It was in the early eighties that I first visited the North East of India. I had the good fortune to spend a few days in Guwahati too then. As a youngster, that visit was a kind of an eye opener to me; a bit of shock too. The first shock I received was from a co-passenger in the Tinsukia mail, an Assamese working in a bank. That was the time dissent and rebellion had first erupted in Assam.

As we spoke, he casually told me, ‘If you look at the map, you will see that we are connected to India by a thin strip of land. So, that thin strip becomes very important.’

The Chicken’s Neck, or the Siliguri Corridor.

‘What did you say? That you are connected to India and not the rest of India? Are you not part of India?’ I asked the question in disbelief.
He refused to open up and have further discussion with me on the agitation that had started in Assam then.

In Guwahati, I could interact with a lot of college students, and all of them were quite honest and forthright in their opinion on the problems that were haunting them then. They were confused, troubled and disturbed. We sat huddled on the steps in a college campus and talked. When they told me about the frustration they felt when they saw ‘outsiders’ or ‘foreigners’ ruling them in their own land, I could not understand their anguish. I asked, how could you call your neighbours, Indians as outsiders?

They confessed that they had been lazy but that was because nature was kind to them. They didn’t have to toil hard at all to earn a livelihood. Every year, after the Brahmaputra flooded and then receded, it left them a soil that is so fertile that they only had to throw a seed to reap well.

“When nature is kind to you, you tend to be lazy and slow,” they tried to analyse and find a simplistic solution to all the problems. “One day, when we woke up, we found that all the businesses in the state had been hijacked by our Bengali neighbours. We see our culture also dying soon. We see our land being taken over by them. We see ourselves losing our identity. Should we not fight for our land and our identity?”

The violent struggle that began in the eighties still continues, more violently and more viciously. If it was against the business class then, today it’s against the poor labourers who migrate to this fertile piece of land for livelihood.

The questions that haunt me are not different from what I felt then. Who owns the earth? Who is the proprietor of land? Could the earlier settlers in Assam claim the right to throw the immigrant Bengali or Bihari out as a “foreigner”? Can the dispossessed Native American say that the European immigrants five hundred years ago are “foreigners”; can the European immigrant regulate further immigration by others? Do Jews have a right to the Galilee where they were turned out of by Romans two thousand years ago? Or is the Palestinian who later settled there the rightful occupant? Could we claim a right to the free land in Australia and Canada as a denizen of the world? There is also the greater question under WTO; movement of natural persons being not considered while movement of capital was taken up in the globalisation agenda.

Is the land the occupants declare as theirs, really theirs? Does anyone own it? Is it not man made boundaries that separate us? Is our culture so fragile as to die because of somebody else?

Let us not talk about the world, let us talk about just India. If there is an entity called India, do we not have the right to move anywhere in India? Who decides the ownership of land? Just because you are born in a particular place and just because your forefathers have been there, can you claim that place?

These questions came up in my mind again when I read about the merciless butchering of the poor labourers from Bihar by ULFA. Do they realise they are killing human beings who are no different from them?