Normalcy in Itanagar

It is heartening to note that Itanagar and Naharlagun – the twin capital cities of Arunachal Pradesh – are slowly limping back towards normalcy. What happened in the two beautiful cities on Saturday and Sunday was beyond any imagination. The senseless violence unleashed by a section of people is highly deplorable and must be condemned with the strongest of words. There have been reports that one opposition party had a hand in triggering off the violence. Union minister of state for home affairs Kiren Rijiju, who happens to be an MP from the frontier state, has directly named the Congress and held it responsible for the horrible things that happened. Rumours were spread with the help of various social media, and a section of the people, particularly the youth, were carried away by the rumours and fake news that began doing the rounds like anything.

The state government, however, cannot consider itself innocent. The state government definitely had contributed towards the untowards situation by way of at least one minister reportedly telling that the members of the six communities that are not recognised as Arunachal Pradesh Scheduled Tribes would be soon granted Permanent Resident Certificates – probably before the ensuing Lok Sabha election. That the particular minister had an eye on the votes of the non-APST communities also became clear because Arunachal Pradesh will also hold state assembly elections simultaneously with the Parliamentary election. The communities – who include Deoris, Sonowal Kacharis, Morans, Misings and ex-serviceman belonging to Gorkha communities – definitely have a sizeable number of votes that have a direct bearing on the election pattern in the Assembly constituencies in Namsai and Changlang districts.

It is a fact that most of these communities have been residing in those places since time immemorial, much before even North East Frontier Tract (NEFT) was created by the British in 1914, an administrative unit attached to Assam, which was renamed as North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) in 1951. While NEFA was renamed as Arunachal Pradesh and made a Union Territory in 1972, it became a full-fledged state in 1987. These communities are inseparable from the remaining communities of Arunachal Pradesh. That probably was why the All Arunachal Pradesh Students’ Union (AAPSU) had also by and large accepted that these people should get PRC.

The state government, however, must take a portion of the blame for the violence because it had utterly failed to communicate with all the communities of the state about the limited use/purpose of the PRC to those communities. Likewise, the organisations which had spearheaded the anti-PRC movement that soon turned violent, must also take a portion of the blame. Is violence an accepted way of resolving issues? Do the common people subscribe to violence? Could not there have been a peaceful agitation, a non-violente demonstration, one that would have prevented large-scale destruction of public and private properties? What is the message going out to the rest of the country, especially after the venue of the first-ever Itanagar International Film Festival was set ablaze and vehicles and valuable musical and cinema equipments belonging to several eminent filmmakers of the country were destroyed?