BETWIXT AND BETWEEN: Old women turn the prayer wheels at a monastery in Tawang

Hindi follows you like a thread through Itanagar. It’s Friday evening, and the Arunachal capital is yet to call it a day. This, after all, is the time for the crude antics of mothers-in-law out to depose their daughters-in-law in Hindi television soaps. Out on the streets, quite a few video parlours are still open. The young have been hanging out there, in trendy jeans and tees, watching the latest Hindi films. And the language of trade in the remote northeastern state is predominantly Hindi.

And that is why Tamo Mibang shifts uneasily in his chair, unable to fathom why India is so “ominously” silent when China is “brazenly” claiming Arunachal Pradesh as its own. “India is where we belong,” says the pro vice-chancellor of the Rajiv Gandhi University (formerly Arunachal University ). “But who is going to defend us if India, our country, doesn’t?” he asks. He is not the only one to raise this question, though. This is the leitmotif in Arunachal Pradesh today.

Clearly, Arunachalees — as the people of the largest of the seven northeastern states are known — feel let down by what they see as Delhi’s muted response to Beijing’s latest move to assert its claim: China refused a visa to an IAS officer from the state.

“We are outraged (by the Chinese move),” says Kanu Bagang, president of the influential All Arunachal Pradesh Students Union (AAPSU). But he adds that he is equally “disturbed” by Delhi’s evident lack of concern over the issue. “Why can’t the central government come clean on Arunachal and make plain to China where we belong?” the 31-year-old leader asks agitatedly.

The border dispute between India and China is an old one. India says China is unlawfully occupying 43,180 square kilometres of Jammu and Kashmir. This includes 5,180 square kilometres of land, which, India says, Islamabad had illegally ceded to Beijing under the 1963 Sino-Pakistan border agreement. China, on the other hand, accuses India of holding some 90,000 square kilometres of its territory, mostly in Arunachal Pradesh.

Shortly before Chinese president Hu Jintao visited India last November, San Yuxi, the Chinese envoy in Delhi, triggered a diplomatic row, declaring Arunachal as a “Chinese territory.” There were cases in the Eighties of China refusing visas to senior functionaries from Arunachal. “But there is an important difference between what happened then and now. Earlier, all requests for Chinese visas had gone from the state, not from the Centre,” a senior Arunachal functionary says.

But this is the first time Beijing has directly rebuffed Delhi, rejecting its request for a visa for Gonesh Koyu, an IAS officer in Itanagar. Koyu was part of a 107-member IAS delegation Delhi was sending to China on a two-week, in-service training trip. Stung by the visa rejection, the Centre called off the trip.

It was a strong protest by India, which had in April allowed a 44-member delegation to China to attend an international fair even after Beijing had abruptly dropped three officials and a legislator from Arunachal Pradesh from its invitation list. Patience has clearly worn thin in South Block, but India is also keen to avoid a diplomatic stand-off with the country that it has been seeking to improve its ties with in recent years.

Arunachal residents are far from pleased, though, with the Centre. They feel India could and should do more to affirm its sovereignty over the state it calls an “integral part of the country”. “China is repeatedly claiming Arunachal and rejecting our visas. This can’t go on. India should take a strong stance on this,” says Arunachal information minister Lombo Tayeng. He says Arunachal chief minister Dorjee Khandu has already taken up the issue with the Centre. “The issue could have serious consequences for not only Arunachal but also for our country in the future if it is left to fester,” Tayeng says.

If nothing else, Arunachal Pradesh — the stage of the 1962 Indo-China war — is vital to the country’s security. Besides a 1080-km-long border with China, the state also shares its boundaries with Myanmar (440 km) and Bhutan (160 km). Draped with forests and crisscrossed by myriad rivers, Arunachal is a potential powerhouse, with a projected capacity for more than 50,000 mega watt of hydro-electricity.

Tucked away in a mountainous corner of the country, Arunachal — home to 20 major tribes and dozens of sub-tribes — has Hindi as the local lingua franca, thanks chiefly to the presence of the Army in the state, says Y.D. Thongchi, an IAS officer and Sahitya Akademi award winning writer. Not counting Sikkim, Arunachal is possibly the only state in the northeast that is largely unaffected by the scourge of insurgency. And it is picture perfect.

The window in pro-VC Mibang’s office at the University at Doimukh, some 25 km from Itanagar, looks out at the rolling, shadowy hills on the horizon. Clouds scud about in the azure sky and a cool breeze blows in. But beneath the surface tranquillity, there is a sense of insecurity, a pervading “fear psychosis,” as a senior IAS officer puts it. “There is uncertainty. No one knows what will happen tomorrow, whether India will trade Arunachal for some other parts it wants back from China. People’s apprehensions deepen as Delhi keeps mum while Beijing is strident in its clamour for Arunachal,” says the officer, requesting anonymity.

To many, memories of the 1962 war are indelible. Mibang was in grade two when the war broke out but he distinctly remembers the “sufferings” of the people of the state. Offices and schools closed down and those who could, he recalls, fled to the plains of neighbouring Assam, including his elder brother. “I remember how people carried ailing family members to their villages on their backs when doctors fled and the hospital in my town closed down,” Mibang says. In his school, he says, he joined other students in “ripping down” their hostels (made of bamboo) to prevent the advancing Chinese soldiers from billeting there.

The educationist dismisses the Chinese claims on Arunachal as absurd. “We have no cultural or linguistic affinities and our way of life is completely different,” he says, adding that “people are 100 per cent with India” and that Delhi should not squander this “advantage”.

Yet, many in Arunachal —far away from Delhi — harbour a sense of neglect by the Centre. Information minister Tayeng of the Congress-led state government says the state is a “victim of injustice” in more ways than one. With 83,743 square kilometres of area, Arunachal, which graduated to a state from a Union Territory in February 1987, is bigger than Assam but has a population of barely 11 lakh. “We lose out in a big way as the Centre gives us funds on the basis of population, not on the basis of our area. It’s a reward for keeping our population low,” he says. T.G. Rimpoche, the Congress MLA from Lumla in Tawan district, bordering China, agrees. “The central government seems neither serious about the development nor about the Chinese threats,” says the Buddhist legislator.

The feeling runs deep. “We joke that the government of India doesn’t bother about a northeastern state unless you have insurgency” holds Moji Riba, a documentary filmmaker and executive director of the Centre for Cultural Research and Documentation at Naharlagun, 12 km from Itanagar. Like Rimpoche, Riba stresses that despite having some cultural affinities with a neighbouring Tibetan province, the people of Arunachal are “Indians first and Indians last”.

It is a refrain that runs through Itanagar. “We are as much Indian as a Bengali or a Maharashtrian and Delhi should say that squarely and unequivocally to Beijing,” stresses Nanni Dai, owner and editor of the Echo of Arunachal, the state’s oldest newspaper.

Gonesh Koyu, the IAS officer at the centre of the diplomatic row, seems unruffled, though. Sitting in his office in the state secretariat, the rural works department secretary says he is not at all disappointed by the rejection. “I knew from the start I wouldn’t get the visa. In fact, I was never keen to go to China. I agreed because it was part of my in-service training,” Koyu says.

But there is simmering anger among the people, too. If India stays silent, AAPSU president Bagang warns, a day may come soon when “people will be forced to” raise the demand for a “buffer” state, an independent country between India and China.

Mibang, who has taught history for 17 years, says India must realise that people could “take its silence to mean that it is conceding the Chinese demands.” In his dreaded nightmares, the 53-year-old sometimes sees Arunachal’s boundary with Assam turning into an “IB” or international border. His nightmare or India’s?