How Modi, Shah have shred Vajpayee & Jana Sangh’s principled opposition to ILP in Northeast
The Factivist

How Modi, Shah have shred Vajpayee & Jana Sangh’s principled opposition to ILP in Northeast

Vajpayee & Jana Sangh fought Nehru for quarantining fellow Indians in Northeast under Inner Line Permit. Their successors have strengthened & expanded it.

   
Narendra Modi in traditional Nagaland headgear | Twitter

File photo of Narendra Modi in traditional Naga headgear in Nagaland | Twitter

The tribal states of the Northeast have been promised Inner Line Permit protection from the fallout of the CAB-NRC process. To explain what this means, I need to do some story-telling.

One very special privilege of holding a most distant outpost in difficult times is how much attention, time and affection you can get from people who’d be way above your station in ‘normal’ times.

One of the many blessings of my three-year stint in the Northeast as The Indian Express correspondent based in Shillong (1981-83), therefore, was how some brilliant, old and eminent people dropped by, mostly unannounced at our tiny ‘Assam Type’ cottage home in a quaintly-named neighbourhood (like much else in Shillong), Kench’s Trace.

One such, on a brilliant and fortuitous afternoon, was N.K. ‘Nari’ Rustomji, among the doyens of what used to be called the IFAS, or Indian Frontier Administrative Service.

The IFAS was designed to manage the most sensitive Northeastern border (essentially tribal) states of India. It consisted of a tiny elite of the elite, hand-picked by Jawaharlal Nehru and his tribal affairs adviser (especially for the Northeast) anthropologist Verrier Elwin.

Rustomji, an ICS officer of the 1942 batch, had been a favourite of both. He had held the most important positions in those difficult and dangerous decades, including as prime minister to the Chogyal of Sikkim.


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Long after retiring now, he had become a writer. He was a devastating raconteur. Of course, some of his exploits will be a bit risqué for mere news columns.

He was spending time in Shillong because he was working on a new book: Imperilled Frontiers (I reviewed it later for India Today). He had tasted much fame with an earlier one called Enchanted Frontiers. In the early 1980s, the Northeast had four active, foraging insurgencies (Naga, Mizo, Manipuri and Tripura tribals), and a mass movement in Assam so popular it had blocked off the flow of crude from its oil fields to mainland India’s refineries.

That’s why the book’s title, Imperilled Frontiers.

He took a liking to us, our first-born and, I presume, our dogs, and dropped by often.

One theme recurring through his book drafts was ‘hastening slowly’. He said this was the innovative plan Nehru and Elwin had devised for the tribal regions of the Northeast. They wanted change to come to these distant, sparsely-populated, tribal and sensitive regions eventually, but at a pace that these fragile communities and geographies could absorb.

Elwin, by the way, was a self-taught anthropologist who fell in love with Indian tribes, became a friend of Nehru’s and, in 1954, became the first Briton to be given Indian citizenship. It is only then that he was appointed adviser to the prime minister on tribal affairs, especially in North Eastern Frontier Agency or NEFA, as Arunachal Pradesh was then called. In 1957, he published his Philosophy for NEFA. You can find more details in Ramachandra Guha’s biography of him.

The essential pillar of the philosophy was that “people should develop along the lines of their own genius and we should avoid imposing anything on them”.

The entire philosophy rested on the idea of controlling and carefully calibrating the interaction between these communities and ‘outsiders’. Inner Line Permit (ILP) restrictions on outsiders from the rest of India freely travelling to these states were the instrument to implement this. Nagaland, Arunachal (NEFA) and later Mizoram came to be thus ‘protected’ with the ILP.

Not everybody agreed. Least of all the Right-nationalists of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the parent of BJP). It saw the usual Nehruvian woolly-headedness here, and sometimes, even a diabolical Western conspiracy.


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Even at their most charitable, they compared these ILP areas with the ‘reservations’ the Americans had built for their natives. Why should we quarantine our fellow Indians into the wild, only so missionaries could go and convert them at will? The Hindu-Right was joined in its fears by socialist Ram Manohar Lohia. He made two visits to NEFA to break through ILP restrictions, was arrested and returned.

After the 1962 debacle, these voices strengthened. Under pressure, a broken Nehru conceded the demand from Jana Sangh — articulated by a young Atal Bihari Vajpayee — that India resettle one lakh ‘sturdy’ Punjabis, especially Sikh ex-servicemen, in NEFA.

Elwin fought back. The Jana Sangh, however, said the state which the Chinese had just invaded had a Muslim chief secretary, Parsi adviser (Rustomji) and a Christian chief anthropologist (Elwin). It was unacceptable.

Guha’s biography mentions how Elwin visited the home ministry on 21 February 1964 and was told by another Northeast specialist officer Rashid Yousuf Ali that the decision to resettle Punjabis and lift all restrictions was final. He had the file on his desk.

The next day, Elwin met friend Nehru. He died the day after, at 62. Three months later, Nehru too joined him.

Now, time-travel quickly to today. Nehru, under his “British” friend’s influence, bought into the idea of ILP. Vajpayee and Lohia wanted it out. Over the following six decades, successive Indian governments allowed restrictions to weaken, and the result was welcome integration, hastening slowly.

Now, Vajpayee and Jana Sangh’s children haven’t just re-strengthened the ILP restrictions, but extended them to an entirely new state, Manipur (the third largest state in the Northeast) and also added to it Nagaland’s Dimapur, a bustling cosmopolitan town in the plains.

Postscript: For all talk of his Christian influence, Elwin had ceased to be a Christian years ago. He was cremated according to Buddhist rites in Shillong.


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