areas to Burma rather than India. There was no particular reason why
such areas should have shared an Indian nationalist sentiment, as Nehru
himself acknowledged: ‘Our freedom movement reached these people
only in the shape of occasional rumours. Sometimes they reacted rightly
and sometimes wrongly.’^45 (By this, apparently, Nehru applied to the
behaviour of the ‘tribals’ a yardstick of legitimacy that was based on a
‘right’ attitude to Indian nationalism.) After Indian independence, Nehru
believed, the Naga areas ought to be a part of India and of Assam. He
offered concessions: ‘It is our policy that tribal areas should have as much
freedom and autonomy as possible so that they can live their own lives
according to their own customs and desires.’ They could expect protection
from being ‘swamped by people from other parts of the country’ and
consequently from being exploited.^46 He seemed quite unconscious of the
patronising language and the colonial rhetoric of his pronouncements.
In March 1952, Nehru visited the north-east and made paternalistic
assurances: the tribals would be protected, but would not be treated as
anthropological specimens. In April 1953, Nehru, now accompanied
by the Burmese prime minister, U Nu, attempted to address a gathering
of Nagas; they turned their backs on the two prime ministers and walked
out of the meeting. Rhetorically, Nehru could afford to be tolerant: ‘The
tribal people of India are a virile people who naturally went astray
sometimes. They quarrelled and occasionally cut off each other’s heads... It is often better to cut off a hand or a head than to crush and trample
on a heart. Perhaps I also felt happy with these simple folk because the
nomad in me found congenial soil in their company.’^47 This tolerance, in
effect, was making a virtue out of necessity. A modernising agenda that
depended on the prior interpretation of that agenda by outside agents, and
thereafter its application to its alleged beneficiaries, was bound to be
resisted.
Nehru’s ‘Naga problem’ was not solved – there was insurgency
throughout the 1950s, ending in the formation of a new Naga state within
the Indian Union, conceded in 1960 and inaugurated in 1963 – the ethnic
principle of redrawing the map had had finally to be conceded. Meanwhile,
Indian attempts at ‘nation-building’ by force of arms, with the Indian
‘defence forces’ in culturally alien territory indulging in large-scale killing
and rape, were hardly the best ways of demonstrating to the Nagas the
warm and enveloping joys of belonging represented by Indian nationhood.
But Nehru’s centralised state could not afford to have fuzzy edges. It was
210 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55