‘Hello China, Bye Bye India’: In Mizoram, students are protesting against Citizenship Bill

[manlion]

On Wednesday, thousands of young people hit the streets in different towns of Mizoram to protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. Many of them held banners that read, “Hello China, Bye Bye India”.

“There is a strong feeling among us Mizos that the India does not listen to us, does not care for us, and favours illegal migrants over us,” said Ricky Lalbiakmawia, the finance secretary of the North East Students’ Organisation, an umbrella body of students’ organisations in the region, which organised the protest rally along with the Mizo Zirlai Pawl, Mizoram’s most influential student body. “So, we are starting to think if it is instead better to seek assistance from China, and have better relations with them.”

A polarising Bill

The bill, which seeks to grant citizenship to Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian, Parsi and Jain migrants from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan if they have lived in India for six years, even if they do not possess the necessary documents, has elicited strong reactions from groups in the North East that claim to represent “indigenous” interests

The Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha earlier this month, and is likely to be tabled in the Rajya Sabha during its next sitting, scheduled to begin from January 30. In Guwahati, too, a similar protest rally on Wednesday called by the All Assam Students’ Union, which spearheaded the anti-foreigner agitation in the state from 1979-85, and supported by the North East Students’ Organisation, saw a massive response.

According to the organisers, the attendance in the Aizawl leg of the rally itself was over 30,000. “We have resolved to safeguard our land against foreigners till our last breath,” said Lalnunmawia Pautu, general secretary of the Mizo Zirlai Pawl. “We Mizos will not sit idle if the government turns a deaf ear to our repeated requests to annul the Bill.”

‘Will boycott Republic Day’

Mizo civil society organisations said they will up the ante of the protests if the Central government sticks to its stand in “favour of illegal migrants”. “All NGOs will boycott Republic Day if the Union government doesn’t keep Mizoram out of the Bill’s purview,” warned Lalhmachhuana, the general secretary of the Young Mizo Association, Mizoram’s largest and most powerful pressure group, which has in its ranks almost 40% of the state’s population. A protest led by the outfit in the run up to the elections had forced even the Election Commission to shunt one of its officials out of the state. Similar banners had been seen at that protest too.

“We have submitted multiple representations to the home minister, the prime minster and the joint parliamentary committee on the Bill, but they don’t want to listen to our feelings,” said Lalhmachhuana. “It means the people of Mizoram are not taken into consideration by the Union government. If that’s the case, we are not also not interested in being India citizens. We better be with China, where the people also belong to Mongoloid tribes like us.”

https://scroll.in/article/910659/he...dents-are-protesting-against-citizenship-bill

 

[manlion]

 

[randomradio]

Lol, the dumb students. It's not like the minorities will find homes in Mizoram anyway. Even other citizens of India cannot settle in Mizoram.

 

[manlion]

Mizoram State ministers participate in protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill

Mizoram should Never forget or forgive the terrorists

Air attacks in Mizoram, 1966 - our dirty, little secret

One month and four days after becoming prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi was faced with a problem familiar to her father, Jawaharlal Nehru: an insurgency in the north east. On February 28, 1966, the Mizo National Army (MNA) revolted against India and fighting broke out across the region. In response, the Indian state did two unprecedented things.

By March 2, the MNA had overrun the Aizawl treasury and armoury and was at the headquarters of the Assam Rifles. It had also captured several smaller towns south of Aizawl. The military tried to ferry troops and weapons by helicopter, but was driven away by MNA snipers.

So, at 11:30 am on March 5, the air force attacked Aizawl with heavy machine gun fire. On March 6, the attack intensified, and incendiary bombs were dropped. This killed innocents and completely destroyed the four larges areas of the city: Republic Veng, Hmeichche Veng, Dawrpui Veng and Chhinga Veng.

Locals left their homes and fled into the hills in panic. The MNA melted away into surrounding gorges, forests and hills, to camps in Burma and the then East Pakistan. The air force strafed Aizawl and other areas till March 13. One local told a human rights committee set up by Khasi legislators GG Swell and Rev Nichols Roy that, “There were two types of planes which flew over Aizawl — good planes and angry planes. The good planes were those which flew comparatively slowly and did not spit out fire or smoke; the angry planes were those which escaped to a distance before the sound of their coming could be heard and who spat out smoke and fire.”

This was the first— and only — time that the air force has been used to attack Indians in India. It cleared Aizawl and other cities of the MNA, but did not finish off the insurgency, which would last for another 20 years. Till the 1980s, the Indian military stoutly denied the use of air attacks in Mizoram in 1966.

