Conditional or half-hearted offer
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: August 14, 2014 -

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has succinctly stated that the Government of India is willing to hold talks with the North East insurgents as well as the Maoists provided they shun arms.

It is heartening that after a long gap the Government of India has opened its door for political dialogue with insurgents operating in the North East. But the sad part is, it comes with a rider.

It is this rider which negates the very idea of holding peace talk with the militants. Once the peaceful process of political dialogue is initiated, arms would automatically go silent.

While overtly inviting for peace talks, the Home Minister was implicitly dictating terms from the very beginning. “Attention will be given to the development of the Northeast as the region continues to be backward.

We want to give them the assurance that they too are part of India”. These were the exact words of Rajnath Singh.

The Union Home Minister’s offer for political dialogue sounded like opening a door with the left hand and closing the same door with the right hand. Yet, the Home Minister’s offer was not without any silver lining.

Unlike his predecessors, Rajnath Singh did not stick to the oft-repeated clause ‘within the Constitution of India’ which is the single largest stumbling block to all efforts toward bringing militant groups to the negotiating table.

Or was it a case of Rajnath Singh missing out the particular popular official jargon. Militant groups operating in the North East are varied and many.

Some are demanding outright sovereignty, while for some others, their political objective is limited to autonomy or creation, nay carving out of new States. Violence can be a means but it can never be the end.

So ultimately all political violence must be resolved on the negotiating table.

If the Government of India is sincere enough to address the issue of militancy in the North East, as an initial step the core issues need to be identified both by the armed opposition groups and the concerned Government and bargaining has to be started based on the commonly identified and accepted terms.

The core elements of the Indian State, which is politically and legally understood, are ingrained in the Constitution as the basic structure.

And sovereignty is a key vital element. Any modifications of the basic structure would render India stateless or meaningless to exist as a sovereign nation-state.

And these are, according to the makers of the India Constitution, are derived from the collective history and ethos including the culture, tradition, ways of life, etc. practised by the people of India.

Looking from this perspective, core is a very unique entity, just like the soul of the body. That’s why, India makes the habit of keeping a pre-condition before entering into negotiation or treaty or pact, “It has to be within the guidelines provided by the Constitution of India”.

Just like India, Manipur had its own core elements. Many of the militant groups operating in Manipur have been contending that these core elements of Manipur were swallowed up by India and they have been trying to vindicate their political violence in the name of reinstating the lost core elements.

Whichever way the arguments and counter arguments may go but they should have a meeting point if, after all, a conflict resolution process should be initiated.

Frankly we are not very hopeful on this front if the long drawn peace parleys with NSCN-IM is any indication.

We would rather be pessimists and proved wrong than optimists only to be proved wrong at the end.

We are also not very hopeful that Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s offer for peace talk which went with the rider ‘shun arms first’ would be responded positively by any of the major militant groups which have their own set of political ideologies and objectives.