Meghalaya is ending 2018 with 15 miners trapped beyond hope of survival after 18 days in a flooded mine in the Jaintia Hills where illegal and dangerous rat-hole coal mining was on. In Manipur, the Chief Minister and his Bharatiya Janata Party seem determined to defend the jailing for one year under the National Security Act of a local journalist who abused him in a Facebook post. Assam ends the year with continuing tensions over the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and the National Register of Citizens. December 31 was to have been the last date for submission of claims for inclusion by the 4 million people excluded from the list. This deadline was extended last week. The controversial Citizenship Bill is, however, still waiting to be tabled in the ongoing Parliament session, and Assam will begin 2019 with concern over this.

Any statement about the entirety of seven states over a whole 365 days can only be a generality of the most superficial kind. I am looking briefly and superficially at only three of the seven states, because to do more is beyond the scope of this article. Yet sometimes even superficial generalities do illustrate broad trends. Looking back from the vantage point of December 31, it appears that the year gone by has been a rather worrying one for Northeast India. It’s not only the events themselves that cause concern. It is what they portend.

Fifteen deaths are a tragedy. The greater tragedy indicated by these deaths from river waters rushing into narrow underground coal mine shafts is the inability of successive state governments in Meghalaya to enforce the ban on coal mining imposed by the National Green Tribunal in 2014, or do anything to introduce safety and environment measures into local mining practices. A coal mafia has been known to exist in the state for long. The damage that their greedy and unscientific extraction of coal was doing to the environment was known to all in Meghalaya. Tragedies such as the one now ongoing are not new. In 2012, 15 miners had died in almost exactly the same manner in Meghalaya, with water rushing into mine shafts. It was one of the events that the NGT took note of when asking for a ban on unscientific mining.

Greed, however, is considered good these days. The waters of the rivers Lukha and Myntdu in the Jaintia Hills have routinely turned bright blue, acidic and lifeless since 2007 owing—according to the Meghalaya Pollution Control Board—to acidic run-offs from coal mine shafts. Everyone in Meghalaya knew this, but there has been no real support for actually changing anything at all about rat-hole mining in Meghalaya.

The people from the mining areas continued to get rich from the unscientific and illegal mining. When the local water got poisoned, they switched to drinking mineral water. Whenever anyone said anything about halting mining pending safe and environmentally less harmful mining practices, they had to face threats or worse. An activist was attacked and beaten to within inches of death in the same region of Meghalaya only weeks before the latest mining tragedy, after taking photos of trucks ferrying illegally-mined coal. In some cases, activists, some of whom double as extortionists, have struck deals and taken their share, selling their silence for a price.

The state’s tribal status has been used to seek exemption from environmental laws and overturn the NGT mining ban because it is the only way to ensure political survival for anyone ruling Meghalaya. Unfortunately, laws of nature do not permit exemptions. The Sixth Schedule will not save the land or the waters, or the health of people who cannot afford mineral water all the time.

Several of the miners trapped in the Jaintia Hills mine turned out to be Bengali Muslim men from villages in Assam and the Garo Hills districts of Meghalaya. They were not locals. Normally, poor Bengalis, and especially poor Bengali Muslims, are prone to being labelled illegal Bangladeshi immigrants anywhere in Northeast India. Meghalaya and Assam politics for decades has revolved around the spectre of local communities being overwhelmed by illegal migrant hordes. Yet, when one examines the issue in detail, it turns out that the people doing most of the back-breaking agricultural and construction work, and the dangerous mining work—for the least money, with absolutely no legal or human rights—are mainly Bengali Muslims.

The owners are almost always from locally dominant communities in these states. By worsening the precarious nature of the labourers’ existences, the mining mafia ensures that labour remains cheap and they bear no legal responsibilities for injuries and deaths of workers. Indian citizens, especially locals, can raise their voices against injustices. Alleged illegal migrants have no rights. Therefore, bringing in such people—if indeed they are being brought in from elsewhere—and then keeping them in a condition of legal limbo serves the interests of the mafias that finance politics. Governments come and go, but this system stays forever.

This mafioso system being elevated to state policy is one of the potential fallouts of the National Register of Citizens in Assam. There is a view that the 4 million people whose names have not figured in the NRC should simply be deprived of their citizenship rights and used as some kind of indentured or slave labour. The reason for this generosity—the alternatives that have been considered are deportation or internment in concentration camps euphemistically termed detention camps—is the profit motive.

No one knows how many of the 4 million people are actually just poor Indians who have difficulty providing the required documentation. The documents sought are not easy for the illiterate and landless poor to provide. Were the exercise to be repeated in more populous states such as Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, the number of those failing to make it to the list would undoubtedly rise into many tens of millions. This number would include Hindus as well as Muslims, and Indians as well as illegal immigrants. But the complications of the bureaucratic exercise and the obfuscations of political rhetoric ensure that most people outside Assam do not grasp what is really going on with the NRC and the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill.

The NRC and Citizenship (Amendment) Bill have reopened old wounds and old questions that were on their way to being settled. The NRC is an attempt to settle the issue of illegal migration and throw out the millions of alleged illegal migrants who are believed to have entered Assam over the decades. Unfortunately, it reopens a divide between the Bengalis and Assamese, with Bengalis, Hindu and Muslim, being seen as Bangladeshis.

Questions of ethnicity and linguistic identity become paramount. The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill being pushed by the BJP tries to reframe the identity divide in religious rather than linguistic terms. By excluding only Muslims from the list of those from neighbouring Muslim countries who can gain Indian citizenship on preferential terms, it essentially takes to conclusion the logic of Partition.

The resulting clash of ideas in Assam due to this combination of NRC and Citizenship Bill is between linguistic nationalism, which is the bedrock of old Assamese “jatiyobadi” (literally “jati” or race-based, usually translated to mean nationalist) politics and Hindu nationalism. Secular humanist ideas and notions of civic nationalism are largely missing from the fray. There was a shameful scramble to claim “credit” for the NRC until it became apparent that all was not going well with the exercise.

None of this is cause for joy or optimism. Add to this the kind of blatant misuse of state power that was and continues to be on view in Manipur, and one has to wonder about the nature of Indian democracy. We’ve always been told that China may have better infrastructure, but we have greater freedoms. Our greater freedom is the excuse trotted out for relative incompetence in everything in which China does better than India, including Olympic sports. It is an excuse that becomes hard to believe when one is confronted with the spectacle of a man being charged with sedition for the crime of going on his terrace, recording a rant against Manipur Chief Minister Biren Singh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his phone, and posting the rant on Facebook. He was then let off by a court which saw no sedition in this, but the government arrested him again after his release by court, under the National Security Act and put him in jail without trial for a year, the maximum possible under the Act.

This does not look like democratic politics or rule of law; it looks like the actions of a tinpot dictator in a totalitarian state.

The combination of deepening social schisms along linguistic and religious lines, a seemingly unbreakable nexus between criminal mafias and politics, and blatant misuse of state power in states that fail miserably at good governance, do not portend well for the future. However, one silver lining to these darkening clouds over Northeast India has just migrated in from Bangladesh. Today’s news is that Sheikh Hasina has won the Bangladesh national elections by an overwhelming majority. Bangladesh is where the leaderships and camps of several militant outfits from Northeast India who fought against the Indian state as well as Bangladeshi migration were based. At least for now, these groups and their Pakistani backers will have little room to fish in troubled waters.

However external factors are not the reason the waters are troubled in the first place. For that we have to thank our own politicians and societies. With national elections coming up in a few months, 2019 may well test Northeast India’s commitment to peace and development.

Happy new year.