Inept Handling Escalates Assam – Nagaland Border Problem

Sunil Garodia, TIR, 21 August 2014: The simmering dispute on the Assam-Nagaland border has flared up. Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi has blamed the Centre, in particular Home Minister Rajnath Singh for not heeding to his request for increased security along the border. For the record, the border is being manned by CRPF personnel. But the discontent was brewing for some days and the governments of both states, more particularily Gogoi’s government, is guilty of letting a landlord-tenant dispute assume the contours of an inter-States dispute through its inaction and apathy. Now it is putting the blame at the doors of the central government.

What is happening in upper Assam is just the frustration of an inept government and its law enforcing agency coming to fore. Some miscreants from Nagaland crossed the border and indulged in arson in Assam. They burnt houses and threatened the Assamese people in some areas of Golaghat district. The problem was essentially of dubious landlords from Nagaland trying to collect rents on landed property which the Assamese people claimed belonged to Assam. Initially, it was a law and order problem that should have been dealt with sternly by the local administration with help from Assam police.

But the Gogoi government sat on the problem, allowing the miscreants to whip up passions on both sides of the border. What was initially a dispute between a few interested parties has now become a problem for both the states. The Assam police have gone berserk. Instead of preventing miscreants from Nagaland entering the state and burning down houses of Assamese people, they are resorting to lathi charge and unprovoked firing on peaceful protests against the same. In the process, one person was killed in Rongajan area of Golaghat district on Tuesday, Aug 19 and 2 were killed in Rongajan and Arengapathar in Golaghat on Wednesday. The Rongajan person was killed when he was mowed down by a truck as he ran away from the danger zone. On Wednesday, two people were killed in police firing. The Assam government has ordered a judicial probe into the police firing.

While the SP Golaghat, Siladitya Chetia reportedly said that the protestors created a serious law and order situation, independent observers and TV footage has confirmed that the police firing was direct and unprovoked. What are the police trying to prove? Are they hiding their incompetence in preventing the arson by the Nagas by taking out their frustration on peaceful Assamese protests? Yes, the border is controlled by the CRPF, but the miscreants went deep into Assamese territory to burn the houses. Where was the Assam police? The result is a dawn to dusk bandh in upper Assam on Thursday Aug 21 that is going to put pressure on the tea industry, already reeling under low sales and preparing to pay Puja bonus in first week of September.

Gogoi has said that people trust Assam police more than CRPF, which is wrong. The Assam police are the one who are now firing at peaceful protestors. If what Gogoi said is true, then why was he asking Rajnath Singh to deploy more CRPF personnel across the state border? The fact is that the local administration has been found wanting in tackling the problem.  Gogoi should have constituted a bilateral committee with Nagaland government to look into the simmering land dispute and find a solution. He had let the situation come to a boil and now expects the centre to bail him out. His inaction has forced the centre to deploy the army.

The Assam and Nagaland governments need to form a commission with representations from local bodies in disputed areas. They should sit down with detailed maps and demarcate the areas of respective states. The demarcation should be informed to the people through various means. After that, no variations should be tolerated and the miscreants should be promptly booked. A small number of antisocial elements are holding the two states to ransom and creating enmity between the two people. They should be dealt with stringently.

Since most of the seven sister states in the North-East were carved out of a larger Assam, they have always shared a tenuous relationship with the ‘big’ sister. But they have largely co-existed peacefully. Disputes such as the current one are mostly solved by the local administration as and when they flare up. In the instant case, vested interests took the governments of both Assam and Nagaland for a ride. The sorry state of political affairs can be gauged from the fact that no politician of worth visited the area. Blaming the centre for what is largely a local dispute allowed to assume gigantic proportions by inept an administration is not going to help.