Sanjay Barbora
Introduction: At the outset, I express my sincere gratitude to the organisers of this esteemed event for their kind invitation. Their efforts in bringing together such a distinguished gathering are truly commendable. I also want to thank Dr Sashipokim Jamir for the initial invitation to speak and the subsequent reminders to adhere to deadlines. It is a great honour to be invited to Patkai Christian College. This institution has been the intellectual home for many generations of youth from the region, including my partner and her close friends, who have also become mine. In the 1980s, I heard of the college from my Naga classmates at St Edmund’s School in Shillong. They spoke about the marvellous opportunities offered for young, talented people, especially those who were musically inclined. As I grew up and left the region for my higher studies, I came across many graduates from this college, and I can attest that many were indeed exceptional musicians.
I was fascinated when I heard that a college had been named after a hill range. In the Tai-Ahom language my ancestors once spoke, Patkai refers to a place where a sacred chicken was cut. I am unsure, but it could refer to the rituals different waves of Tai-Ahom migrants had used since the 13th century. After all, rituals and paying obeisance to ancestors and spirits continue to be part of our repertoire in modern times as we begin something new. Historians tell us that the Ahoms were forced to leave their homelands in southern China because of internal conflicts and natural calamities. As successive waves of Tais spread from their homelands to various parts of Southeast Asia, including northern Thailand and eastern Assam, they would have had to appease the spirits, gods, and demons who had put obstacles along their way. One such obstacle might have been the mountain passes that create a narrow pathway from northwest Myanmar into Assam. Each group that crossed the mountain pass to enter eastern Assam would have sacrificed a white fowl to read the signs as they made their way downhill.
Such rites of passage are common in most human societies. Some may have origins in ancient times but have survived into our age. They help build values in individuals and communities that can be passed on from generation to generation. These are some of the issues that I would like to raise in my talk today. I want to dwell on the following questions: How have institutions - like Patkai Christian College or St Edmund’s School in Shillong - nurtured values that have helped create a better society in our region? What are these values? Does every person pick up the same codes to function in society? Finally, what happens when we are confronted with responses from individuals and institutions that make it harder for us to co-exist as a species on this planet? I admit that these are profound questions we may not have ready-made answers to, but this is an excellent opportunity to place them before you.
Multiculturalism
We live in a multicultural world where most people speak at least three languages, if not more. Our knowledge of different languages helps us navigate our complex corner of the world. As children, we picked up languages effortlessly. My Roman Catholic school in Shillong was home to boys of every ethnicity. In the wooded heights of Shillong, we were more concerned about our Saturday walk into town and our upcoming football match.Civil strife and endless strikes happened in the Brahmaputra valley and to people whose mother tongue was taught as our English-speaking school’s second (or even third) language. It did not touch us as we debated the right course of action for the terrible food they served in the school’s refectory. When we brought up the troubles around us, we did so detachedly. We were products of strange compromises that our parents had made to climb up the social ladder, some just one generation ago, as representatives of stubborn peoples, while others, perhaps two generations ago, were beneficiaries of colonial economic and political largesse. In that distinctive boarding school, we were products of a peculiar historical process of class and political stratification, where our planter/bureaucrat/politician/entrepreneur parent wanted to shield us from the realities of the world they thought they had barely escaped.
What was this world that they were trying to escape, and why?
The answer to this question sharply delineates life experiences within India, especially inside its sequestered Northeast. None of us, kicking leather balls and each other’s shins on the school’s football field, could claim centuries of caste exploitation as Dalits. Nor could we feel righteous angst about the weight of religious strife and oppression. Yet, we were children of people who felt the burden of marginalisation and thought that an English-medium boarding school, run by strict Irish missionaries, in a place slightly far away – indeed, Shillong was equidistant from the epicentres of strife in Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura – would ensure our escape from the worldly realities they were trying so hard to cope with.
I almost got away. My college and university years were spent between Bombay and Delhi, where I had access to a universe of books and ideas. These were also places that made me aware of my peers’ differences in experiences. Despite the convergence of class interests and political positions (which generally veered left of everything), there was always this little feeling that those not from the so-called Northeast didn’t get it. It permeated our conversations and everyday lives. There were times when the old Fenian graffito: “To those who understand, no explanation is necessary, and to those who do not understand, no explanation is possible”, seemed like the only way out of dialogue and uncomfortable pauses.
Somewhere in the middle of the plantations of upper Assam, the small towns of Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, the idea of the inchoate Northeast was changing. We now know that our land is a reluctant frontier for South Asia and Southeast Asia, where history and politics collide with the express purpose of creating a militarised region. We also know that we live in an area that has remained a state of exception in democratic India for over five decades. Yet, more is needed to describe what it means to live here.
