aizawl photos on Flickr

I wonder how many people know the existence of this happy little place in Aizawl? I noticed it when I first stepped outside of the Millennium Shopping Centre and immediately snapped a picture. Months later, I got the chance to venture inside with my friend Ma Ruati. We had gone Christmas shopping, and our usual haunts were too crowded. I remembered this place and we gave it a go. We each had a nice happifying cup of coffee.

freshers by ZOKUOM THAWN

2009 never again by zaiapachuau

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PaRCha - JNU - All Organisations - 2012 ID-52752 by PaRChA project — the Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism

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destroyed the indigenous agriculture and forest dependent economy. And all of this has of course been done in the name of so called 'development', whereas the reality is that all the regions North East to India remain grossly underdeveloped without opportunities for education or jobs. It is this that forces people from North East to migrate enmasse to Indian cities, where also in turn they are racially discriminated or as the cases of Nido, Taniam, Richard Loitam and many others have shown even killed. Notwithstanding its 'integrationist' posturing, the Indian state has never considered the regions to its North East nothing more than avenues for surplus extraction through brute force and coercion . The idea of India as a nation state which was construed and established through the artificial borders drawn by the British colonialists continue to imprison and exploit various nationalities of North East with brutal military might. .

The Indian racism has also been sustained through ruthless subjugation of the oppressed nationalities in North East and their struggles for dignity and nation self-determination. The deployment of huge army and .

para-military contingents all across North East under the impunity of draconian AFSPA. shows that it continues to remain occupied under the military jack-boot. In the past more t11an six decades, the Indian state has perpetrated the most heinous crimes to suppress the various movements for national self-determination in the region . In 1966, the Indian air force bombed Aizawl and other centres that had been liberated by the guerrilla fighters of the Mizo National Front to recapture them against the will of the people. Apart from destroying thousands of houses and murdering many hundreds of Mizos through such aerial bomb9fdments, the Indian state also carried out the policy of 'strategic hamleting' in Mizoram -a technique invented and widely used by the US Army in Vietnam. Fake encounters, rape, burning of villages, destruction of crops and property of the people, torture, custodial deaths has become the order of the day in the entire North East. From 1964 till the present, an armed struggle for national liberation is also being waged by the people of Manipur, despite severe state repression as exemplified by the brutal rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama by the Indian army in 2004 or the murder in broad daylight of Chongkham Sanjit in 2009. Even on occasions when the people of various oppressed nationalities have declared their popular will to form free and independent countries of their own, the Indian ruling classes have never respected their democratic decision. For i,nstance, in May 1951 the Nagas conductr d a referendum to decide the political future of their nation in which 99% of the Nagas voted in favour of forming an independent and sovereign Nagaland. This .

refusal by the Indian state to recognise their democratic aspirations and its use of coercive power to keep the Nq_gas occupied led to the armed liberation movement led by the Naga National Council from 1952. Frorn 1975, National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN) has spearheaded the Naga self-determination movement through armed struggle against the Indian occup~tion forces. Even the subsequent ceasefire agreement and the mutually-agryed guidelines of the talks have been regularly flouted by the Indian government. The collective leadership of the Nagas are being kept virtually under house-arrest and even imprisoned 01 1 frivolous charges, as in the case of Anthony Shimrey, the head of foreign affairs of the NSCN. Much like in Kashmir, the Indian state has also profiled and .

criminalised all these movements for national self-determination as 'terrorist', 'anti-national' and what not. Borrowing the policy of divide and rule from its-Colonial masters, it has also resorted to engineering several conflicts amongst the different communities, lest they identify the common enemy which is none other than the Indian state that exploits all these communities and repress them alike with escalated military strength. .

Indian Union is a colonial formation, a prison-house of nation::~ lities established through the use of brute force and intimidation. If the two hundred years of colonial rule marks the forcible integration of many independent nationalities like the Assamese to the Indian union, 1947 marks the territorial division of many other nationalities . The continued Indian occupation of Kashmir, Nagalim, Manipur and Assam, or its war on the people of central and eastern India under 'Operation Green Hunt' shows that the army is the cornerstone of political power of this state and no principles of democracy or popular will find any place in it. This national oppression is maintained by the Indian ruling classes for continuing the semi-feudal semi-coloni al system of extraction and exploitation of peoples' resources. Today, it is not simply the question of mere 'human rights' in the region as it is often reduced to be. More .

than that, it is the violation and denial of the collective political right of the people to decide their collective destiny regarding national self-determination. And it is to perpetuate and ideologically justify this exploitative state of affairs, that the state has created and attempted to normnli7e xenophobia against the people from the region . .

The violence against people of North East has not escalated suddenly. Just that, the corporate media has been forced to take cognizance of these regular instances of violence recently, due to the assertion of people. But this deeply entrenched problem of racism cannot be fought unless t1 1e progressive and democratic voices speak up against how it has been deeply institutionalised and V<11idated through the subjugation of these various oppressed nationalites. And with that we also need to question and challenge this enforced brahminical notion of India which only reflects the perception of a dominant sections and their enforced jingoist hegemony, in the name of 'national .

integration.' .

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GLIMPSES OF DEVI PARASHAKTHI BHAVA SAMADHI DARSHAN - AKASHIC READINGS 29TH AUGUST 21 by Paramashiva Gold