By 1967, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act was in force in the area that is now Mizoram. That year, the eastern military brass, led by the then Lt General Maneckshaw, and government decided to implement the second terrible thing it did in Mizoram. This was called ‘regrouping of villages.’

the way down to where the state’s limits ended. To the east and west of this road were vast tracts of forests, hills and ravines, dotted with hundreds of villages.The military plan was to gather villagers from all over, and cluster them along the side of this road. These new, so-called Protected and Progressive Villages (PPVs), were nothing but concentration camps, minus gas chambers. The movement was supposed to be voluntary — people in some far off hamlet were supposed to jump with joy when told to give up their land, crops and homes to trek hundreds of miles and live behind barbed wire. Actually, the military told villagers to take what they could carry on their backs, and burn everything else down. Elders signed ‘consent’ papers at gunpoint.

In every case, villagers refused to move. When they were coerced to march, they would refuse to burn down their properties. Then, the military officer and his men would torch the whole place down. They would march in a column guarded by the military, to their designated PPV.

Life here was tough: each resident was numbered and tagged, going and coming was strictly regulated and rations were meagre. In the PPVs’ confines, tribal conventions broke down. In the scramble for scarce resources, theft, murder and alcoholism became widespread.

The regrouping destroyed the Mizos’ practice of jhum, or shifting cultivation. There was little land inside the PPVs and their original jhum areas had been left far behind in the interiors. Farm output fell off a cliff. Mizoram suffered from near-famine conditions, supplemented by what little the military could provide, for the next three years.

Why were the villagers herded into the PPVs? The military reckoned that keeping villagers under their eyes would keep them from sheltering surgents or joining the MNA. The original villages, crops and granaries were destroyed to deny wandering insurgents shelter and food.

These ideas were picked up by our officers from the colonial British playbook. The British had regrouped villages during the Boer war in the early 20th century, in Malaya, where they interned Chinese in special camps and in Kenya where villages were uprooted to crush the Mau Mau revolt.

The British could get away with all this because they were inflicting pain on a subject population. The Indian establishment had no such fig leaf: it was giving grief to its own citizens.

The scale of the Mizoram regrouping was awesome. Out of 764 villages, 516 were evacuated and squeezed into 110 PPVs. Only 138 villages were left untouched. In the Aizawl area, about 95% of the rural population was herded into PPVs. No Russian gulag or German concentration camp had hosted such a large chunk of the local population.

The first PPVs were dismantled in 1971, but the last ones continued for another eight years. The MNA revolt ended in 1986. No government has expressed regret for the bombing and regrouping.

Read more at:
//economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/18565883.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
..

 

[manlion]

Why are Mizos angry?

Unlike in Assam, where the illegal migration from Bangladesh has been a decades-old issue, in Mizoram, the big perceived threat is from the influx of “illegal Chakmas”. The Chakmas are Buddhists, and number almost a lakh in Mizoram. Along with the Lais and the Maras (both Christians), the state’s other two ethnic minorities, the Chakmas make up over 10% of the state’s population.

Large sections of Mizos do not consider Chakmas as part of Mizoram, and accuse the community of crossing over illegally from Bangladesh. Mizo groups have led a spate of protests demanding that the Chakma Autonomous District Council (CADC) be dissolved.

MZP general secretary Lalnunmawia Pautu told The Indian Express: “So many Chakmas are living illegally in Mizoram. Everyone will get citizenship if the (citizenship amendment) Bill is passed.” The proposed law, he said, is “extremely dangerous for the people of Mizoram and the Northeast”, and warned that disregarding the voices from the state might give rise to a violent secessionist movement like in the 1960s. (refer article above)

Lalhmachhuana, general secretary of the central committee of the Young Mizo Association (CYMA), said: “We Mizos oppose the CA Bill, 2016… The Government of India did not listen to our repeated requests.” The slogans of “Hello China” were intended to convey that “we are not safe in India”, Lalhmachhuana said.

A four-point resolution adopted by the MZP on Wednesday said that “to safeguard our land against the foreigners, we the Mizos will fight till our last breath”, and that changing the citizenship law would imply that “the government is favouring the foreigners over its own people living in the Northeast”.

The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, which was passed in Lok Sabha on January 8, seeks to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955, by relaxing citizenship eligibility rules for migrants belonging to six minority (non-Muslim) religions — Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian — from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan

https://indianexpress.com/article/e...ina-bye-bye-india-in-street-protests-5554008/

 

[AfrazulMandal]

On Wednesday, thousands of young people hit the streets in different towns of Mizoram to protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. Many of them held banners that read, “Hello China, Bye Bye India”.

“There is a strong feeling among us Mizos that the India does not listen to us, does not care for us, and favours illegal migrants over us,” said Ricky Lalbiakmawia, the finance secretary of the North East Students’ Organisation, an umbrella body of students’ organisations in the region, which organised the protest rally along with the Mizo Zirlai Pawl, Mizoram’s most influential student body. “So, we are starting to think if it is instead better to seek assistance from China, and have better relations with them.”

