On the issue of the recent stand-off between the state government and the members of the conglomeration of civil societies, popularly known as Coordination Committee on Fuel Adulteration, the government did its usual knee-jerk reaction in response to the bandh call of goods vehicles and government registered vehicles in the National Highways. Either there is a shortage of good advisors in the state machinery or it just indicates a confrontationist attitude of the state government.
There is no doubt that bandhs are illegal ways of protests and it is clearly against the law as ruled by the Supreme court in 1998 when it upheld the earlier decision of the Kerala High Court. The government has every right to also pre-emptively arrest and detain the signatories and the leaders who call for forced bandhs and closures.
However the question that comes to everyone’s mind is; was the state government in its sixty years of statehood able to do it? Except for some voluntary symbolic arrests of some students on boycott calls on certain National Days there aren’t many cases of arrests being made for calling bandhs in the state. The local dynamics that play out in the state when issues as the present case just blows out of proportion and causes more harm than the initial concern that started the demand. Successive governments have therefore always relented to the demands of the public as long as the demand is within the Constitution of the country.
The Naga Students’ Federation still remembers the two young students as martyrs who died in police shooting during a protest against the government in the eighties. The ramifications were felt by the then state government. The state government over the years was even made to enact laws in the Legislative Assembly through various public movements. The two that stands out today can be the Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition Act and the Retirement Act. However if it is viewed academically, in all the major public movements in the state there have been many under-currents at play. The diversity and division of the Naga society with its related dynamics makes it impossible to cast aside such interpretations.
In the present case, it was the district administration along with volunteers of Against Corruption and Unabated Taxation (ACAUT) that raided the fuel depot and the adulteration units. Though investigations are still on it is alleged by ACAUT that the some police personnel in connivance with some of the accused had pilfered the sealed units and drained out the contents of one truck thus leading to the courts to release the empty trucks. When such a big allegation came up right at the time when the government instituted Special Investigation Team is in place the apprehension of the coordination committee on the integrity of the SIT is on expected lines. The present scenario of the state is such that numerous divisions among the people are at play except for the opposition-less government. The bungling of matter as the present case will become detonators for bigger public unrests. The government just citing the ruling of the Supreme Court to declare the protest as illegal even though it may have the law on its side was not a very wise decision.
