Bijhu Nijeni 2011 - MAADI

part of Secular India. A majority of Chakmas
are bound to feel they are living under the
mercy of the majority, not in a democracy!
Just look at the way the then Sub Divisional
Officer (Civil) of West Phaileng, Mr
Sangthuama in a letter dated 24 May 2008
threatened to cut off all welfare schemes and
pro-poor programmes at Khantlang village
in Mamit district if the village council did
not allot land for a Church there. Or just
admire the audacity of the Deputy Commissioner
of Lunglei Ms M Zoohmingthangi
who has threatened, with total absence of
fear of the law, the Chakmas of Saisen,
Bandiasora, Nekuksora, Debasora, Malsury
and Tablabagh to vacate their villages which
have fallen outside the India-Bangladesh
border fence before 25th February 2011 or
face brute action.
The nineties saw large scale systematic
attacks against Chakmas. Notably these
were all visible to the naked eye - physical
assaults, burning down of houses, attacks on
Buddhist temples/statues, arbitrary deletion
of citizens from voters list, denial of civil and
political rights, etc. But those were the days
in the past. With the change of times, the tactics
at the hands of the rulers too changed.
Mizoram perhaps learnt from Gujarat that
open repression tactics like launching physical
attacks against religious minorities won’t
work in highly globalized environment with
mobile phones in every body’s pockets,
24x7 private television channels and when
every citizen can be a “citizen journalist”.
The subtleness of the repression against the
Chakmas, therefore, had to change over the
years, especially in the last a few years. The
repression of today has become more subtle,
more systematic and yet, less visible to the
naked eye. Presently, the persecution is
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more through denial of economic and social
progress and less of physical atrocities.
II. Three-layered strategy
In my view, the Mizoram government
has long ago adopted and continues
to pursue a systematic “three-layered strategy”
to suppress the Chakmas.
First: deny basic education
The fundamental of Mizoram’s
policy is to keep the Chakmas illiterate and
socio-economically backward. Once in every
five year (or whenever necessary), the
acute poverty helps the political leaders to
win elections by paying a few thousand rupees
to the village level leaders and just a
few bundles of bidi and match boxes to the
common voters during elections while ignoring
them for the entire term. This way
the political leaders and the state government
can also serve their goals to deny fundamental
right to have access to basic
amenities to Chakmas. T h is
is the reason why till today 72% of the
Chakma villages do not have Middle
Schools and 96% Chakma villages are without
High Schools in Mizoram. More than
half of the Chakmas are still illiterate, although
Mizos have nearly touched cent per
cent literacy mark.
Second: choke the economic lifeline
The Chakmas have succeeded to
attain higher education in spite of the
Mizoram government’s policies, not because
of them. To make the record straight,
most of the Chakma youths in the 1990s
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