Northeast: India’s Other?
By Parvin Sultana
17 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org
The region of Northeast continues to be in the headlines for the wrong reasons. The latest being the Vision Document published by BJP on the eve of Delhi elections which claim to provide special security for people from Northeast who move to the capital city. But the document called such people “Immigrant”. While the BJP leaders were too quick to make amends and called it a typing error, the damage was already done. What such a statement did is reinforce the alienation that the region has faced since ages.
While political parties are trying hard to build bridges and reach out to people in the Northeast, it still seems a long way to go. Frequent instances of violence against people hailing from the region, banal instances of harassment which shrouds doubt over their identity as Indian as happened recently in Agra go a long way to point how the image of an Indian continues to exclude many. To understand what such random statements reinforce we need to revisit history.
Northeast has been the stage where ‘othering’ and ‘alienation’ has been played out since pre-independence. Never a part of the Mughal Empire, it was made a part of British empire as late as in 1826 under the Treaty of Yandaboo. To assimilate this region with the larger nation, since independence a constant quest has been nationalising space in northeast and using this land frontier as a tool of nation building. Apparent is Sanskritized names of the states of Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya. This has also been done by taking northeast in the fold of mainstream developmentalism whereby development and underdevelopment gets constituted discursively and objective material conditions took a back seat.
It is this continued perception of Northeast through the prism of national security, aggravated post Indo-China War in 1962, along with the persistent underdevelopment of the region that has given space to subnationalist movements which have robbed the people of the region of peaceful living. Civilians have found themselves caught in the crossfire between insurgents and army.
Persistent underdevelopment amidst political chaos further pushed the region back. While royalty for natural resources continue to be meager, income flows into the hands of people who have moved from other parts to this region. As a result the binary of insider-outsider continues to dominate the political discourse.
Policies of economic development couldn’t do much to assuage the anger of the local people. The kind of developmental policies that the Central Government made in New Delhi failed to address the specific needs of the region. Development in Northeast has to be sustainable development and the policies should be made at the regional level by people who know the region and by taking cognizance of the ground reality of Northeast. Centralised policy making leaves out the region’s peculiar needs.
It has been an interesting and to some extent disturbing fact that low intensity armed conflicts has infested the area for such a long time that a militarised life has become a part of normalcy in the region. The linguistic re-organisation that took place in 1956 did not solve the problems of Northeast. The region became a theatre of “cultural wars”. When Assamese were busy fighting the Bengali speakers, the hill tribes which initially supported the Assamese felt that such subnationalist aspirations will end up imposing Assamese culture and language on their tribes. Sensing this threat demands for separation came from Mizo hills, Naga Hills. To sort it out the central government did a hasty division of Northeast over a period of time. It created 7 states but never looked at possible alternative solutions. What came out was cosmetic federalism. The fact that this did not solve the problem of ensuring cultural harmony is vindicated by the persistent and violent upsurges in the Northeast.
Northeast continues to be a land frontier for the centre which needs tight security. To curb insurgency the solution has been stringent militaristic rules in the form of Armed Forces’ Special Power Act (AFSPA) which has been in place for a few decades in the region. This act gives virtually unlimited power to the Army to kill without holding them accountable. Also it has put in place a Military Command structure called the Unified Command which puts the Army under the control of the Centre. Prafulla Mahanta supported such a structure and it was only Tarun Gogoi who talked of a greater role of Assam Police in such operations. However there is still a vast presence of paramilitary forces. This attitude of treating the region as a frontier is further vindicated by the fact that retired Army Generals are often appointed as Governors of these states. Their gubernatorial interventions often insulate counter-insurgency operations from democratic practices and scrutiny. Counter insurgency put in place a diminished form of democracy in terms of basic freedom, rule of law and principles of accountability and transparency. The latest intervention in this has been appointment of General V. K Singh as the DoNER Minister. Mere timely elections can only fulfil an extremely minimalist and reductionist understanding of democracy. The attitude of the Centre has been paternalistic and patronising, treating Northeast as a spoiled child who needs to be disciplined, normalised. This same attitude transcended in other spheres as well.
On the conceptual level, rather than enforcing ideas of nation building in Northeast to make it feel more Indian, the state through its policies should put into place an alternative paradigm, that is, Northeast can be a part of India, despite of being different. Cultural alienation should come to an end. Effective policies should inculcate a confidence in the people and ensure that their interests can be safeguarded irrespective of if they have their own homelands or not. The ways of life of this region does not need to be normalized or standardised. The largest democracy of the world should not continue to put up an undemocratic, authoritarian, punitive face in the Northeast.
In such a backdrop even a genuine typing error will seem sinister and difficult to dismiss. Calling people from Northeast immigrants have sparked widespread protests in the region. One cannot be sure whether this contributed to the debacle of BJP in Delhi. But it cannot be ruled out completely. In absence of an inclusive idea of nationhood, people from the Northeast will continue to be treated as the ‘other’ – typing error or not.
Parvin Sultana is an Assistant Professor in Goalpara College of Assam. Her research interest includes Muslims in Assam, development and northeast, gender etc.
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