Fishing in troubled 'NE' waters
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: August 24, 2012 -

With each passing day, the ongoing drama around the forced exodus of panic stricken Northeasterners from various cities of India is turning out to be more hilarious, leaving no room for doubt on the real culprits behind the hate messages and videos that triggered the flight.

Four days after the exodus started; Union Home R K Singh came up with the claim on last Saturday night that bulk of hate messages and doctored images threatening attacks on northeasterners in retaliation of the violence against migrant Muslims in Assam have been uploaded from Pakistan.

The following day, Pakistan did not waste any time in rejecting India's claim outrightly and contended that such 'wild allegations' would only widen the trust deficit between the two neighbouring countries, which have been at war thrice and spent greater part of their respective 65 years of Independence in pointing finger of accusations at each other.

Pakistan also demanded New Delhi to provide the evidence first so that it could 'look into' the matter.

Consequently, one Monday, Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde assured that India would soon provide Islamabad with evidence of the involvement of Pakistan-based groups in whipping up panic that led to exodus of Northeasterners from different parts of the country. So far, there is no inkling whether the evidence sought by Islamabad has been provided or not.

To counter this supposed 'cyber attack' from across the border; Government of India went ahead with a crack down on websites circulating morphed pictures and videos.

In all 250 such websites were blocked, 80 more websites were ordered to be blocked and even threatened to take legal action against social networking sites like Twitter which refused to cooperate in the crackdown.

All these and many more efforts were put in place as confidence building measures to facilitate return of the Northeasterners who have been forced to return home leaving behind their studies and jobs midway.

Now, the most interesting part of the whole drama has unfolded in the form of revelation that a large number of threatening SMSs that spread panic and forced northeasterners to take flight-for-life were also generated by fringe Hindu fundamentalist groups within the country.

Vindicating the earlier claim, it has emerged that around 20 percent of the inflammatory web-pages blocked by of the Government of India were actually uploaded by right-wing Hundu fundamentalists to fan communal passions among the people.

One may wonder why anybody would do that.

The answer is simple - to fish in troubled waters and ride on the conflict in Assam for their own political gains.

Perhaps, that explains why 'everyone' was so eager in outdoing one another in trying to dissuade the northeasterners from leaving even before the exodus actually started.

One may still argue, what about 80 percent of the remaining inflammatory web-pages which too have been blocked, and Hindu groups are not responsible for that.

Our answer is simple, yet again, why make the innocent northeasterners the pawn in the ugly Indian politics.