By Adam Halliday
On Monday Former Mizoram MLA and Vice-President of the Zoram
Nationalist Party K Liantlinga referring to BJP’s vision document
calling people from the North-East “immigrants” said there was nothing
to feel bad as it is true and highlighted that people from the region
and the rest of the country are “of different races and ancestry”.“The BJP’s vision document which calls us immigrants is the party’s true view. They must have reviewed this document twice or thrice before releasing it, and this is the way they see us, and there is nothing to feel hurt about it because its the truth,” K Liantlinga said during an address to party workers in Aizawl.
“Mizoram was dragged into India by the British, and was reinforced only after an agreement between the Mizo National Front and India. We are Mongoloids, and the people of India are Aryans, who came from the west. So us and them, we belong to two different races, and we are descended from different peoples,” he added.
It is not the first time such a view has been publicly expressed.
Also read: Outrage over BJP vision distortion: North East people called immigrants
Naga writer Kaka D Iralu had written in an article for the Morung Express newspaper last week that the BJP “calling the North East citizens as ‘immigrants’ was a most heartening and welcome description for the North East peoples.”
“It is indeed a historical fact that no Hindu or Mughal king had ever conquered North East countries beyond the river Brahmaputra. In fact, even the word North East did not exist in any historical documents prior to the Indian invasion of these territories after the Indian independence of August 15th 1947,” Iralu had written.
“Prior to 1947, India was indeed a country of over five hundred Princely states that had never invaded any of its neighbour nations. For the first time since her independence, one political party of India has at least uttered the truth for once. (Though it was immediately withdrawn as a ‘printing error’),” he said in the article.
Iralu’s article has also been translated into Mizo and circulated on social media, garnering hundreds of likes on Facebook and drawing dozens of comments, most of them in agreement.