Our linguistic and cultural diversity has been under pressure since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many ultra-nationalists in Assam would like to blame migration, but their arguments do not convince me. Whether temporary or permanent, migration leaves us more prosperous in learning new languages and cultures. However, the modernist idea that only one language can propel us to prosperity is destructive and damaging. It quickly creates hierarchies and a power structure, where some languages are considered more important than others. Think about it! In the past hundred years, or maybe less, we have slowly been persuaded that only language can give us (and our children) a better chance in life. We punished children in schools for speaking their mother tongue because someone decided it would be harder for them to learn English or Hindi if they continued to talk in Galo, Lotha, Khasi, or any of the beautiful languages we say in the region. When we do not understand our neighbours’ language, we are prone to making assumptions about them, which can lead to more significant conflicts.
I taught a programme on peace and conflict at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences until recently. We emphasised the importance of knowing many languages so students could imagine entering different worlds. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) was taught yearly. Our students were sceptical about the power of faith to overcome decades of violence and trauma perpetrated by the apartheid regime. South Africans spoke many languages, and apartheid had kept each community apart. Yet, the TRC went on for more than four years. Even though many continue to doubt its outcomes, it remains one of the few attempts at national reconciliation after the violent suppression of people’s rights. To convince my students, I would make them listen to the South African national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika (God Bless Africa), sung in five of the country’s eleven official languages. We go through the entire national anthem in Xhosa, Zulu, and Sesotho, which are Indigenous to Africa, and settler languages, Afrikaans and English. That is when my students opened their hearts to what Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: “It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth…in the end, only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing”.
My students and I would then begin our difficult conversations about values and listening to the languages with which we express our love, hurt, and hopes.
Values:
One significant outcome of a strict Roman Catholic upbringing at school was the insistence upon penance and forgiveness. We were always taught that being truthful was right, even if it made us unpopular. Love, mercy, suffering, compassion, and morality were values that we woke up with and had to practice as diligently as possible. These values saw us through difficult times. It kept us grounded and routinely reminded us that we had a conscience.
I often wonder about conscience these days. We have many wars being fought across the world. Some, like the ones in Central Africa and East Africa, have been going on for a while without any anguish from the rest of the world. While Western countries have rightly condemned Russia’s war against Ukraine, their double standards have been exposed in their response to Israel’s continuing occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, especially the nine-month-long decimation of the Gaza Strip.
However, more than collective political values, the personal ones bother me more. In the past few months, the wanton display of technological and military power exerted by the Israeli Defence Forces has been disturbing. Its smart bombs and drones have devastated the Gaza Strip and left thousands of people dead and more than half a million displaced. In April this year, my colleagues at the Department of Sociology at Santa Cruz and I read a chilling story about an Artificial Intelligence program that had contributed to creating kill lists for the IDF. Written by a brave young Israeli journalist and documentary filmmaker, Yuval Abraham, we read about a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential targets for military strikes in the heat of war.
Such a machine exists. The Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based system called “Lavender”, and it has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip. Formally, the Lavender system was designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets.During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source talking to Yuval Abraham stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, usually, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorising a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what is regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 per cent of cases and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have a loose connection to militant groups or no connection at all.
Lavender marks a new, alarming set of values disregarding international law, especially during warfare. Even in Israel, previous governments and military leaders had established strict protocols for targeting enemy military commanders in their homes. Since this was a brutal method of attacking their opponents and lacked proportionality, such targeted actions were chosen after months of deliberation and intense scrutiny of legal principles. However, this changed with the introduction of Lavender. Using data generated through WhatsApp and other instant messaging and voice-over-internet protocol services, Lavender created kill lists based on patterns the machine taught to mark out as suspicious. Even a greeting from a low-ranking militant to his aunt, wishing her good health, would have been marked off as the beginning of a suspicious network. Soon, this suspicion would extend to the aunt’s extended social network comprising her friends, colleagues, children, and their networks. In this manner, Lavender would create a kill list based on communication patterns between ordinary human beings. When the program decided that all the possible combinations of the network were together in one place with the original low-ranking suspect, it would generate a kill order, which, as I mentioned a little while ago, needed less than 20 seconds to verify.
I pause here for a moment to let this sink in. As a sociologist, I am also trained to look for patterns of collective human behaviour. My colleagues and I spent several days agonising over this information that Yuval Abraham and his colleagues had released to the world. Inside our minds, we were all grappling with the same question: Could a sociologist have contributed to the Lavender program? It took me back to one of the most honest, heartfelt autobiographies I have read. In his book “Beyond Boundaries”, Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson expressed compassionate resignation because most of his best students were probably joining the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after graduating from Cornell University. So, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that there are sociologists who sit across a class from teachers like us and will eventually join technologically cutting-edge human-machine programs like Lavender.
