FRoaming in a gentle spring breeze, the fire tore through the English Middle School and the Saturday Market before moving into the neighborhoods of Humiche Weng and Chinga Weng. Carpet of fire sweeps south as two decades of savage war called for by Mizos Bui Lai—’The Disturbances’—gathered momentum. The terror lives on in the minds of the victims: very few in India have heard of the incineration at Pukpui, the threat of cannon bombardment at Lunglei, and gang rape Kolasib, Mizoram.
For decades, the government dismissed the testimony of eyewitnesses who had seen Indian Air Force fighters drop bombs on Aizawl on 5 March 1966.
A resident of Aizawl said, “The good planes were those that flew comparatively slow and did not spew fire or smoke.” told a committee Led by Meghalaya MP GG Swale. “The angry planes were the ones that flew away before they heard their arrival.”
Fifty-seven years after the Aizawl attack—the first and last time that India used air power against its own citizens—fighter jets have again targeted Mizoram. This time, Myanmar Air Force jets are targeting ethnic Chin rebel camps along the Tawai River, which runs along the border with India.
Ethnic Chin rebels fighting Myanmar’s junta, ThePrint Karishma Hasnat disclosed Using Mizoram as a logistic base this week. Last year, the National Investigation Agency discovered network smuggling tons of explosives for the extremists. Some residents of Mizoram are fighting alongside insurgents they consider kin.
a peace settlement The Mizoram insurgency ended in 1986, but the brutal fighting in the border areas reflects the complex historical trauma that underpinned it. The renewed flow of arms to the region, and a rising tide of Zo ethno-nationalism inspired by atrocities in Myanmar, are fueling the war’s outcome in India.
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learn bad lesson
The constitution drafted by the Mizo National Front (MNF) in 1965 declared “the Lord Jesus Christ is the Supreme Head of Mizoram,” and “the Holy Scriptures shall be the foundation of the law.” After a famine in 1958–1959, utopian ethno-nationalist currents swept Mizo society. The Indian state, the ethno-nationalists argued, had shown itself to be an unreliable protector of Mizo interests. A new nation state was necessary to protect the Mizo in the plains of Assam against the loss of their land and identity.
Well-equipped and trained MNF insurgents in East Pakistan—now Bangladesh—capture Aizawl to establish a nation state that will include all Zo’s branches hnahthlak Or family tree. This means the Kuki, Mizo and Chin people were spread across Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura, East Pakistan and Myanmar.
The Indian state was determined not to turn the other cheek. failed to push back the rebels who captured Aizawl, ex-army officer and Historian Vivek Chadha Recorded, Indian troops called in air support. An Indian officer involved in the operation recalled, “At the end of the air action, the city of Aizawl caught fire.” Later, more airstrikes were called in as the army pushed on to Lunglei on Demagiri.
Learning from the British colonial counter-insurgency in Kenya and Malaya, the army forced some four-fifths of the rural population off their land and into garrison villages surrounded by barbed wire and guard posts. The strategy was intended to deprive the rebels of food and logistical support – but also to make self-sufficient farming communities dependent on the state.
Although the government had promised that the resettlement policy would not involve “any tinge of force”, Political scientist Sajal Nag recorded that the reality was very different. Before dawn the army would surround the entire village and force them to take with them what they could to new blockade positions. Photographs of families will be taken to control movement in new villages. Beating and hitting were common.
Elders of Darzo Village, Bureaucrat Vijender Jaffa Written, ordered to destroy their grain supplies and homes and then at gunpoint, forced to issue a certificate that they had burned their village.
Gerald Templer, General is credited with providing the intellectual foundation for British doctrine in Malaya, ffun written The key to a successful counterattack “lay not in putting more troops in the woods, but in the hearts and minds of the people”. The Reality of Imperial Britain’s Colonial Wars, Historian Carl Hack The records include the use of mass shootings, executions, gang rapes, burning of villages and imprisoning 10th of the population in security enclaves.
“The Indian Army slavishly copied the British,” a Economist Amrita Rangasamy It was observed in 1978 after completing extended field research in Mizoram. Like the British, they were unsuccessful – but the rebels India was fighting were also facing defeat.
