Under watch

The phrase ’North-east India’ entered the Indian
lexicon only in 1971. Until 2003, the phrase
referred to the seven states, separated from the
Indian landmass by Bhutan and Bangladesh except
for the 37-kilometre Siliguri corridor. The
phrase, it bears repeating, originates in changes
made to the architecture of governance of the
region, including the creation of a number of
small states that culminated in the North Eastern
Council in 1971.

National security considerations were pre-eminent
in the advent of the category ’North-east India’.
It is perhaps not accidental that 1971 saw
another dramatic change in the region’s political
geography. Pakistan was split and Bangladesh
became independent. The Sixties were tumultuous
years. India and China fought a war in 1962, the
movement for Naga independence got into full
swing and the Mizo armed insurgency began in
1966. After the humiliating defeat in the war
with China, Indian policymakers began to fear
that external and domestic enemies could come
together in the region and mount a formidable
threat to national security. By intervening in
the Bangladesh war, India, to some extent, took
advantage of an opportunity that arose to change
that geopolitical ground reality. But the fact
that the category ’North-east’ too had its roots
in the same set of national security
considerations has escaped public memory.

Even though the North Eastern Council has had to
gradually adapt to the reality of democracy, that
is not how it began. It was envisaged as an
institution to promote security and development.
Initially, it did not even include the chief
ministers of the states. It was made up of the
governors. A military man, the inspector-general
of the Assam Rifles, was its security adviser.

B.P. Singh, who had held key positions both in
the region and in the Indian home ministry, has
written about having to struggle with the
challenge of making the NEC fit into the
constitutional framework of federalism in The
Problem of Change: A Study of Northeast India.
The NEC was technically made an advisory body so
that "it would not infringe upon the political
autonomy of the constituent units", but this came
into conflict with autonomy. From a security
perspective, however, such tensions were seen as
inevitable, given the constraints of ’nation
building’ in a border region. The best the NEC
could do was conduct itself in a way that would
not "hurt the sensitivities of member units and
make them feel like second class states in
India’s federal structure." As it became more
democratic, its security function became weaker.
But that does not mean that the security function
devolved to the state governments. It shifted
directly to the Union home ministry.

With the advent of the phrase ’North-east India’,
the area became a ’border area’ and a security
space in a way that it wasn’t till then. The very
naming of the region carries with it the burden
of that legacy. After all, directional names
reflect an external and not a local point of view.

While Pakistan after 1971 became a smaller
country, Bangladesh did not stay India-friendly
for long. Indian officials even believe that in
recent years, it has become hospitable to
Pakistani intelligence operations in India. While
Bangladesh is “India-locked,” says Bangladesh’s
foreign minister, India must remember that
North-east India is “Bangladesh locked.” This
could be a wake up call for Indian policy-makers,
but not in the sense that the security
establishment might interpret it.

Ninety-nine per cent of North-east India’s
borders is with foreign countries, making it
impossible to separate domestic and foreign
policy. To transform the region from a
’political, economic and cultural hinterland’
into a vital zone of activities, it is not enough
to build roads to India. The region’s
international borders would have to become spaces
of cooperation instead of confrontation. A small
example would illustrate this. The distance
between Calcutta and Agartala before Partition
was about 300 kms. It became 1,700 kms after
Partition. Even the best roads in the world
cannot make up for this difference.

It is not surprising, therefore, that while
enormous amount of money has been spent to bring
about development here, especially since the
Nineties, by the end of that decade the economies
of the entire region had decelerated. Not being
able to take the transnational dimension into
account has been the bane of Indian policy
vis-à-vis the North-east. Of course, in its own
way, the security establishment does take the
transnational dimension into account. But
transnationalism from its vantage point has
little meaning beyond wanting India’s neighbours
to cooperate in counter-insurgency strategy.

Meanwhile, our security obsession has put real
limits on what we could and could not do for
development. The contradictions are perhaps the
sharpest in the smaller hill states. Development
policy there amounts to trying to create an elite
to support the pan-Indian dispensation. In the
make-believe world of formal rules, the
“traditional” economies and political structures
of the hills are being protected: for tribal
lands, in theory, are owned by the community. But
in reality, there has been a capture of community
resources by local elites and a massive
transformation of the de facto ownership of land
and natural resources that eludes government land
records. Indeed there is no cadastral survey of
most tribal lands because they are supposedly
community-owned. While a small elite may have
developed a financial stake in the pan-Indian
dispensation, one cannot say that about hearts
and minds. Ideas about independence and autonomy
remain attractive to both the educated youth and
to losers in the transformation of property
relations taking place outside the make-believe
world.

In the meantime, as economists like Atul Sarma
has pointed out, the absence of a land market has
meant that neither formal credit nor investments
can enter the rural economy, especially from
outside. Even though the contradictions are
apparent, our style of policy-making, that
prioritizes (but does not achieve) political
stability in a ’sensitive border region’, has
meant postponing all hard policy choices to an
indefinite future. Without borders becoming
spaces of cooperation, policy debates about the
region can never address those fundamental
dilemmas.

North-east India needs a major shift towards a
way of thinking that integrates international and
domestic politics. India’s foreign policy towards
its neighbours and domestic policy towards the
North-east have to come together, and in doing
so, it has to come out of the iron-grip of our
security-wallahs.