Last week, one more gory chapter was added toNagaland’s violent recent history. The brutal and very public lynching of SyedFarid Khan, a small-time Bengali-speaking businessman in Dimapur, consideredNagaland’s commercial capital, has laid bare the faultlines that have come tosymbolise the town over the past quarter century or so.
Dimapuris the only major town in Nagaland exempt from the decades-old Inner Line Permit(ILP) system. Under this system, non-tribals have to obtain a temporarypermission to enter Nagaland -- and two other states, Mizoram and ArunachalPradesh -- to work or live there. No ‘outsider’ is permitted to buy land or setup business in his or her own name under the ILP system.
Influx of Outsiders
However,Dimapur, Nagaland’s only airport and a major railway station, has witnessedlarge-scale influx of ‘outsiders’ over the past 25 years and especially afterthe Centre put in place in 1997 a ‘ceasefire’ with the Issac-Muivah group ofthe National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM), regarded as thebiggest insurgent group in the north-east.
Theoutsiders are a mix of Indians from neighbouring states of the north-east and afair sprinkling of illegal Bangladeshi migrants. Over the years many of themhave married local Naga women and have become owners of real estate andfarmlands by proxy.
Farid Khan too had married a Sema woman and was more orless settled in Dimapur after migrating from southern Assam’s Karimganjdistrict. In fact, the young woman who had accused Farid Khan of rape, belongedto the same village as that of his wife. All this still does not explain themob fury witnessed last week when Farid Khan was pulled out of the Centraljail, stripped and paraded naked even as he was being beaten, stoned andabused.