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force majeure
Led by rebel commander Demokhsik Gangtey – relying on a compass set to 10º north, as they had no maps – the MNF guerrillas made the perilous journey across the Arakan mountains in 1972, hoping for help from China. The group received some weapons and cash from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), but was so discouraged by offers of assistance that it remained in Myanmar. Twenty-seven of the 47-member group would surrender to the Indian Army three years later.
Five years after the fighting in Aizawl, the MNF lost its sanctuaries in East Pakistan. The PLA correctly assessed the deeply-Christian commanders of the MNF as incompatible with revolutionary communism and withdrew support. Since 1976, the MNF has been locked in a negotiation process that has led to the withdrawal of force. Both sides realized that coercion had its limits.
Even though skeptics thought that if New Delhi had not bribed an exhausted rebel leadership to share power, things might have turned out better. “The army has stopped bothering us,” a village leader sarcastically told Rangasamy, “looks like it’s the police’s turn now.”
From the Magisterial Visual Anthropology of Mizo Joy Pachuau and William Van Schendel, it is clear that the community was successful in shaping its own unique modernity – which melded the Taj Mahal and miniskirts, cowboy hats and Korean bands into a distinct identity. There were fears of the 1986 political settlement that New Delhi would impose a violent colonial regime.
ethnicity and rebellion
Faced with ethnic insurgencies across Myanmar, the Tatmadaw – the country’s armed forces – failed to understand the extent of coercion. Rather than seek political and cultural accommodation with ethnic rebels, political scientist Lionel Beaner explains, it resorted to ever-increasing strength. The army’s own vision of itself as a leviathan upholding Burma’s identity undermined many attempts to create a truly federal relationship, while granting self-governance rights to the ethnicities. The result has been the longest running civil war in the world.
The 1966 insurgency had seen thousands of refugees from Mizoram move to Chin to be with their relatives. After the 1988 coup and now again in 2021, refugees are coming from another route. fleeing air raids and large scale military operationsRefugees are also coming to Thailand and Bangladesh.
Mizoram leaders believe New Delhi should do more to pressure the Tatmadaw to end the civil war and restore democracy. Ordinary Mizos living along the border with Myanmar have also been demanding a more powerful Indian military post, which could prevent the Tatmadaw from attacking Chin villages. The Tatmadaw, however, has been a reliable partner for India, working with it to crush the Naga and Manipuri insurgents.
Faced with a dilemma, New Delhi has been quietly mulling its options – but the increasing tempo of fighting in the border areas means that time for speculation is running out.
The relationship between refugees from Myanmar and the Mizos has been less than perfect. The influence of the Church ensured that prohibitory orders remained in force throughout Mizoram until 2015. Ethnic Chin migrants were, rightly or wrongly, blamed for running small-scale distilleries, which were spread across many areas of Aizawl. Heroin trafficking, and later methamphetamine, smuggled in from Myanmar, ravaged Mizo communities.
Over the past decade, powerful networks such as the Young Mizo Association (YMA) – a powerful network that some have linked to a parallel government – have repeatedly called for the expulsion of certain refugee groups such as the Bru and Chakmas.
A resident of Aizawl pointed out, “We say that nothing good comes from the east but the sun.” law scholar Kirsten McConachy, “Every time there is drug shipments and arrests, it is always from Myanmar.”
However, for all these frictions, Zo nationalism has emerged as a real force among young Mizos – a means of asserting their identity in both the Northeast and India, which, for the most part, fail to acknowledge their existence. lives. In 2015, when a landslide destroyed hundreds of homes in Chin, YMA volunteers sent trucks of aid. Local churches organized aid drives, while Mizo celebrities staged fundraising at Aizawl Mall.
Like ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka or Bengali Hindus in Bangladesh, violence against the Chin has sparked growing anger in Mizoram. The involvement of young Indian citizens in the Chin insurgency, though small in number, reflects anger. India has to be able to show that it is on the side of its own people.
Praveen Swamy is National Security Editor at ThePrint. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Hamra Like)