What brings hope in such dismal times is the idea of solidarity.
Solidarity
Yuval Abraham wrote his extraordinary investigative piece for a radical online journal called +972 Magazine. +972, in case you don’t know, is the area code for Israel, just as +91 is the area code for India. You can access the journal online at www.972mag.com and read the brave journalists contributing to it.
Click on the contributor’s section of the menu to find cartoon-like sketches of young people with Hebrew and Arab names. It does not require much to realise that the people who run this fantastic online magazine are young Israelis and Palestinians. Just like the brave South African anti-apartheid activists before them, they see a shared future for both communities with a refreshingly bold clarity. This, for me, is the best example of solidarity across ethnic divides. It is glued with a shared idea of ethics, values, and respect for human differences across cultures (and languages).
As my colleagues and I agonised about our students potentially becoming part of the oppressive war machine, the young people on campus began their protests. The undergraduate students pitched tents at what constitutes the main centre of our campus. They set up their temporary home between wooden buildings built in the 1970s and the main store. They called it their encampment, and within 24 hours, they were joined by members of the Students for Justice in Palestine. A few hours later, more students joined them. Forty-eight hours later, as I was coming out of a lecture, I saw four masked Indigenous women talking to the students in Spanish. My student Justin looked at them, waved a clenched fist and said: “The Zapatistas are here”. Four days after the encampment started, the campers and the entire university were delirious. Someone had seen Angela Davis on campus, and everyone wondered if she would speak at the encampment. That afternoon, my undergraduate class asked to be excused because they wanted to hear Angela Davis speak. I gladly agreed because I wanted to listen to her, too. She was one of the first Marxist Feminists I read as a college student, and her entire life inspired my generation. Her involvement with the Communist Party, exile, association with the Black Panthers, and her influential campaign for prison reforms were part of our education in college and university.
A few weeks later, the graduate students –those doing PhD research – went on strike. The entire University of California system comprises nine campuses and is unionised. The union for graduate students is the United Auto Workers, a well-known socialist union with almost four hundred thousand members. The graduate students were protesting the assault on fellow protestors on the UCLA campus a few days earlier. The UCLA students had begun their encampment earlier than ours, and it was, like all other student encampments in the US, peaceful and inclusive. Many of its core organising members were Jewish American students. Still, the UCLA encampment was brutally attacked by Zionists and paid mobs while the police stood aside and watched. The UAW strike was called to draw attention to the unsafe work environment on the UCLA campus. That is why our students, located several hundred miles away, stood up in solidarity. My colleagues and I had jumped the gun regarding our worries about what students were learning in class. The young could express solidarity with the oppressed, and I think they learned some of this in our classrooms.
Indulge me one last memory of solidarity across time and space. On 5th May 1981, the Irish revolutionary Bobby Sands was martyred in Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland. His death was not inevitable. He and his comrades, all of whom were members of the Irish Republican Army, had gone on hunger strike to demand the status of political prisoners. Bobby Sands began his fast sometime in March 1981. I distinctly remember the Irish Christian Brothers who taught us were distraught. They asked us to pray for strength and courage for Bobby and his comrades. Alas, that was not to be. The British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, refused to grant the IRA prisoners their demands, and Bobby refused to end his hunger strike. For me, it was the earliest act of solidarity that I can remember. It was not forced, nor was it difficult. How could one not feel the passion of a young man who wanted dignity and freedom for his people?
Before he died, Bobby Sands wrote: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children”.
The Role of Institutions
Let me conclude here with the role of institutions in nurturing an environment of multiculturalism built through the imparting of values. Most institutions encourage some degree of multiculturalism, even though we are going backwards on this count in India. However, institutions that impart education only sometimes encourage revolutionary ideas. They prefer stability and order, almost tilting towards the status quo. Our school is better known for the number of bureaucrats, politicians, and businessmen that went through its classrooms. No one remembers the names of those who sought reform and change. Despite all its radical intentions, even my California university eventually called the police to clear out the encampment against the wishes of the faculty and students.
I understand why they cannot call for the overthrow of oppression and oppressive systems. It has to do with the safe space that it provides for those who can think differently. As students graduate from these institutions, they become stalwarts of industry or entrepreneurs and become aware of a world of inequality and injustice around them. Institutions, therefore, are the safe spaces that allow for these differences of experience and intent. Looking around me, I am reassured that Patkai Christian College has offered a safe and nurturing space for several generations of scholars who have passed through its gates.It lives up to the name my ancestors were supposed to have given to the hills they crossed to come to our land. It prepares the young for a problematic world. May it grow, and its graduates find their calling with grace and dignity.
This speech was delivered by Sanjay (Xonzoi) Barbora, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz at the Patkai Christian College Golden Jubilee talk on August 10, 2024.
