Uncertainty for Katak Bahadur Chhetri begins where India’s longest road under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, the Miao-Vijaynagar Road, ends near the border with Myanmar. While the 1,57.56 kilometre-long road connecting Vijaynagar on the border to inland Miao in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh has improved connectivity since it was opened in 2022, the work to elevate it from a 157.56 km dirt track coincided with a push for ejecting the ‘settlers’, who, like the local residents, were off the ‘mainstream radar’ for almost six decades due to the remoteness of the terrain.
Katak Bahadur Chhetri, 84, is one such settler. He has been worried about the rising tensions between his community, who are primarily families of Gurkhas who served in the Army and the paramilitary Assam Rifles, and the Yobins, a trans-border community known as Lisu in Myanmar and China and given Scheduled Tribe status in India, since 2020. Both the settlers and the Yobin consider each other as “foreigners”.
Katak Bahadur is one of the last surviving members of the first 23 families of soldiers of the Assam Rifles who were settled by the Indian government in 1967-68 in the Vijaynagar valley. The government’s plan was to settle armed forces personnel and their families in a strategically important “vacant” land in the North-East Frontier Agency, which became Arunachal Pradesh in January 1972. A total of 200 families were settled in nine villages of this valley in three more batches.
Now, Katak Bahadur is worried for his future. In 2020, a mob, allegedly led by the All Yobin Students’ Union (AYSU), attacked properties near his house as they wanted all the settlers to be driven out of Vijaynagar. It also wanted them to be barred from participating in the panchayat elections on December 22 that year. The AYSU argued that the State’s rules did not allow former servicemen who are not Arunachal Pradesh Scheduled Tribes (APST) to contest the panchayat polls. It also said that the 30-year lease on the land on which they had settled had ended in 2020. The AYSA supports the Yobin. A majority of some 5,000 Yobin people live in Vijaynagar.
Photofile | Ground Ziro — It’s all about land for the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh
Following this violence, panchayat elections were not held in Vijaynagar. The upcoming Assembly elections in Arunachal Pradesh are the first since the the violence. The ex-servicemen fear that the denial of land documents and the demand to scrap residential certificates to them could eventually impact their voting rights.
Katak Bahadur says settlers are now sometimes being asked to show the inner-line permit (ILP) whenever they move out of Vijaynagar, even to visit other parts of Arunachal. The ILP is a travel document for non-residents who visit the State for a limited period of time. “An atmosphere of distrust prevails here,” he says.
Litany of woes
The need to demarcate the boundary with Burma, now Myanmar, was felt after India attained independence. It took until 1960 to initiate such an exercise when a 7th Assam Rifles team mounted an unsuccessful expedition to present-day Vijaynagar from Miao. The next expedition led by Major Sumer Singh in February 1961 was partly successful; the team returned from a place now called Gandhigram, about 22 km short of Vijaynagar. A third team led by Major General A.S. Gauraya reached the targeted place in October 1961 and named it Vijaynagar after his son. An Assam Rifles camp was established and a scheme to populate an “unprotected” part of India was worked out.
The Ministry of Home Affairs’ settlement plan entailed 10 standard acres of non-transferable land for each family for farming and an additional acre for a homestead and kitchen garden, and full free ration for the settlers at government-approved rates for the first year, at 50% or more for the second year, and up to 50% for the third year as the “settlers would be expected to be self-sufficient” from the fourth year.
According to the plan, the proposed settlers would be transported by air to the destination and provided ₹2,500 per family for necessary household equipment apart from farm tools, implements, seeds, fertilizers, and livestock worth ₹3,000 per family as one-time grants. The other proposals included a one-room tenement per family, machinery to make the land suitable for farming, and construction of inter- and intra-colony link roads.
About 95% of the settlers were Gurkhas, mostly from Nepal. A few were Kumaoni and Garhwali from Uttarakhand, Mizos from Mizoram, and Koch-Rajbongshis from Assam. After the last of the families were flown in, no settlers were allowed to move out of Vijaynagar without escort.
“For 10 years thereafter, the settlers were not provided with any rights like land-holding certificates and permanent residence certificates (PRCs) as promised during the settlement. In 1980, the settlers filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court, which issued an order seven years later seeking the visit of a Central team to Vijaynagar to hear the grievances of the people,” says Bhagat Chhetri, a spokesperson of the Gorkha Welfare Society.
The issue dragged on until the State government issued a land allotment order for the ex-servicemen in April 1990 but on lease for 30 years. In its compliance report before the Supreme Court in August 1990, the government did not mention that 164 land allotment orders were issued to the settlers on a 30-year lease.
“The apex court was kept in the dark about the lease. But what pained the settlers most was that a lease for any specific period was not discussed at the time of the settlement process. Otherwise, the Assam Rifles personnel would not have agreed to quit their jobs and settle in such a remote area,” says Chet Narayan Upadhyay of Buddha Mandir village.
“The land allotment system in the State changed with The Arunachal Pradesh (Land Settlement and Records) Act, 2000, and a person holding a land possession certificate (LPC) came to be declared as the owner of the land. With an amendment in 2018, the Act indirectly gives ownership rights to only the indigenous tribal communities of Arunachal Pradesh. In between, we approached various authorities to convert our land allotment issued on a 30-year lease to LPCs or permanent titles over land. All our efforts went in vain,” says a member of the All Settlers’ Welfare Association.
