At a seminar in Dhaka a few weeks ago on the explosive situation in Myanmar and its impact on Bangladesh in particular and eastern South Asia in general, I made a suggestion about the situation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, or CHT. The time for a comprehensive and conclusive peace is now. Indeed, it’s long past the time that such a peace took hold, and, at the very least, ensured that the peace accord of 1997 is fully implemented in letter and spirit and the rights and dignities of indigenous people of CHT are respected and preserved against majoritarian impulses and politics.
The suggestion was made in the context of securing Bangladesh against spillover effects of the depredations and ongoing war in Myanmar in Rakhine and the Chin State that border Bangladesh, and Myanmar’s adjacent Sagaing Division. It’s also a tri-junction: India’s Mizoram state abuts the entire stretch of CHT’s eastern border -- for nearly 320km -- and is also home to Kuki-Chin-Mizo ethnicities.
But the core point remains securing Bangladesh against itself.
That crucial need was underscored by a series of spectacular bank robberies by suspected rebels of the Kuki National Front, or KNF, in the Bandarban area in early April and the state’s response to it. The response included a massive clampdown by security forces and application of a provision of the penal code -- an inheritance of a 19th century British system and widely misused across the subcontinent since 1947 -- that permits cases against unnamed persons. This clubbing together of several dozen, even several hundred in some instances, unnamed suspects typically facilitate the arrest of anyone by law keepers to fill this interrogatory quota, as it were, in their search of answers more frequently than solutions.
As a corollary, local police, paramilitaries, and the creamy layer of the army impose knee-jerk restrictions on the local people, severely limiting their movement, and, as a ripple effect, impacting livelihoods, commerce, and all matters of governance like healthcare and education.
It goes beyond KNF and even allegations, articulated last year via media briefings and leaks, that this Made in Bangladesh outfit had formed alliances of convenience with militant Islamists by offering them sanctuary, weapons and training. This naturally paints a target on the outfits and their geography of operation. And, in the name of maintaining peace and law and order, a broad spectrum, hardened police response, and militarist state response, as ever, take precedence over that undervalued quantum of solace: Governance.
To extend the argument: An economy of conflict continues to take precedence over an economy of peace.
It’s unsalutary, and hardly unusual. In Bangladesh such a cycle has persisted since the transplanting of majoritarian populations and generally obtuse government responses to local ethno-political needs of identity, administration and dignity from the 1970s onwards.
In the neighbouring areas of India, including Tripura, Meghalaya, and the nearby states of Nagaland and Manipur, obtuse and callous government reaction carried on the shoulders of the army and assorted security elements led to decades of militancy and utter socio-economic and political devastation of citizens. The human rights horrors that inevitably followed -- all eminently and meticulously recorded and much of it strenuously if unsuccessfully denied by various Indian government agencies -- fed into what quickly became a vicious cycle of conflict and its equally cynical offshoot, conflict management.
The ultimate irony was of course the application of strong-arm tactics, constitutionally through the enactment of utterly undemocratic laws in its Parliament, such as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, or AFSPA, and the follow through of impunity and immunity AFSPA provided the armed forces to freely interdict suspects, even kill them.
Among other things, AFSPA provided -- indeed, continues to provide -- India’s army and operational adjuncts such as Assam Rifles and Rashtriya Rifles both immunity and impunity in areas that the Act is enforced, to kill at will anyone even on the merest suspicion of breaching law and order, of being a rebel sympathizer. This writ extends to “(A)ny commissioned officer, warrant officer, non-commissioned officer or any other person of equivalent rank in the armed forces … in a disturbed area …”
AFSPA has over the decades led to gross abuse of power in the far-eastern Indian states of Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, Tripura, and elsewhere -- and a derivative of AFSPA as applied to Jammu and Kashmir. The brunt of it has often been borne by non-combatants -- written off as collateral damage in the greater interest of the nation.
Indeed, in Mizoram, after rebellion erupted in the mid-Sixties after government mismanaged a famine response and applied the stick when carriages of food grain and relief would have done, the Indian Air Force was in March 1966 ordered to strafe rebel strongholds in and around the capital, Aizawl. “Collateral damage” on account of that operation quickly paled on account horrific attacks on citizenry and relocating and regrouping entire villages -- a tactic also used in Nagaland -- to deny rebels shelter and support.
It was altogether an abject demonstration of inviting people to be loyal citizens of a country, by first taking them for granted, and then applying the hammer.
It remains an open secret that the East Pakistani establishment of the day, with a nudge or two from the Chinese establishment of the day, offered sanctuary to Mizo rebels -- a template followed by some regimes in later years while offering sanctuary to a wide spectrum of anti-India rebels -- effectively leveraging a situation of vulnerability readily offered by India’s misgovernance.
It required a staggering level of political maturity -- and the implacable will of the Mizo people -- for a treaty in 1986 to turn Mizoram into a zone of relative peace that has held for nearly four decades. Every such success, in Tripura, Meghalaya and to some extent in Nagaland, has been built on recognition of the identity, dignity and aspiration of local citizens -- indigenous people -- according them social and political channels, enabling and empowering them with every positive mechanism of constitutional governance, and attempts to ensure that livelihood opportunities keep pace alongside a criminal justice system that is actually seen to offer justice.
Where an enterprise of governance has been deliberately subverted for majoritarian political benefit, as in Manipur, ethno-political violence has since May 2023 dislocated every mechanism of government. In all of far-eastern India in zones that border Myanmar and Bangladesh, Manipur is today a symbol of how-not-to-govern. It remains a pressure-cooker of dissent and violence. Several thousand weapons looted from state armouries, and ultra-militant outfits that have variously found majoritarian and non-majoritarian aid, ensure that the region, including the tri-junction area, remains awash in AWOL arms, as it were.
In India as in Bangladesh, managing conflict without addressing root causes of distrust and dissent will remain a cynical exercise that substitutes a peaceable intent with a command-and-control structure that feeds into the economy of conflict. This is not governance, the same as one can say that the absence of conflict is not necessarily peace.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Centre for South Asian Studies at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
