Since 1999, I have worked in some major conflict affected countries: starting with Cambodia in 1999, Rwanda in 2000, Sierra Leone in 2005 to Sudan in 2006. In India, my home state and the whole Northeast India is reported to be the home to more than a handful extremist groups and its recent past is full of ethnic clashes. My life seems to be a journey through conflicts across continents. But the most shocking and heart bleeding experience for me was my landing in Rwanda as a young teacher deputed by India to help re-built its education sector. Since then, I have been working on conflict resolution, interfaith dialogue and multi-cultural understanding through this NGO - PFI Foundation. In 2007, I initiated a major reform program among Muslim religious institutions in Northeast India and this year in 2011, with support from The British High Commission at New Delhi, launched a flagship program on interfaith dialogue and conflict resolution called Minorities Initiative in Learning and Partnership (MILAP). Presently I am trying to revise the program in a global context and scale it up to reach other locations in Northeast India. As an Executive Director of my organization I supervise projects, organize interfaith and multi-cultural training workshops in order to reduce the ethnic tension between various ethnic and linguistics communities in Northeast India.
At times I find there are so many of us who are working in isolation for peace-building in India delinked from the latest global contexts. It seems that there is an overall lack of professional training/education on peace/conflict management among the lead actors of these organizations. Northeast region being away from the central India and also communication-wise an off-track remote place from mainland media coverage many incidents of low-scale ethnic conflicts go un-noticed and hidden from national/international attention.
Northeast India has witnessed a process of ‘globalization’ and ‘nationalization’ among diverse ethnic communities over the last few decades. But, it has also created conflicts of values and rejuvenated the formation of several layers of identities on the basis of languages, traditions, cultures and revivalist religious rituals. The region poorly connected to the Indian mainland by a small corridor and surrounded by many countries such as Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and China. It happens to be the setting for a multitude of conflicts that undermines the idea of India as a prosperous and functioning democracy. The region has seen a series of ethnic uprising like the Naga insurgence, started in the 1950s, is one of the oldest unresolved armed conflicts in the world.
According to an estimate “more than 70 different insurgent rebel groups” and 13 of the 32 “banned organization” on Government of India’s list are from Northeast. The immediate fallout of these conflicts has been catastrophic, mainly for women and children, leading to the death of thousands of people and rendering many others homeless. Unfortunately, it seems to have created a “culture” of conflict to which people have surrendered. However, amidst the widespread sense of helplessness, there is also an overwhelming desire and force to be free from such a situation of conflict which cripples the people from all sides. Conflicts, preceded or followed by lack of development, inconsistent ways of using armed forces as well as negotiations to resolve the crisis, have created a vicious cycle of backwardness in terms of economic, social and political development of the region. Use of terror from all sides has resulted in the rise to extra-judicial killings, ethnic cleansing and large scale massacres followed by massive internal displacement and abuse of human rights.
Against this backdrop, and to gain an alternative avenue to mitigate such conflicts at the grassroots level, an inter-faith and inter-cultural dialogue approach is being explored in the state of Assam. Involving the religious leaders, teachers, preachers and students of faith-based schools, the journey so far has been both challenging as well as encouraging. Out of 1200 faith-based schools, only 65 joined our efforts in 2007 at the first workshop but early this year we trained our first set of 75 “community peace ambassadors”. We are looking forward to scale up and expand the program to other communities and states in the region. At the end of the day, we want to see at least one inter-faith community leader in each community/village joining an active network. At the same time, to sustain the training program, and enrich it by regular action research we want to ‘mainstream’ it through education systems in the region. At a different level we would like to rope in more public and private sector corporations as our long-term partner in our ongoing projects.
When I started to talk about inter-faith dialogue as a way to reduce ‘conflicts’ in 2006, it was Greek to many. We have gained many friends since then. I am directing this program for some time now and I would like to stabilize it before it is adopted as an accepted channel of resolving grassroots conflicts. I am now exploring the various methods, approaches and techniques that are adopted elsewhere and synergize them with our efforts. I have, therefore committed myself to continue to facilitate this program till it is accepted and well enriched to sustain itself with support from communities, institutions and partner NGOs. Hence, I see myself in the role of a coordinator-facilitator for the whole process.
I feel that we need skills training in areas of sustainability strategies, partnership building across private and public actors and an overall hands-on training in ‘professional NGO management’ that have become essential to any cost-effective organizational management practices in NGO sector today. At various steps, we needed to know how to create holistic sustainability initiatives through ‘partnerships’ that gains a buy-in from all stakeholders in a program. In a nutshell, we need: skills and techniques to recognize strategic challenges and identify appropriate strategies to address them, exposure to leading experts in the field as well as opportunity to network and study with peers from different but related backgrounds, bringing a deep and immediately relevant insight into NGO management.
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