Highway 39 - A book that leaves a mark -

Highway 39 - Journeys Through a Fractured Land

Sudeep Chakravarti

2012

Fourth Estate 

Read a book that hit me hard - heart and mind - after long. It is raw and direct; neither has pretensions nor tries to be diplomatic. 

A review (by me) may not have done justice to the sheer starkness of the issues the book hit me with. I share some 'unconnected snippets' that stayed with me long after I had read it; travelling in the very region it talks of. 

Text in red is what the author has heard in conversations with locals while the blue colour brings out the author's voice. 

A lot of money is also wasted in Nagaland because Nagaland isn’t permitted to do the planning, which has to be in conformity with what Delhi wants – and Nagaland can’t do the planning because Nagaland doesn’t have the resources. So it’s a waste for taxpayers in India. Their money is being wasted in Nagaland. And because we don’t pay tax here there is no transparency . . . there’s no accountability – its not  our money. But, you see, were we to pay taxes, we would question why such a grand police office is being constructed when in our hospitals people do not even have a place to stay.

I heard of an event from the early 1990s when the army badly beat up three men and two women in the area. By way of apology they were offered tea and a box of lipsticks each for the women.

When you ask a young child “what is your aim?” he will answer either that he wants to be a police commando or he wants to be an armed revolutionary. Because, these armed people are the most powerful people. Imagine a child growing up in that situation. These are the two role models.

I can’t help thinking: there must be something fundamentally still raw – with the construct of India, if more than sixty years after independence from Great Britain we still need to try hard, so institutionally, at patriotism.

My presumption is that it’s the same funds that get extorted or siphoned out of the system which comes back in the form of investments. The institutions which flourish increasingly are those which probably have (this) money, either individually or as a group. In the long-term it’s a positive thing, because its getting into the system. Once you are in a system you want to protect that.

Why would this lot – among them the chief minister and tourism minister – congregate at this army camp to plant saplings at great public expense? It’s the great Indian photo-opportunity riddle, templated over several decades by several thousand politicians and public servants across the country.

We also want to write a letter to Sonia Gandhi, so that she can be reminded of the non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi. I couldn’t help clarifying the situation. Nehru didn’t exactly follow the path of non-violence – not after India’s independence anyway. The Naga regions know well the brutal force of Nehru’s precept of violence. Certainly his daughter Indira Gandhi did not. Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland know it well. And her son Rajiv, even though he had attempted peace deals in Assam and Punjab, nevertheless had several blemished entries in his book of national conscience – where could one begin? Of these ‘national’ figures only Mahatma Gandhi truly had practised non-violence. And this Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhis aren’t related - though the Nehru-Gandhis haven't ever specifically advertised the fact. 

As I read I recalled select conversations with acquaintances and friends over the past decade in Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. I wondered on the layers of experiences and shades of emotions of these friends and acquaintances which would have had a brearing on the shape and texture of these conversations.