Why DIMA HASAO Is Burning

The first bullets to break the fragile peace in Assam were fired last week in a place called Maibang in the Dima Hasao area of Assam, when two young protestors were shot dead from close range.

- Samrat Choudhury

A crisis is brewing in Northeast India. The region, which has seen decades of violent armed insurgencies, repeated bouts of ethnic cleansing, and a deepening corruption of its society and polity as an indirect consequence of the conflict, had turned a corner in recent years – or so it seemed.

Peace had returned as a result of a combination of factors including dialogues with many of the groups, a hardening of state response against the holdouts, a reduction in popular support for separatism, and a change of government in Bangladesh in 2009 that landed some of the top leaders of various regional insurgencies in Indian government’s hands. Now, however, the situation once more is fraught. The first bullets to announce this new reality were fired last week in a place called Maibang in the Dima Hasao area of Assam. The shooters were men of the Assam Police. Two young men from the Dimasa tribe, Mithunjoy Dibradege and Probanto Hakmaosa, both in their 20s, died in the firing.

RSS Draft Plan for Naga Accord Ferments Trouble

The confrontation that led to these deaths had occurred as a result of news that appeared in The Wire titled, ‘Revealed: RSS Draft Plan for Nagaland Accord’. The article quoted a veteran RSS pracharak who works in Northeast India, Jagdamba Mall, and presented excerpts from a ‘draft agreement’ that he said was his ‘personal effort’. A paragraph in the article mentioned that ‘Mall’s draft agreement’ has suggested ‘separate development authorities (to be) constituted for a period of ten years to execute the development programmes in seven Naga inhabited districts of Manipur’, ‘two Naga inhabited districts of Arunachal Pradesh, Changlang and Tirap’ and ‘one in Assam, the Dima Hasao (North Cachar Hills district)’.”

It was this news that set Dima Hasao alight.