India First

LANDING IN GUWAHATI IN the early 2000s, I was full of cautious excitement. Guwahati was a small city then; it didn’t have any big-brand ho­tels, there were hardly any restaurants or local transportation for tourists. The city shut down early and people were laidback. Everything was done lahey lahey, slowly-slowly. The hills met the mighty Brahmaputra and the Goddess Kamakhya looked upon the city from the Nilachal hill. There was an old-world charm that was largely found in old tea plantation families. Their homes lined with furniture made of Burma teak, a mandatory piano and a member of the family adept at playing old songs on it for guests who sang along. There was nothing flashy about the city or its people. Fresh out of university in London and coming from the chaos of Delhi, it felt like time had stopped in Guwahati.

But when you are young, it is easy to romanticise life. It didn’t take me long to realise that under the layer of gracious hospital­ity and relaxed demeanours there was an indisputable sense of anxiety. Dinners ended by 9PM and guests moved in a convoy of cars in fear of terrorist attacks, kidnappings, and extortions. Businessmen avoided building large homes or buying expensive cars out of apprehension of being targeted by one of the 33 or so insurgent groups in the state of Assam. The city was not flashy because it chose not to be. In 2000, over 300 terrorists were killed by security forces but also nearly 400 civilians died. The state was widely known across the country through the terrorist activities of the separatist group United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a designated terrorist organisation by the Union government that aimed to establish an independent sovereign nation-state of As­sam. Founded in 1979, ULFA admitted to having ties with the Na­tionalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), a Naga Christian militant separatist organisation and the Kachin Independence Army, one of the oldest militant groups in Myanmar. NSCN, too, held the dubious distinction of being the longest-active and most powerful of the insurgent groups in the Northeast; some called it the mother ship of other separatist groups in the region.

Militant movements, terrorism, identity-based politics and ethnic conflicts were not limited to Assam but extended to other northeastern states as well. NSCN’s reach itself was far and wide, up to in Arunachal Pradesh, parts of Assam, Nagaland, and parts of Manipur. They wanted to carve out a country from these states for the Nagas called Nagalim. The National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), a designated terrorist outfit, wanted to establish an independent Tripuri state. Meghalaya had the Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA) which fought for a sovereign Garo land in the western areas of Meghalaya. Manipur had the United National Liberation Front (UNLF) aiming to establish a sovereign and social­ist Manipur with an armed wing called the Manipur People’s Army (MPA). There were many more groups, and what was common to all these groups was a plank of chauvinistic sub-nationalism that was threatening national unity, that too at the cost of their own people. In this mosaic of separatist groups, the environment in the Northeast became one of ‘them’ versus ‘us’, creating hostility towards a larger overarching national identity, not by the majority but enforced by separatist leaders.

It was in this backdrop that I travelled to some of the most conflict-ridden areas to research and study insurgency in the re­gion. These areas were remote, dangerously unpredictable, and difficult to reach because of the lack of connectivity and infra­structure. One of my first trips outside Guwahati was to a town in the Dima Hasao district of Assam. Exhausted from an overnight journey on a local bus that was stopped at many points by local militant groups for the collection of illegal ‘road tax’, I decided to stay at the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram school, a Rashtriya Swayam­sevak Sangh (RSS)-inspired organisation, in Haflong. This was a school where tribal children who did not have access to educa­tion received free boarding along with tuition. The headmistress was a retired State Bank of India employee from Pune who had committed to two years of teaching and managing the school. I found it fascinating that a woman who could be enjoying her retirement had opted for a post-retirement life in a highly volatile place. But that was the nationalism that RSS and those affiliated with it practised.

The more days I stayed, the more I learnt from the children as to how they were so grateful for the school, an opportunity their parents could not have dreamt of, and how many of the former students had gone on to pass competitive examinations and be­come “big officers”. However, what they were most excited to tell me about was of their trip to Mumbai. It was the first time they had ever left their district, been on a train, but most importantly to them, seen the great sea. Something until then they had only seen in photographs and dreamt of. The boarding school was nothing like the ones in the rest of the country. It was not for the privileged few but the marginalised many. The school had noth­ing extraordinary about it; yet, every morning its extraordinary students sung the national anthem in unison, innocently challenging separatist mindsets that prevailed around them.

This was the case wherever I travelled in the Northeast. For as many militant sepa­ratist groups there were, there was RSS and organisations inspired by it, its “ideological mentees”. There was the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti (an independent women’s wing ), Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA, a non-profit organisation committed to the uplift of tribal communities), Seva Bharti (a non-profit or­ganisation that provides education, health, skill development and livelihood support to marginalised communities), Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (the student wing that largely arose to counter communist influence in educational institutions), amongst a dozen other organisations working at the grassroots level, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar.

