Disclaimer- We are expecting a question in this year mains as the government has honored 10 freedom fighters from North-East India this year.
- Kanaklata Baruah
- Bhogeswari Phulkarni
- Rani Gaidinliu
- Kushal Konwar
- Moje Riba
- Gopinath Bordoloi
- Tirot Sing
- Shoorvir Pasaltha Khuangchera
- Matmur Jamoh
- Sambhudan Phonglo
“Martyrdom does not end anything, it only a beginning”. The axiomatic truth in the words of late Mrs. Indira Gandhi finds full reflection in the roles played by people of North-east in Indian freedom struggle.
Deep buried in oblivion, the tales of fortitude and indomitable spirit come alive only in the teachings of classrooms but fail to mesmerize posterity with inspiration. The teeming millions in the rest parts in India are not even aware about the sacrifice of these noble people from north-east, who laid down their lives for their motherland fighting against the British imperialism. Unfortunately, the brave daughters and sons from the soil of north-eastern states are yet to get recognition from the people of India for the courageous leadership in the battle of freedom against the British.
Let’s know about some of the legends who fought valiantly against British imperialism till their last drop of blood.
Bhogeswari Phukanani-
It was the year 1942 and her eyes were spewing venom as she marched along with other revolutionary during the turbulent time of ‘quit India movement’. Despite being a housewife and mother of eight children, she dared to attack and set free the office of Congress in Berhampur town of Assam. As the British police had laid a siege of the building, it was her exemplary courageous act with other revolutionaries that freed the building. On the auspicious occasion of “panchveer divas”, literally she and the revolutionaries added a golden leaf to the history of Indian freedom struggle. Born on 20th September 1885, this fifty-seven year old brave lost her life to the bullets of British Police while struggling for her life in the hospital for 20 days.
U. Tirot Singh:-
Anyone has heard about a war being fought between two groups of people, where the first group has guns, canons, and other sophisticated arms and ammunitions to strike the enemies quite from a distance, whereas the other group of people has only sticks, stones, spears, and swords. Yet, the people of the second group do not step back in trepidation but engage the fierce enemy in guerrilla warfare. This is the truth about a war, where the heavily armed British forces had an encounter with the tribal people of Khasi Hills.
The incident took place, when the British gained control of Brahmaputra valley but were in search of ways to connect Guwahati with Sylhet in Assam. Realizing Khasi hill would come in-between the two places, when the construction of the road gets started, they made a pact with the chief of the tribes in Khasi hills- U. Tirot Singh to get help in the completion of roadwork. But as it was customary with the British diplomacy, Tirot Singh was deceived in the end. Furious, he waged a war against the British that lasted for four years. Fighting bravely, Tirot Singh was ultimately captured as his followers died one-by-one. He was deported to Dhaka and jailed there till death.
Shoorvir Pasaltha Khuangchera
Every Indian is aware about great freedom fighters like Khudiram Bose, Subhash Chandra Bose, and Saheed Bhagat Singh but no one has heard about Shoorvir Pasaltha Khuangchera of Mizoram. Being the first Mizo leader, he fought with British forces in the year 1890, when they invaded Lushai Hills. As the British captured the hills, Pasaltha Khuangchera died, fighting to the last drop of his blood. Regarded as a deserving character for receiving Bharat Ratna posthumously, his bravery, strength, and righteousness find few parallels in the contemporary history of India.
Rani Gaidinliu
This fiery female leader in Indian freedom struggle gets often compared with Rani Laxmibai for her courageous acts during the days of freedom fighting. At a tender age of 16, she began a movement against the British imperialism demanding end of colonial rule and resurgence of Zeliangrong religion and Naga self-rule. The British administration captured her and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. The first Indian prime-minister and freedom fighter, Jawaharlal Nehru was amazed at her courage and will-power and gave her the title “Rani”. After independence, she was released from jail and continued her works for the poor and down-trodden in the same spirit and determination. She was awarded Padma Bhushan for her tireless efforts for the cause of Manipur people in North-east.
Kanaklata Baruah, 17, was shot dead by the Britishers in Assam’s present-day Biswanath district while going to hoist the natinal flag at a local police station. On the same day, about 150 km away at Barhampur in state’s Nagaon district, Bhogeswari Phukanani, a 57-year-old mother of eight, was killed for the same reason by the British Police.
Arunachal Pradesh’s freedom fighter Moje Riba will be honoured as he was the first person to hoist the tricolour at Dipa village in Arunachal Pradesh on August 15, 1947.Riba was arrested by British Police for participating in the Independence struggle and distributing pamphlets during the Quit India Movement.
The news related to it :-
Ten freedom fighters from the Northeast that include three women, who are largely unfamiliar to the rest of the country, will be honoured by the central government as part of the 70th Independence Day celebrations.
It is part of NDA government’s plans for visits by Union ministers to the birth places of ‘forgotten heroes’ and sites of freedom struggle to honour the bravehearts.
Kanaklata Baruah, 17, was shot dead by the Britishers at Gohpur in Assam’s present-day Biswanath district while going to hoist the national flag at a local police station. On the same day, about 150 km away at Barhampur in state’s Nagaon district, Bhogeswari Phukanani, a 57-year-old mother of eight, was killed for the same reason by the British Police.
Kanaklata was leading her group of unarmed villagers following Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India Movement when she was shot dead at Borangabari near Gohpur.
Bhogeswari and her colleague Ratnamala were leading a procession at Barhampur when they came face-to-face with police officer Captain Finish, who snatched the flag from Ratnamala.
When Bhogeswari saw it, she hit Captain Finish with the pole of the flag. A furious Captain Finish pulled out his revolver and fired at Bhogeswari, who succumbed to injuries.
Naga spiritual and political leader from Manipur Rani Gaidinliu will also be honoured as part of the “forgotten heroes” programme.
Ranima, as she was popularly and affectionately called, led a movement against the British colonialism in 1930s and the struggle soon turned into a battle to uproot British from Manipur and Nagaland.
She was in jail for 14 years and was released from jail only when India got independence in 1947.
Another freedom struggle hero of Assam, who will be honoured, is Kushal Konwar. He was hanged by the Britishers for derailment of a military train at Sarupathar in Golghat district in 1942.
Arunachal Pradesh’s freedom fighter Moje Riba will be honoured as he was the first person to hoist the tricolour at Dipa village in Arunachal Pradesh on August 15, 1947.
Riba was arrested by British Police for participating in the Independence struggle and distributing pamphlets during the Quit India Movement.
Assam’s first Chief Minister Gopinath Bordoloi will be honoured as it was due to his continuous fight that Assam remained with India after he foiled the design of Muslim League to include the Hindu-dominated state into East Pakistan during “grouping” scheme.
Tirot Sing, one of the chiefs of the Khasi people in the early 18th century will also be honoured.
Sing fought against British attempts to take over control of the Khasi hills.
He died on July 17, 1835 under house arrest in Dhaka.
Shoorvir Pasaltha Khuangchera, the first Mizo leader to fight Britishers in 1890, will also be honoured.
As the British invaded Lushai hills (Mizoram), Shoorvir died fighting them.
Matmur Jamoh was a freedom fighter from Siang district in Arunachal Pradesh who will be honoured.
Jamoh had killed a British assistant political officer Noel Williamson in 1911 as he did not like the British interference of people’s day-to-day life while his followers killed another British officer Gregeorson.
Jamoh was soon arrested and sent to Cellular jail in Andaman where he died in obscurity.
Freedom fighter from Assam’s Dimasa tribals Sambhudan Phonglo will also be honoured for his contribution during country’s freedom struggle.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.