Imlisanen Jamir
Within a week of the October 23 bandh in Pasighat, police had arrested 26 people and the state had moved 30 companies of central forces into three districts. The dam that set it all off had by then slipped out of the conversation, because social media had found a more agreeable subject in itself.
A country that could not have found Pasighat on a map a fortnight earlier now discovered that it could itemise to the rupee what each hill state owed in gratitude. The maps came colour-coded and the confidence behind them was that of an auditor who has never been shown the firm’s books. Villagers in Upper Siang were informed that loyalty is a tax like any other, and that people who ask to be consulted before ancestral land goes under a reservoir resemble a tenant who has started to discuss the lease. The maps credit direct tax to wherever it happens to be deposited, which favours whichever state houses the head offices and rewards whoever happens to be holding the calculator. A ledger kept this way can prove anything, since the entries are chosen by the person who wants a particular total, and the villagers had no seat at the table where the columns were drawn.
The same feeds that for years have called people from the North East ‘Chinese’ in restaurants and hostel corridors now asked them to defend the frontier against China. Few of those issuing the order seemed to recall that they had spent the previous decade doubting the nationality of the recipients. The job calls for being foreign and patriotic on alternate days, and applicants were given no chance to ask which shift came first.
On the other bank of the timeline, the ‘mainlander’ was being compressed with equal industry into a single figure with one accent, one diet, one opinion and one relative who once asked where somebody was really from. A slur for him, assembled from the same materials as the old ones, went round with the pride of a people discovering that it too has a vocabulary. Contempt travels as easily as a phone and can be picked up by anyone with a grievance and a free evening. The grievance here has a documented history that runs through so many cases, and that history gives the retaliation its energy without improving its aim. Each side supplied the other with exactly the caricature it needed, and the supply never ran short all week.
The two sides arrived at the quarrel with unequal equipment. One had the army, the tax map and the security argument, and the other had a hashtag and a long memory. The astonishment was shared evenly, with each camp announcing to the other, and to anyone passing, that the mask had slipped, as though anyone had been wearing one. Meanwhile the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project still remains at the pre-feasibility stage. The only structure completed in the valley this season is the wall between the two audiences, which went up without a survey, without consent and well ahead of schedule.
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