to the ‘mainland’ and beyond, so that people would understand more, misunderstand less. I realised much later that it was as much to know those stories, as to come to terms with yet another dark side of the country I love — and am also exasperated and horrified by in equal measure.
Of course, I realised the Northeast was a complicated place, made more complicated by the quite haphazard division of British-ruled India into India, Pakistan and Burma that further fractured homelands. But it seemed entirely too complicated to pay attention to at that time. I realised only much later that I was displaying the time-worn ‘forget it, too complicated’ brush that ‘mainlanders’ apply to any Indian territory east of Darjeeling; and Darjeeling already seems plenty east.
Perhaps I was at the time consumed by what was happening in the hubs of Delhi, Mumbai and other metropolitan areas, as I worked my way into journalism. My chosen profession opened my eyes to both the magic and maelstrom of India. There was progress. But there was also Punjab. Mayhem ensued after Indira Gandhi ordered an attack on Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple, in Amritsar. It was to cleanse the temple of pro-separatist rebels, but the damage to the shrine cost that prime minister her life. That was in 1984. Just as that was winding down, mayhem ensued in Jammu & Kashmir in 1989.
In those charged times, the goings-on of the so-called ‘Northeast’ were muted to us elsewhere in India. Attention would only be drawn by the grossest of events — as with the butchery at Nellie in Assam in 1983. Largely, the Northeast remained ‘Outland’, a kind of region I described in my book on India’s ongoing Maoist rebellion, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. To me, ‘Outland’ is out of sight of the majority of Indians in ‘Inland’ and, therefore, outside of any easily digestible construct. Like the poor of India in the heart of India, the identity-conscious in the country’s eastern periphery too have been both pushed to the limit.
Very simply: there were stories to be told. Stories that had to continually confront India’s grand conceit of being the ‘largest’ democracy’ by also pointing out that it needed to be a ‘good’ democracy, an ‘effective’ democracy; a place where people didn’t need to take to arms, or be butchered for asking for simple rights to identity, livelihood and respect mandated by the Constitution of India.
I did not manage to carve enough mind space, as it were, to pursue independent research and writing till I took a sabbatical in 2004. I planned to write some novels and short stories but also pursue narrative non-fiction — telling stories that can do with all the telling. Red Sun… came of this space: what I gauged as an urgent need to break through the mall-stupor of Middle India and tell it how poverty, corruption, displacement and denial were creating vast pools of negative energy across India. And with the publishing of Red Sun…, I had the required space, the bandwidth to pursue the stories I had for long wanted to, stories of neglect and conflict from the Northeast.
During a road trip in Manipur and Nagaland along Highway 39 in 2008, the approach and the title of the book fell into place. This highway, through its routing through a thin slice of Assam, and the bulk of Nagaland and Manipur, offered itself as a broad sutra for storytelling about both conflict and emergence from conflict.
It’s not much if you look at the distance, 436 kilometres, from Numaligarh along the southern bank of the Brahmaputra in Assam, near Kaziranga to the border with Myanmar, at Moreh, in Manipur. But Highway 39 appeared to me like few others: a living, festering snake of a lifeline — and death-line — that winds through a landscape of both romantic and brutal history, continuing bloodshed, immense rage, and desperate hope. If you will, a sort of highway through governance hell.
And there was dual irony, as I also learnt in the years prior to beginning the book. As much as the administration that rebel groups reviled across the ‘Northeast’, they too indulged in forms of extortion and corruption, putting the squeeze on common people they had sworn to protect. And the other: rebel groups who claimed to fight a particular cause could sometimes be fighting themselves — most visibly among the Naga rebel groups. In the same summer of 2008 that my book took shape, two major factions indulged in a kind of fratricide not seen for two decades. (These shambolic displays of cause and effect are also part of my story.)
The more I travelled and researched, the more I was convinced of a story to tell. An assertive China at its borders, and prospects of trade and business with Southeast Asia have in the past decade or so compelled official India towards greater interaction with these parts. It is essentially a soothe-the-natives approach that geopolitics has made imperative: cool conflicts; provide play to aspirations, offer hope or we lose the empire sort of thing. And, even with a rampaging economy of conflict that lives almost entirely on central government dole — and one that survives and thrives on the absence of firm peace: security deployment, security-mandated contracts, skimming off development funds meant to uplift broken zones and people — there is a momentum of progressive thinking and economic aspiration that is gradually spreading outward from cities like Guwahati, Shillong, Dimapur, Kohima and, even, scarred Imphal.
There is growing recognition of the fact that, as an economy of conflict is seductive for those who live by it, peace must therefore be fought for; the vultures of war must be subdued, or more generations will be lost. And there is growing official recognition that, if these regions are not reclaimed, they will be utterly lost to India. The story of the Northeast is still the story of our times, the unfinished story of India’s integrity.
And so, Highway 39 seemed to me like the region it travelled through. Broken, but not dispirited; corrupted but fiercely hopeful; so not-India, and yet, tied to its future. (Sections of Highway 39 have been renumbered. And yet, for me, there was no better name for the book. To delete Highway 39 would be to delete a tormented history, a seething present, and an uncertain future.)
Besides, it became clear to me early on that to attempt an omnibus book on the Northeast would for my purpose be impractical. If the world often had difficulty grasping the enormity of India, both on account of its geographic and ethnic variety, that logic extended to the mini-universe of its Northeast. And, while protest icons like Irom Sharmila are widely known in the Indian ‘mainland’, driven by reportage in print, on the Internet and television, there generally isn’t much news or views beyond what is occasioned by a ‘news spike’ — the killing of a ‘VIP’; violent protests; fighting among rebels groups; the ‘suspension of operations’ against one rebel group or the other, or the ongoing grosser human rights violations by police, paramilitaries and the army. And, there is still not enough writing and discourse about what drives the dynamics of protest and hurt in these parts. And, as with much in the Indian subcontinent, there is still space to humanise a story. To tell it from the points of view of the players and participants — often, reluctant players and participants.
As a storyteller, that is what I set out to do. This may not be the perfect approach, but, to my mind, there really isn’t a perfect approach, only practical ones that attempt to bring untold stories — or humanised versions of told stories — to audiences that are not otherwise accessed.
My travels took me to these everyday situations, everyday truths. In the course of several visits over some years, I met rebel leaders, and security and government officials. I met everyday people living everyday lives, whether these lives were shattered by incomprehensible death or shuttered by equally incomprehensible policy. I attempted to follow the thread of some histories of conflict and, equally, the thread of some histories of conflict resolution.
Each layer, each step of the journey brought me closer to these truths and realities. As I learnt, there are many truths and realities in these parts. I sincerely hope Highway 39 acquaints readers with some of these.