A polarising Bill

The bill, which seeks to grant citizenship to Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian, Parsi and Jain migrants from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan if they have lived in India for six years, even if they do not possess the necessary documents, has elicited strong reactions from groups in the North East that claim to represent “indigenous” interests

The Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha earlier this month, and is likely to be tabled in the Rajya Sabha during its next sitting, scheduled to begin from January 30. In Guwahati, too, a similar protest rally on Wednesday called by the All Assam Students’ Union, which spearheaded the anti-foreigner agitation in the state from 1979-85, and supported by the North East Students’ Organisation, saw a massive response.

According to the organisers, the attendance in the Aizawl leg of the rally itself was over 30,000. “We have resolved to safeguard our land against foreigners till our last breath,” said Lalnunmawia Pautu, general secretary of the Mizo Zirlai Pawl. “We Mizos will not sit idle if the government turns a deaf ear to our repeated requests to annul the Bill.”

‘Will boycott Republic Day’

Mizo civil society organisations said they will up the ante of the protests if the Central government sticks to its stand in “favour of illegal migrants”. “All NGOs will boycott Republic Day if the Union government doesn’t keep Mizoram out of the Bill’s purview,” warned Lalhmachhuana, the general secretary of the Young Mizo Association, Mizoram’s largest and most powerful pressure group, which has in its ranks almost 40% of the state’s population. A protest led by the outfit in the run up to the elections had forced even the Election Commission to shunt one of its officials out of the state. Similar banners had been seen at that protest too.

“We have submitted multiple representations to the home minister, the prime minster and the joint parliamentary committee on the Bill, but they don’t want to listen to our feelings,” said Lalhmachhuana. “It means the people of Mizoram are not taken into consideration by the Union government. If that’s the case, we are not also not interested in being India citizens. We better be with China, where the people also belong to Mongoloid tribes like us.”

https://scroll.in/article/910659/he...dents-are-protesting-against-citizenship-bill

The no to hindus placards show what the people want. India should respect the sentiments of the majority of the population there and prevent refugees, especially hindus and Buddhist refugees from entering.

 

[manlion]

The no to hindus placards show what the people want. India should respect the sentiments of the majority of the population there and prevent refugees, especially hindus and Buddhist refugees from entering.

BJP's twin objectives to dilute the Mizoram's Christian pop and vote bank politics

In Mizoram, the BJP depends on the Chakmas to make its debut in the state assembly
Ethnic tension between Mizos and Chakmas have helped the party’s cause.
https://scroll.in/article/903494/in...akmas-to-make-its-debut-in-the-state-assembly

 

[AfrazulMandal]

BJP's twin objectives to dilute the Mizoram's Christian pop and vote bank politics

In Mizoram, the BJP depends on the Chakmas to make its debut in the state assembly
Ethnic tension between Mizos and Chakmas have helped the party’s cause.
https://scroll.in/article/903494/in...akmas-to-make-its-debut-in-the-state-assembly

The chakmas should be thrown out to Myanmar. And sanghi BD terrorists to BD.
India has enough terrorists already.

 

[manlion]

Republic Day: Mizoram Governor Addresses Empty Ground Amid Boycott Call

AIZAWL: Mizoram Governor Kummanam Rajasekharan on Saturday addressed an almost-empty ground on the 70th Republic Day, due to a statewide boycott call given by an umbrella organisation against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill.

No member from the general public attended the function, police said adding that only ministers, legislators and top officials were present.

The boycott call was given by the NGO Coordination Committee, an organisation of civil society groups and student bodies.

Six armed contingents participated in the Republic Day parade, officials said. Up to 30 contingents traditionally take part in the annual event.

In other district headquarters, the deputy commissioners unfurled the tricolour in the absence of senior officials and public, as was the case in sub-divisional and block headquarters.

In his address, Mr Rajasekharan said stringent measures would be taken to protect state borders, and welfare schemes for the development of people residing in border areas would be given due importance.

He said measures would be taken for execution of Mizoram Village-Level Citizen Registration, and emphasised that the state government is committed to preserve and promote the Mizo identity, tradition and values.

"This government will endeavour to work for the unity and brotherhood of all Mizo people living within India and across the globe within our constitutional framework," he said.

The governor said Mizoram would introduce the Socio-Economic Development Policy (SEDP), a "holistic inclusive development programme aimed at bringing in socio- economic transformation".

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/rep...resses-empty-ground-amid-boycott-call-1983602

 

[manlion]

Air attacks in Mizoram, 1966 - our dirty, little secret

Aryan Sri Lanka and India only countries in South Asia to bomb its own citizens

Timely reminder to the Hindi occupiers

 

[manlion]

more bad news - news clipping from Andhra Pradesh fringe group

 

[beijingwalker]