Uncertainty for Katak Bahadur Chhetri begins where India’s longest road under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, the Miao-Vijaynagar Road, ends near the border with Myanmar. While the 1,57.56 kilometre-long road connecting Vijaynagar on the border to inland Miao in Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh has improved connectivity since it was opened in 2022, the work to elevate it from a 157.56 km dirt track coincided with a push for ejecting the ‘settlers’, who, like the local residents, were off the ‘mainstream radar’ for almost six decades due to the remoteness of the terrain.
Katak Bahadur Chhetri, 84, is one such settler. He has been worried about the rising tensions between his community, who are primarily families of Gurkhas who served in the Army and the paramilitary Assam Rifles, and the Yobins, a trans-border community known as Lisu in Myanmar and China and given Scheduled Tribe status in India, since 2020. Both the settlers and the Yobin consider each other as “foreigners”.
Katak Bahadur is one of the last surviving members of the first 23 families of soldiers of the Assam Rifles who were settled by the Indian government in 1967-68 in the Vijaynagar valley. The government’s plan was to settle armed forces personnel and their families in a strategically important “vacant” land in the North-East Frontier Agency, which became Arunachal Pradesh in January 1972. A total of 200 families were settled in nine villages of this valley in three more batches.
