When peace is elusive http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070116/asp/northeast/story_7262181.asp
Peace talks, dialogues, ceasefire, and the like are a familiar refrain in a region so steeped in violence. Those who yearn for peace seldom know who to negotiate with in what has become a veritable churning ground for conflict. Violence changes its contours depending on the ground situation and the fluctuating interests of the actors involved. Similarly, peace initiatives need to take these ground realities into consideration. There is no such thing as a time-tested method for ushering peace. As so-called peace loving citizens, many hold the view that violence should be countered by gentle persuasion. My own position is significantly different from the commonly held view that "dialogue" alone can bring peace. Dialogue is a two-way and sometimes a three-way process. There are mediators, there are the actors of violence and the state. Hardly ever have two opponents met eyeball-to-eyeball and arrived at any groundbreaking resolutions. This is natural. Mediators enable the contesting parties to abandon their posturing and to see each other not as egotistic rivals contesting for a winning position or as enemies having divergent interests inimical to the common good. Common goals Mediators can facilitate when the two contesting parties have a common goal but have divergent views on how to achieve those goals. However, mediators have to be extremely circumspect about their own positions. The slightest tendency to incline towards one or the other party in conflict makes their positions suspect and untenable. After the serial blasts in Assam, several so-called experts on Northeast affairs were hounded by the national electronic media for their sound bytes. They had to say something even if they were at the time far removed from the incidents. A certain prominent news channel caught hold of a member of the Peoples' Consultative Group (PCG), addressed him as a spokesperson for the Ulfa and bluntly asked what he felt about the atrocities committed by the outfit on a vulnerable, defenceless group. The gentleman was temporarily stumped. He vehemently denied being an ideologue of the Ulfa before setting out to air his pedantic comments. Mamoni Goswami's own role in this entire gamut of things requires serious critique. She was the one who proposed a dialogue between the Ulfa and the Government of India. Did she have the qualifications, apart from being a celebrity of sorts, to comprehend the intricacies of what could be called the tortuous route to peace? Obviously, Goswami did not have the requisite discernment of the complexities and ramifications of proposing peace on behalf of a terrorist outfit. An astute scholar of conflict would have grasped the diabolical designs of Ulfa, which, simply put, was to get some breathing space and time to refurbish their ammunition. No one in Assam really believed that Ulfa was serious about a dialogue because there was nothing to demonstrate that intention. Anything veering around sovereignty is a non-starter. Apart from that contentious demand, Ulfa has never put forward other demands cogently and in a manner that reflects their genuine desire for a political settlement. However, to list demands without consulting the larger population of Assam would also be presumptuous and perhaps not acceptable to the people. Mediators, therefore, can have no role when one party or the other adopts an obdurate stance and is not open to new ideas in the light of changed circumstances. Biased views In the context of India's Northeast, our own parochial stance of looking at the perpetrators of violence as kith and kin because they belong to a particular community, viewing them as simple youths gone wayward because of circumstances and undermining their heinous crimes and taking up partisan positions have further exacerbated conflict. There are also some familiar approaches adopted that have undermined the role of the security forces. When force is applied in fits and starts, without a long-term strategy but merely for temporary containment of violence, the security apparatus loses its cutting edge. When the force suffers casualties on account of inchoate political messaging, they either go on a rampage or withdraw into their barracks, demoralised. Assam and Nagaland are perfect examples of the politicisation of violence. While conflict in both states is rooted in political and historical aberrations, their solution lies in prudently constructed frameworks, which take into account the ground realities and contextual positions of actors in conflict vis-à-vis the state. State politicians do not have the experience or acumen to come up with such judicious proposals. Tarun Gogoi is emerging as a lame duck chief minister, cornered by the media and all hues of political rivals who have descended on Assam like a bunch of vultures. His lieutenants also have no credible answers for the Ulfa's bloody adventure, so they explain away everything and that makes things worse. Indeed, Assam is a picture of complete chaos. At this point, it would be perfectly credible to say that things in Assam have gone beyond the control of the state government. The Centre needs to act and act fast. In fact, the tendency of the Congress-led Government at the Centre to prevaricate and adopt flip-flop stances when it comes to addressing issues in Congress-ruled states has actually aggravated the situation. Hence the need to depoliticise violence cannot be over-stated. This cannot be achieved merely by deployment of additional forces because at best that is only a fire-fighting strategy. The top brass of military strategists have opined that militancy in Assam has become a cross-border assault and unless Myanmar and Bangladesh co-operate in counter-terrorism engagement offensive, violence in Assam will only be contained temporarily. It will have the potential to escalate whenever the Ulfa desires to step up its extortion demands. Looking beyond At this juncture, there is an urgent need for civil society to articulate its own positions in the light of the recent massacres. It is now time to go beyond peace processions and other muted forms of protests. There is need for a coherent people-oriented strategy for peace which could draw upon the experiences and expertise of conflict managers and experts not just from the state but outside. Also, it must be said that mere holding of peace seminars in Assam is not likely to bring down violence. Civil society must send a definite message to Ulfa that it no longer supports the outfit's subversive tactics and that it is willing to stake its all for the sake of peace in Assam. Media glare on all civil society initiatives for peace has the potential to create more problems. There must be an element of privacy at least while strategies for peace are being drawn up. KOUSHIK HAZARIKA http://www.asom.co.nr/
