Redemption

Mizo Hills District 1968 (it wasn't the State of Mizoram yet). We had survived for six months in the bullet-infested hills, perpetuating our delusions of security.

Yet, time had stood still during all these months, as we searched for a form through which to mediate our feelings of inadequacy. The old rule about war photography - that pictures are good enough only when the cameraman is close enough - didn't apply here. When pain and distress battered their spirit, Mizos hid their emotions away, deep inside the mountain caves. With hardly any access to their inner thoughts, we held on obsequiously to the stated official perceptions, and made no efforts to resolve our incomprehension of the process that makes ethnic minorities inhabiting huge sub-continents llike India drift into such tragedies.

I stepped into this singularly ill-contrived world when the population was being relocated miles away from their homes - in barbed-wire-enclosed camps, euphemistically called Protected and Progressive Villages! While the generals guarded the primacy of their tactics over all other considerations, the masses ran up against a formidable military response (visualized by the colonial armies for suppressing freedom movements), unleashing extraordinary indignity and repression upon a hapless population. In a surrealistic twist, those who had set up the insurrection became fleeting, elusive shapes like the phosphorescent creatures of the deep ocean, directing the confused struggle from the safety of foreign sanctuaries, while the village folks, most of whom knew very little about anything, bore, as if under a cosmic design, the brunt of an exasperated army.

If our attempts to checkmate the army methods was like getting Beelzebub to drive out the devil, the hearts-and-minds campaign was an inter-service burlesque, played out to the galleries. In their frustrated righteousness, the civil servants seemed more concerned to look shrewd, determined, imbued with necessary vigilance before the wiles of the army than with finding a way to soften the harshness the armed conflict had brought upon the population. In any case, the Mizos found it queer, even impertinent, that one hand should pretend to heal the wounds inflicted by the other. What was the point in a see-through fig leaf, anyway?

Inevitably, deviations took place wherever governments, even the most democratic ones, defended themselves militarily against armed uprisings. The problem was our inability to determine a reasoned response. Would a state turn to terror and affirm the values of terrorists? Or follow the tired, subjective ideology of crime and punishment until the doomsday? Or unless, at any rate, Mother Teresa agreed to handle political violence! It was the first of the many dead ends of my career.

But faith often appears in one's life in a trivial guise. How, indeed, could one have imagined that a riverside lunch, hosted by a Colonel who commanded an operational sector, would lead to an unscrambling of sorts?

The Colonel had had his share of miscalculations. In a gesture symbolic of his professional hubris, he had the fate of insurgents marked on his operations-room pert chart. I had nothing against this level of optimism as I knew that you couldn't make the army fight if you didn't allow them to believe that they would win. But his advocacy of total annihilation of people opposing the state was somewhat risky. There were, of course, riskier propositions in his repertoire!

The occasion was a regimental anniversary and he had organised an enormous party garnished with the best of kebabs and biryani, endless pints of beer and rounds of gin and lime, photographers, a brass band, and hyperbole in full flow. The after-lunch speeches, which were a must in the army in those good old days, started with their customary pseudo-Kennedy peroration about country before self etc. etc.

But just as it was time for me to unravel the crochets of my mind before a large audience of infantry officers, the Colonel announced that he would not press me for a speech despite his great desire to hear me because the demands of security dictated that everybody should be back home well before sunset. An advice is an order in the army.