Opinion: The burden of ethnicity - Mizoram’s response

By Patricia Mukhim: It was the late BG Verghese, a noted journalist who spent considerable time in India’s North-East and wrote the book – India’s Northeast Resurgent, who said that there are at least 238 ethnic communities in this region.

This makes the north-eastern frontier of India inhabited by people of Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic races a sort of outlier. The people here feel greater kinship with their Southeast Asian neighbours than with people of Aryan and Dravidian descent.

This is not intended to create divisions but to point to the sociological-anthropological patterns of behaviour. Many in the rest of India have not read Verrier Elwin, the first known anthropologist, who wrote extensively about the tribes of the North-East. Only scholars like Ramachandra Guha, who understood what drove Verrier Elwin to write what he did, are able to understand this region and its people.

The British came to the region in 1826 after vanquishing the Burmese and signing the Treaty of Yandabo with them in 1826. The British started their civilising mission by bringing in missionaries to “enlighten” the people here because their indigenous knowledge systems were considered inferior to that of the colonisers. Then came in schools started by the British and they also gave the Roman script to the Khasi tribals in 1841.

Until then, the Khasis were an oral tradition people who have no recorded history of their antecedents or their folk tales. Large sections of tribals were slowly converted to Christianity and those who refused to be converted were termed “pagans”, a derogatory word. In his book, ‘Savaging the Civilised’, Ramachandra Guha points to the fact that Elwin had so well elucidated that some tribal customary practices and behaviours were perhaps more civilised than the arrogance and cruelties of the British.

India’s North-East is, therefore, several countries that were brought under the umbrella of “India” by coercing the maharajahs of Tripura and Manipur and the tribals’ chieftains to sign the Instrument of Accession (IoA) to the Indian Union.

Only the Naga and Mizo chieftains never signed the IoA. At the time of signing the IoA, the maharajas and chieftains ceded only defense, currency and external affairs. But we know the Indian government never respected that agreement and these principalities were all subsumed into the Indian state.

This is the reason why the Nagas rebelled and demanded sovereignty, because they said they were never a part of British India and could, therefore, not automatically be subsumed into the Indian nation. The Indian government sent the Indian Army to subdue the Nagas and we are all aware of the atrocities that visited the Naga people, especially their women then, and until the time when Nagaland became a state in 1962, when the violence subsided but was always a tinder box that could ignite any time.

Among the tribes of the North-East, the Mizos, who are a branch of the Kuki-Zo community, reside in present-day Mizoram. Other sub-tribes under this larger Kuki-Zo umbrella are also settled in Mizoram, the hills of Manipur and as far as the Cachar valley in Assam. The ethnicities are so tightly wound that an injury to one of them is likely to meet with reprisals on the aggressor.

Since May 3, when the conflict broke out in Manipur, the Kukis fled their homeland out of fear of being physically attacked by their rivals -- the Meiteis -- and gone to Mizoram in droves. Mizoram currently faces a huge burden in having to provide shelter to the refugees from the Kuki-Chin community who are fleeing from the junta in Myanmar and are now burdened with the fresh inflow from Manipur.

But they managed to cope with the burden as the Mizo-Kuki-Chin brotherhood from across the world poured in their support by way of money and materials. But when the outrageous video showing the two young Kuki women being paraded naked went viral on July 19, even the otherwise benign Mizos lost their cool and certain groups that call themselves ‘Peace Accord MNF Returnees’ Association (PAMRA) — an association of former underground Mizo National Front Militants, issued a statement on July 21 asking Meiteis residing in Mizoram to leave “for their own safety”.

That same day, the Meiteis in the Cachar district of Assam gave a diktat that Mizos should leave the place. That diktat was withdrawn either because good sense prevailed or at the behest of the Assam Chief Minister.

About 2,000 Meiteis residing in Mizoram and working in different institutions had to leave the state. That, perhaps, was the only way of showing empathy with those two sisters whose vulnerabilities turned into exhibitionism for a mob fuelled by extreme hatred. It takes a dead soul and a debased mind to film such a revolting video. This level of cruelty has never been witnessed in the past in this region and the ethnic loyalties of the Mizos towards their Kuki kin turned the Meiteis into their most despicable enemies. That is the burden of ethnic loyalties.

In the same manner, there are Meitei men who were equally hurt by the loathsome video because they were not insanely consumed by the poison of hatred and who were sane enough to argue within themselves that a similar outrage could visit their own daughters, sisters and mothers. These sane voices have now been muted because of the fear of reprisal from their own Meitei community. Here too, is the burden of ethnicity which prevents one group from stretching out the olive branch to the other community. The rupture is complete and irreparable. But for how long can people of the same state?

If the different ethnic communities distributed in different states of the region are now told to pack up their bags and leave at short notice as retaliation for an act executed by some misguided, misogynistic Meiteis, so many lives and livelihoods will be disrupted. And these acts of retaliation are all happening because of the strong ethnic loyalties. These disruptions will be difficult to mend. But where are the statesmen to bring in the healing touch? All we have are unscrupulous, self-serving politicians who thrive on division.

(Patricia Mukhim is the Editor of The Shillong Times, and a member of South Asian Women in Media.)

(Views expressed in this opinion piece are that of the author.)