India Briefing, 1988 by Marshall M. Bouton

Author:Marshall M. Bouton [Bouton, Marshall M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, General
ISBN: 9780813307404
Google: 8jb_QgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 5030542
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1988-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Internal Security

As India’s relations with both Pakistan and China improved in the 1970s, there has been an increase in the level of domestic strife involving various ethnic and economic groups. Correspondingly, the Indian government has increased its deployment of both the regular armed forces and the paramilitary forces to deal with the growing sectarian violence in the country.

Domestic strife in India may be classified first in terms of ultimate objectives, namely secessionist and nonsecessionist movements; and into the type of violence that it involves, namely civilian riots, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. In the northeast of India there have been secessionist movements of varying significance by some Naga, Mizo, and Gharo tribal peoples (mainly Christians converted by Western missionaries) and in Tripura and Manipur. And, of course, there are Sikhs in the Punjab who are conducting a terrorist campaign to secede from India. Many Muslims of Kashmir, and many Tamils, claiming at times to speak for all South Indians, have displayed secessionist sentiments, backed by occasionally anti-central government political movements.

While religion plays an important part in the separatist tendencies among the tribal peoples of the northeast, and for Kashmiri Muslims and Sikhs, Tamil separatist demands for a Dravidastan in the 1950s were linguistic and quasi-racial in character. The Tamils are predominantly Hindu by religion, but they believe themselves to be a separate people with deep historical roots, the main inheritors of the Dravidian language and culture as distinct from the languages and culture of the Indo-Aryan North which are derived from Sanskrit. Early Sikh demands for a separate Punjab state were presented as linguistic demands (especially after Punjabi Hindus declared Hindi as their language instead of Punjabi) until they achieved their goal in 1966, when the new states of Haryana and Punjab were formed. However, more recent Sikh secessionist demands for a Khalistan are based on religion. After the Nagas, Mizos, and Gharos gained internal statehood at various times through the creation of Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya, their separatist demands have all but disappeared.

The threat to internal security posed by movements demanding the recognition of the rights of a linguistically defined people to significant cultural and political autonomy has been met, often after violence and attempted police and military suppression, through political solutions. Although the reorganization of the Indian provinces on a linguistic basis had been a demand of the Congress movement for 25 years before Independence, it took a violent upheaval in Andhra Pradesh in 1953 to achieve reorganization three years later in most of India. After another series of upheavals, separate states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were carved out of the old Bombay state in 1960.

More recently, a movement in the mid-1980s among the Nepali-speaking Gurkhas of the Darjeeling area of West Bengal to create a separate state of Gurkhaland within the Indian Union has, in mid-1988, seemingly been settled with the concession of some autonomy within the state. In Assam between 1982 and 1985 there was severe violence stemming from an effort to expel Muslim Bengali settlers from

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