Charting Mizoram’s political journey | Review of Sanjoy Hazarika’s Lal Thanhawla

In 54 years of its existence as a Union Territory and then as a full-fledged State of the Indian Union, Mizoram has had all of six chief ministers. Sanjoy Hazarika has picked the man whose political career spans this entire period to narrate the tale of this north-eastern frontier. With 22 years as chief minister, Lal Thanhawla’s life story, in large measure, indeed encapsulates Mizoram’s.

Rebellion and accommodation

The author must have wished though that Laldenga, the original rebel-turned-first chief minister of Mizoram State, were alive. After all, it was the Mizo National Front (MNF) chief’s takeover of Aizawl that prompted an IAF aerial bombing of the capital in 1966, the first and only instance of India strafing its own territory after independence. Through extensive archival work detailing the protracted negotiations with New Delhi on his terms of surrender, Hazarika illustrates that Laldenga’s violent struggle for Mizo freedom was perhaps more one man’s quest for power.

Thanhawla, in comparison, comes across as much more accommodative: a lifelong Congressman after an initial flirtation with the MNF in the early ’60s, he was gracious enough to step aside as chief minister for the MNF chief in 1986 — and also astute enough to know that the ‘sacrifice’ would stand him in good stead in future.

Decades of being journalist and researcher have afforded Hazarika an abiding connection with Mizoram since the ’80s, and it finds adept play in his description of the long detritus of mautam or bamboo flowering of the 1950s, a natural repeat phenomenon that ravages the region. The account of the Rambuai, the period of suffering that began with the Sam Maneckshaw-blessed village regrouping scheme to ‘organise’ Mizos, has featured in Hazarika’s earlier writings, but the treatment is decidedly fuller in Lal Thanhawla.

Where the book comes up slightly short is in examining the swift transition of the Lushai Hills from animistic belief systems to Christianity. It references JNU professor Joy L.K. Pachuau’s remarkable body of work in this regard, and the latter sections do expound on the all-pervasive influence of the Church in modern-day Mizoram, but that it took only 50-odd years for the Christian population to surge from under 1% in 1901 to over 80% never ceases to amaze.

Beyond borders

The author comes into his own when dealing with the Zomiland question, showing how leaders of every hue — from Laldenga to Brigadier T. Sailo, Thanhawla to Zoramthanga, and current Chief Minister Lalduhoma — have upheld the oneness of the ‘Mizo nation’ even if the people are physically dispersed across borderlands. Without spelling it out in as many words, Hazarika hints that when it comes to the Indian state, limited intransigence brings its own reward. In 1965, ‘foreign secretary’ Thanhawla went to Burma as MNF emissary; he joined the Congress in 1967 and eventually became a four-time chief minister.

Laldenga spent years courting Pakistan, even petitioned then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri that “… the time has come now for the Mizos to decide their own future outside India”, but finally abjured arms and was generously rehabilitated by New Delhi. Perhaps the Nagas, more specifically the late Angami Zapu Phizo and the still-alive Thuingaleng Muivah, missed a trick here.

Lal Thanhawla also presents an intimate personal portrait of the now 88-year-old patriarch, a man who first married a Garo girl in his teens, pined for rice in an Assam jail, and drank freely when doing so was illicit. But it is a political account of the life and times of an ‘Indian nationalist and Mizo sub-nationalist’ at its core, faulting him for policy failures as much as crediting him for his long stewardship of one of India’s smallest States.

Lal Thanhawla: The Boy from Zarkawt, and the Making of Mizoram

Sanjoy Hazarika

Westland

₹799

abdus.salam@thehindu.co.in