701
Caution: There are signs of an Assam-Mizoram rapprochement, but the temptation to politicise the strife does not augur well. PTI
Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior Journalist
History’s caprices have a way of catching up with the present times in the least expected ways. The shadow of the Partition has dogged and reshaped the history of three countries at all times but less seen and felt are the ramifications of a similar redrawing of borders demarcating the seven states of India’s Northeast that burst forth violently just when the troubled region seems to have made peace with itself. The irony could not have been starker when Assam and Mizoram went to ‘war’ recently. In ordinary circumstances, the use of the word ‘war’ to describe an intra-nation conflict might be unwarranted. But the sequence of events which erupted on the inter-state border between Vairengte (Mizoram) and Lailapur (Assam) last week reinforced the fragility of an entity that the BJP, like its predecessors, hoped would hang together largely through forced State agency and interventions. That’s not the way the seven ‘siblings’ will respond because unlike the Delhi establishment, regardless of which party is ruling, they do not perceive themselves as vassal states, even if they have accepted the terms of engagement set by the union government.