However, the first question to strike any observer when encountered with such a di­chotomy of aspirations would naturally be how the Sangh had managed to penetrate this deep in the region. Especially with a nationalist agenda in the midst of violent separatist ideolo­gies. While every fault line had been exploited by separatists on the basis of language and eth­nicity, and new ones created by the advent of aggressive missionaries, RSS had only grown. They had not just expanded in the numbers of the shakhas they operated daily, or the outreach they had achieved through their “mentee” or­ganisations, but also emerged in influence as the singular largest unifying voice.

While it is true that India has been a civili­sational state, bound by culture and history, it is also true that the civilisational continuity was lost in the annals of time with the arrival of colonial administration. Even though tribal communities were patriotic in essence as evident from the great resistance movements such as those led by Rani Gaidinliu (1930s) or the Khamti and Singpho Rebellions (1839-50s), among countless others, the practicality of the patriotic experience was abysmal. That is where RSS stepped in.

IT WAS AS early as October 27, 1946 that the first RSS shakha was started in the Northeast in Guwahati. It didn’t take much. Three pracharaks (trained and dedicated workers) from Maharashtra—Dadarao Parmarth, Vasant Rao Oak and Krishna Paranjpe—were sent from Delhi and the very next day, the first shakha emerged. Their agenda, as it was across the coun­try, was to bind people irrespective of their ethnic, regional, lin­guistic, religious identities in a nationalistic narrative. Within a few years of the first pracharaks arriving, social programmes such as the Pahari Sewa Sangh was established. It aimed at building social connections through understanding and participating in daily lives of tribal communities. Later being absorbed into VKA, it was perhaps the anthropological understanding gained in the early years of these shy tribal communities that allowed for mutual trust to be built for the future. Today, VKA has over 26 boys’ and girls’ hostels in Dima Hasao, Silchar, Hailakandi and other places, 40 nursery schools and numerous coaching centres.

By 1975, every district in Assam had a shakha. The Assam Movement (1979-85) further gave RSS momentum across the Northeast. The All Assam Students’ Union (AASU) was at the forefront of the agitation and insisted on the deletion of all Ban­gladeshi immigrants, whereas RSS sought to keep Hindu Bengali names on the electoral rolls citing their persecution in Bangla­desh. RSS also launched ABVP into the movement which helped keep a check on separatist elements.

In the 1980s and 1990s, work increased in tribal-dominated states of Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Mizoram. Even though these states were already Christian-dominated, preserving indigenous culture along with faith appealed to the masses. The famous story of Rajesh Deshkar, a pracharak, who gave a face to Rangfraa, the god of the various tribes of Changlang in east Arunachal, is an example. It is one of the most well-known stories of impact. A fine artist, over a period of time Deshkar drew a picture with inputs from the various tribes on what they thought Rangfraa would look like. Once they were all satisfied, a statue was commissioned in Jaipur. When the statue arrived, it is said that many tribals ran and hid while the others were awestruck. They had never seen their god in form. Today, there are more than a hundred Rangfraa temples. Similarly, the Sangh helped revive Sanamahism in Manipur, the Zeliangrong Heraka movement in Nagaland, and the Seng Khasi faith in Meghalaya. This outreach helped them not only make inroads and spread nationalism but also counter aggres­sive missionary networks.

Unfortunately, to start one shakha may have been easy but to be a nationalist and sustain it, a heavy price had to be paid. In Assam, to dare to advocate a unified India was to become the main opposition to ULFA’s separatist agenda. Shashikant Chauthaiwale, who came to the Northeast as a pra­charak in 1961, is a sole witness to the activities of the Sangh in the Northeast over the years. In his book My Journey as a Pra­charak, he details the murders of pracharaks Murli Manohar, Omprakash Chaturvedi and Pramod Narayan Dikshit. When I met Shashiji, as he is fondly called, recently in Guwahati, he explained how ULFA did not even spare the Assamese pracharaks Sukleshwar Medhi and Madhumangal Sharma.

In Tripura, the combination of the anti-Hindu Communist Party of India (Marxist) government and Christian NLFT be­came a huge stumbling block. In 1999, four pracharaks were abducted by NLFT militants. Shyamal Sengupta, Dinen De, Sudhamay Datta and Subhankar Chakraborty were then ex­ecuted in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.

Murders of Sangh workers and attacks on them happened across the region over the years, a sad testimony of the price that nationalists had to pay in independent India. Yet, from the one solitary shakha in 1946, the network of organisations today has created an inclusive national identity with a collective sense of belonging that has embraced India’s diversity. None of this would have been possible if RSS had not dared to become a challenge to the separatist ideology that loomed over the Northeast, keeping it psychologically distant from the rest of the country. While the organisation has endured difficult times, in the spirit of the North­east, its work lahey lahey continues. After all, what is Bharat Mata, a national personification of India and a symbol of nationalism, if every child from the remotest corners of India has not seen the other corners? Just like the children in Haflong who saw the great sea for the very first time. Till then, it seems unlikely that the work of RSS in the Northeast will be complete.

AssamHindu nationalismManipurNortheast IndiashakhasThe RSS CenturyULFA