Related Stories Pakistan’s civilian dealOne gold, two bronze and quite a few reasons to stop whiningOur defeat, enshrinedInternal insecurityLeader with opposition

 Every reporter pays his dues doing one beat, or story, in his lifetime. I paid mine covering the Northeast between 1981-83. Just as you can’t get that out-of-sight, out-of-mind region on our front pages these days, then you couldn’t keep it off. The ’80s were the most perilous of what the American South Asianist, Selig Harrison, described as India’s Dangerous Decades and the “Seven Sisters” of the Northeast had danger signs painted all over them. The Assam movement was at its peak with supplies of crude oil to the mainland blockaded, Naga, Mizo and Manipuri insurgencies were active, there were killings of “outsiders” in Tripura and even serene Meghalaya had had its first brush with riots in what was called the anti-dkhar (outsider) outbreak.

That eruption in Meghalaya was sharp, but short. By the time I pitched tent in Shillong, still the unofficial capital of the Northeast, peace had returned. You could walk on the street safely at night, even drive to the only “authentic” Chinese restaurant near Polo Ground where they served raw onions and green chillies with your greasy chopsuey. In nearly three years of living in Shillong in what’s been the most wonderful period of my life, personally and professionally, I wrote almost no story on Meghalaya. There was no trouble here, no massacres, no ambushes, insurgency, human rights abuses and secessionism. It was impossible to sell a Meghalaya story even to an Indian Express news desk run at night by a most benevolent and uncomplaining chief sub-editor, namely Radhika Roy (yes, now of NDTV). The usual question from the desk was, but what is the story in Meghalaya? It was echoed in the question a Khasi civil servant once asked me: “So Shekhar, how many plains people do we have to kill so you can get a Meghalaya story on your page one?” So the only Meghalaya stories I wrote then were Sunday features, gleefully accepted by Dina Vakil, who then worked at The Indian Express like all great journalists do at some point. One on Dollymoore Wankhar who made mementos from real butterflies, on the local pastime of “tir” or mass archery where you got prizes for guessing a intriguingly calculated number of hits, rather than for backing the winner, on the quaint old winery of Mawphlang that made syrupy cherry brandy, and one even on tribal monoliths — in fact these were the only ones I had seen outside of Asterix comics.

The Khasis, the Jaintias and the Garos, the tribes of Meghalaya, had their complaints too. But a combination of factors had always made them less alienated or angry. One of these was their very cosmopolitan city of Shillong. The other, just better connection with the mainland. The tribes had their political elites too, probably because as the capital of undivided Assam, they had had a closer acquaintance with parliamentary politics. The Garos had their Sangmas (Captain Williamson and then Purno), the Khasis and Jaintias their B.B. Lyngdoh, P. Ripple Kyndiah (now cabinet minister).

The politics of the two regions was divided by geography and ethnicity. The Garos were predominantly pro-Congress and to get to their districts from Shillong, you still have to drive to Guwahati and then down the Brahmaputra valley, and hook back into the Garo Hills a good eight hours later. The Khasi-Jaintias preferred their own regional parties. One of the oldest among these is HSPDP (Hill States People’s Democratic Party) whose founder Hopingstone Lyngdoh is a key member in the present coalition cabinet, and the main opponent of the exploration of sizeable uranium resources in the Meghalaya Hills. And even Khasis and Jaintias, though similar, have many differences. There was a time somebody launched an ethnic unity movement of sorts called the Hynniewtrep (“seven huts”) movement, harking back to the old belief that both these tribes had been created from a common origin, namely the plumes from the tail of a very multi-coloured rooster — which still represents divinity in an intriguing sort of a way among these pre-dominantly Christian tribes. But it did not get very far.

Given the unfortunate criteria the media sets for news value, it was not such a bad idea for Meghalaya to have stayed out of the national headlines. But maybe it was also not so good to have stayed out of national (read New Delhi’s) focus altogether. Or it wouldn’t have been so easy for these half dozen monstrosities to offend your eyes and nostrils as you enter the bend into the green hills from Guwahati, hoping to catch the cool Meghalaya breeze — after nearly 25 years, last week, in my case. Instead of the untouched green hills, the skyline of the foothills town of Byrnihat is now dominated by a half dozen smoking chimneys of factories making, believe it or not, specialty bricks and ferro-alloys. Now, who the hell allowed these to come up in Meghalaya of all places? They contribute nothing to the state by way of revenue, jobs, or even consumer needs. So why base such polluting and CO2-spewing, power-guzzling factories in a hill state when Assam’s plains beckon just five miles downhill?

I am told these were permitted in the past (mostly by Congress governments) on the argument that Meghalaya had surplus power! And how much is the state’s total generation, almost all from its rain-fed lakes? Just 300 megawatts! It looked surplus mainly because of economic backwardness, so its two million plus people could not even use this much power (by comparison, last summer Delhi’s peak demand was 4030 MW). Now these factories vacuum-clean so much of its power that even Shillong has power cuts. New concrete buildings coming up all over Shillong have that shocking appendage to their terraces we have got so used to in Delhi — the diesel gen-sets. So you go out for a nightly stroll and smell diesel in the most brilliant, cool and moist breeze God created, the rustle of pines drowned in the hum of “silent” gen-sets.