Abstract

ANALYTICAL STUDY OF THE MASS ORGANISATIONS OF THE TRIBALS OF NORTH EAST INDIA

PAWAR PANKAJ TUKARAM

Volume: 3 Issue: 3 2013

Abstract:

Claiming freedom from the British rule, India had a ‘tryst with destiny’ on August 15th, 1947. Ever since that fateful day, the India has attempted, many a time with brute force, to shape the destinies of nations that came under its territory. Carrying forward the logic of the British colonial state, and adding theatrics of ‘liberal’ democratic phrase-mongering with a virulent strain of illiberal nationalism, the Indian state has butchered and subsumed many histories in its zeal for integration…In the colonial period, Assam was the first territory in the northeastern region to be occupied by the British East India Company after the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1826, using it as a base to extend rule to adjoining hill and plain areas including Naga, Manipur, Mizo and Matak territories. An extractive colonial economy saw the region being envisaged as a huge tea plantation. This was accompanied by forcible dispossession of the tribals and peasantry from their means of production, separation of the historical linkages of the plains and hills people with the Inner Line, infusion of opium along with a banning of local production, exorbitant taxes and a destruction of the collective ethos and local subsistence economy. Cheap indentured labour brought in from central India and being made to work in slave-like conditions ensured the super-profits of the colonialists. The excavation and coal and petroleum since the 20th century added to this scenario as another capitalintensive and extractive industry. To ensure continued economic exploitation and hegemony, colonial rule of law was established militarily with complex network of posts and commands, as well as administratively, with a class of middle-men carved out of the feudal rural gentry of the Ahom era and new traders from Marwar region

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