On the morning of May 29, I disembarked from the Guwahati-Silchar Passenger train at the Assam town of Haflong. The Dima Hasao hills had another visitor that day: the monsoons had arrived in North East India.
The North Cachar Autonomous Hills Council, of which Haflong is the headquarters, was in the middle of a political crisis. Some of the council’s most powerful militant-turned-politicians had been convicted in a case of terror-funding, threatening to unravel the area’s fragile democratic arrangements.
Almost immediately, the torrential monsoon showers started to play havoc with my plans. I called a local strongman from the railway station to confirm an interview I had set up earlier but he wasn’t willing to go anywhere. “Maybe in the afternoon, if the rain stops, though, it looks unlikely it will today,” he said.
Eventually, the rains ceased for a few hours. I got the interview with the strongman – and many more over the next few days.
But as I wrapped up my interviews in Haflong, the rain was to play spoilsport again. My train back to Guwahati was cancelled. The railway track had been buried by a landslide.
There were two options now: wait it out for the train service to resume or hit the road. But word on the street was that it could take more than a couple of days to clear the debris off the tracks. I decided hop on one of the shared Tata Sumo taxies that ferried passengers to the neighbouring town of Lumding in the adjacent district of Hojai. Once in the plains of Lumding, I’d have a number of options to get home to Guwahati. I was warned to brace myself for a bumpy ride but asked myself how bad a national highway could really be.
Close shaves
Over the next couple of hours, as I got tossed around in the third row of the over-packed Tata Sumo, I found out for myself. For vast stretches, till the midway point of Maibang, NH-54 is little more than a perilous puddle-dotted dirt track. As the vehicle snaked through the bird “suicide” hamlet of Jatinga, the town of Mahur and the historical ruins of the ancient Dimasa kingdom at Maibang, the young driver regaled us with stories of his many close shaves over the past few days. “But not to worry,” he said. “There’s never been an accident.”
We reached Lumding safe. I took a train back from there to Guwahati, filed my story, and forgot all about the road and the journey soon.
Barely a week later, I received news that a friend in Haflong who had generously put me in touch with several people during my stay had got into an accident on the same road. He too was on board a Tata Sumo taxi. The driver had lost control and crashed into a hill slope. My friend was hurt, but fortunately it wasn’t a very serious injury.
Soon enough, NH-54 was off my mind again.
Several months later, I called up a Hmar student leader I had met in Haflong to ask him what he thought of the peace negotiations that were underway between the Hmar insurgent group, Hmar People’s Convention (Democracy), and the Mizoram government. He patiently answered my questions and promised to pass on a few more contacts.
Immediately after our conversation he sent me a few pictures. “A few bad roads of NC Hills,” he captioned the 12 pictures of slushy mud-filled dirt tracks. “Please do write about them too.”
For a parachuting reporter, bad roads are an adventure to reminisce about in a reporter’s diary like this one. For the people whose daily lives depend on them, though, they are an everyday reminder of the failure of the state and their helplessness to do anything about it.
In the North East, these reminders come only too often.