The association says the settlers have not been able to avail themselves of the benefits of any government scheme as they are not indigenous. “There is no mechanism to issue any domicile certificate to us. The permanent resident certificate issued by the Changlang district administration was discontinued a few years ago and replaced with a residential certificate (RC) so that our people can apply for jobs, especially in Central forces, as the quota for the settlers in the Assam Rifles was done away with,” he says.
“In a nutshell, we are landless people. We are denied participation in panchayat polls and we are likely to be thrown out of a remote part of the country where our parents were settled with unfulfilled promises. There are demands now to discontinue the RCs too and the government has been silent about it. We are paying the price for having defended our international borders in isolation and without connectivity,” says S. Chettri, an advocate.
The Gorkha Youth Committee asks why the settlers have been reduced to temporary residents with minimal rights after having been allegedly sold a dream by some officers to relocate and give up their lands in India or Nepal. “It is all the more painful as foreigners entering as late as the 2010s are enjoying APST status and accessing the government schemes,” a member says. The foreigners he refers to are the Yobins.
‘Going by the law’
Changlang is probably the only district in the Northeast where the people from India’s neighbourhood outnumber the indigenous people. As per the 2011 Census, Chakmas and Hajongs, who were displaced by the Kaptai Dam in erstwhile East Pakistan in the 1960s, constitute 29% of the district’s population of 1.48 lakh. Gurkhas constitute more than 7%. Many of them are descendants of soldiers from Nepal employed by the Indian armed forces. The district also has more than 2,600 Tibetan refugees. Yobins, concentrated in the Vijaynagar area, number about 5,000.
The ex-servicemen claim there were hardly any Yobin or Lisu families around when they were flown in to settle in the Vijaynagar valley.
Lisu organisations say the theory that they are foreigners is based on the fact that members of their community inhabit parts of Myanmar and China. “It is wrong to tag our people as foreigners just because some of us inhabit neighbouring countries. We have been living in the Vijaynagar area for decades before the Indian armed forces came across our people. Disconnected from the rest of India, many of our people realised that they were Indians after the two countries demarcated the India-Myanmar border in 1972,” says AYSU president Ngwazosa Yobin, one of the 45 people arrested for arson, rioting, and vandalism in Vijaynagar on December 11, 2020.
Avia Ngwazah, the general secretary of the Yobin Tribe Fundamental Rights Forum, says the State government acknowledged the contribution of Yobins to the demarcation of the India-Myanmar border and awarded a gold medal to one of them, Akhi Yeliyeh, in 2019 for suggesting the locations of the border pillars. Yeliyeh also donated a large portion of Dawodi (the Yobin name for Vijaynagar) for the construction of an advanced landing ground at Vijaynagar in 1962, he says. The citation that accompanied Yeliyeh’s medal says he and other Yobin men declared their allegiance to the Indian flag and vowed to be loyal Indians.
However, as Tifusa Yobin of Yobin Welfare Society points out, members of the community were subjects of suspicion and were often detained by security forces for allegedly being foreigners as their existence was not recorded for a long time and their Indian citizenship was withdrawn temporarily in the 1970s. Despite their age-old connection to the land, they were recognised as APST in 1979 only to be de-recognised soon after. The status was restored in 2015, but withdrawn again in 2017 owing to a faulty notification. The State government started issuing Scheduled Tribe certificates to the Yobins again in December 2018 following directives from the Tribal Affairs Ministry and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes.
“We are not against the Gurkhas or the ex-servicemen but letting them contest the rural polls is against the provisions of the 73rd Amendment related to Panchayati Raj as well as the Arunachal Pradesh Panchayat Raj Act, 1997, which empower local people. We are just going by the State law,” Nwgazosa says.
Improving connectivity
Residents say the occasional conflicts between a mix of Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian Gurkhas and the Christian Yobins and their run-ins with the security forces and forest officials have often escaped the attention of the world because of poor communication, both terrestrial and telecom. The December 11, 2020 violence could have been averted had there been no communication failure, say officials.
“The Miao-Vijaynagar road has helped cut down travel time although the unpaved portion within the national park where the tribal communities live becomes difficult to navigate during the rainy season. But the condition of the road is much better than about two years ago when I joined,” Vijaynagar’s Circle Officer Chownein Maio says, adding that a project to expand the road and realign it further to avoid the national park as much as possible is in the works.
The road trip costs a passenger ₹1,000 one way. A twice-a-week subsidised chopper service, prone to cancellation because of the unpredictable weather, offers a cheaper alternative for Vijaynagar residents to reach Miao and beyond. “BSNL offers 2G calling and messaging facility for 200 users at a time. There are 10 VSAT Internet facilities for paid WhatsApp messaging. Mini hydropower projects and solar power stations have changed the electricity scenario to a large extent. A new gas agency has 752 households as clients. Road connectivity, despite the bumpy ride through the national park, has opened up the area for tourism with the Gurkhas and Lisus offering homestays,” Maio says.
“Connectivity and opportunities are changing the local economy,” Yaofu Yobin says. But what apparently has not changed is the perception that the Gurkhas began outliving their utility as the road from Miao reached Vijaynagar in 2022.
