He focused on channelising Muslim anger towards physically overwhelming the Chicken’s Neck corridor.
The dramatic arrest of Sharjeel Imam, the Marxist activist turned Islamic jihadist, has surprised many people as the police of at least five states—Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh—slapped charges of sedition, rioting etc., on him before he was picked up from his home village of Koka in Jehanabad district of Bihar on 28 January. Sharjeel was one of the core organisers of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) sit-in protest, which has been going on for over a month in Shaheen Bagh of South Delhi.
There were many who wondered why different Central security agencies and the police of five states were so worried about one single individual, while a host of other political leaders were already opposing the CAA and were publicly delivering fiery and provocative speeches, and when angry demonstrators had already set on fire both public and private property in many states?
Only one element which distinguished Sharjeel from the rest of the opponents of CAA and which electrified the security agencies into an overdrive was his focus on channelising the country’s Muslim anger towards physically overwhelming the “Chicken’s Neck” corridor of West Bengal in order to break the entire Northeast from the rest of India. “Chicken’s Neck”, also known as Siliguri Corridor is an ultra thin passage, just 24 km in width, which lies between Nepal and Bangladesh and happens to be the only geographic link between the Northeast and the rest of India. Once India loses its control on this little region, India not only stands dismembered but also loses its geographic links, and hence relations, with Bhutan.
This explains why “Chicken’s Neck” has become a sensitive word in the lexicon of Indian defence forces and security agencies. Since the unfortunate days of the India-China war of 1962, a section of the Chinese establishment has made innumerable efforts to gain a foothold in this region in order to break India’s links with its Northeast and occupy it at a time of its choice. The high powered 74-day long Doklam standoff between Indian and Chinese armies in 2017 was China’s latest attempt to establish its foothold near the Chicken’s Neck and India’s all out resolve to protect it. China’s oft repeated claims about Arunachal Pradesh being “Southern Tibet” too have left no doubts about what the territorial ambitions of China are vis-a-vis the Northeast.
In the ongoing anti-CAA protests that were spinning around a limited vocabulary of mundane terms like “Hindu”, “Muslim”, “citizenship” and “Constitution”, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and its security agencies were flabbergasted when Sharjeel Imam suddenly started shifting focus to the Chicken’s Neck with the aim of making it the new common agenda for Indian Muslims. Speaking the same language in his speeches at JNU, Jamia Millia, Aligarh Muslim University and Shaheen Bagh he started pronouncing to the Indian Muslim community that cutting off the Chicken’s Neck and separating Assam from India was “our responsibility”.
In a video clip that has gone viral on social media Imam is seen telling the Muslims of India: “If we have five lakh organised people then we can cut off the Northeast and India permanently. If not, at least for a month or half a month…” At another point he is seen declaring, “Our responsibility is to cut Assam from India…”. It was the first time in the past six decades that a call to dismember India and break the Northeast from the rest of India was issued publicly. Though this goal was always obvious, yet no one from the Chinese side or its agents in India said it in as many words, ever.
The very first Chinese attempt in this direction was the Naxalbari movement, which was planned, funded and openly supported by Chairman Mao and his Chinese government in the post-1962 war era. Although it claimed to be a “democratic” movement and an “uprising” of the poor labourers, farmers and students of India, but its only aim was to pull down the “capitalist” Government of India through the bullet and not the ballot.
It was not a coincidence that the Naxalite movement originated from and drew its name from a village, Naxalbari, in Bengal, which is located at one end of the Siliguri Corridor. But before it could acquire a reasonably big dimension the Naxal movement was crushed effectively by two Congress leaders, namely, Siddharth Shankar Ray, the Chief Minister of West Bengal and his close associate Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi who had full support from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the Centre.
Over past half a century, China has tried to achieve the same goal through a host of separatist and militant groups from Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura etc., whom it supported with money, arms, shelter and training. But New Delhi proved smarter in the long run.
Over the years the Naxal movement has been able to revive itself in many states in its new avatar of the “Maoist” movement. Starting from Pashupatinath in Nepal and couching Tirupati in the South, this movement has been able to have its foothold in quite a few states like Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. The geographic pattern of the Maoist movement has been too obvious to miss the attention of political observers and, to say the least, of the Indian security network. This “red corridor” looks like the “Naxal Wall of China”, which has had the potential of holding up India’s defence forces from effectively reaching the Northeast in the event of any Chinese action to pluck these states away from the Indian Union.
This danger presented its most ominous manifestation in June 2007 when the Maoists in the jungles of Bastar in Chhattisgarh blasted five high tension electricity towers on 1 June and another three towers four days later. The result was nightmarish as a major part of the state plunged into darkness and almost all civic services like schools, hospitals, government offices, industry and even mobile network came to a grinding halt for nearly a month. For security agencies this was an obvious dress rehearsal of the real things to come. For the national defence apparatus of India too it was a clarion call to get ready for the Maoists’ potential of playing a similar game in the Chicken’s Neck area on a day convenient to China.
On 8 August 2009, a Chinese think-tank formally mooted the idea of “breaking Indian into more than 30 pieces”. Soon a Pakistani think tank, funded by the Pakistani establishment, released a map of India under title “The Indian Rump State which shows India reduced to some leftover parts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh”.
These incidents and China’s ongoing military preparations on the Tibetan side of the Himalayan borders finally encouraged the Central government to develop an autonomous defence structure both for the Indian Army as well as for the Air Force in the NE region to defend Indian territory even in the event of the Chicken’s Neck being overrun by India’s adversaries.
Just before arresting Sharjeel Imam, the Enforcement Directorate and some other agencies had discovered a monumental sum of Rs 120 crore being deposited in the Popular Front of India’s (PFI’s) bank accounts. This exposed the financial game running behind protracted sit-ins such as Shaheen Bagh and the one attempted in the Nizamuddin area of New Delhi. All these developments show that arrest of this PhD scholar of JNU might prove to be the tip of a mammoth iceberg, which is evolving through a newly found affinity between China and the Wahhabi jihadists of India.
Vijay Kranti is a senior journalist and Chairman, Centre for Himalayan Asia Studies and Engagement, CHASE