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North East “A Troubled Paradise”
North East “A Troubled Paradise”
Dr. D. Bhalla, IAS
The Nagaland peace accord was signed in August 2015 by the Government of India and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN) to end the 40–year old insurgency. Government’s Interlocutor for Naga Peace Talks R.N. Ravi signed it on behalf of the Government of India whereas Isak Chishi Swu Chairman and Th. Muivah General Secretary signed on behalf of the NSCN in presence of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The details of the accord were not immediately announced.
In Assam, with the arrest and deportation of top United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) leaders by the Bangladesh government to India, the once stalled peace process has received a boost. An initiative, in 2010, by jailed ULFA leaders in the form of “Citizen Forum” comprising intellectuals, writers, journalists, sympathisers and professionals from various other fields acted as a catalyst in bringing the Government of India and the banned ULFA to the negotiating table. Today, with the extradition of Anup Chetia, aka Golap Barua, the founder general secretary of the ULFA, the pro-talk faction of the ULFA, led by its chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa, has received a boost. There have been six rounds of talks with the Indian government. Chetia has already expressed his desire to join in the peace talk process for political solution of Assam conflict.
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These developments have brought the focus on the path ahead. There is an urgent need to refocus and reorient the direction of the political process of the region. A political vision that strives for the betterment of the larger public rather than the betterment of a pampered elite should emerge. Politics as a vocation, as a service to mankind should be reintroduced and should be revived. The present existing concept of politics as an entry point to riches should be discouraged. A possible answer to the problem may lie in our ability to blend in the fragrance of traditional consensus politics with the stimulant of modern day power politics. The possibility of creating such an exciting brew does positively exist.
North Eastern Region
North-EasternRegion (NER) of India stretches from the foothills of the Himalayas in the eastern range and is surrounded by Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Nepal and Myanmar. It includes the seven sisters - Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, along with Sikkim in the Himalayan fringes. Marked by diversity in customs, cultures, traditions and languages, it is home to multifarious social, ethnic and linguistic groups.
The eight states located in the NER cover an area of 2,62,179 sq km constituting 7.9 per cent of the country’s total geographical area, but have only 39 million people or about 3.8 per cent of the total population of the country as per 2001 Census. Over 68 per cent of the population of the region lives in the State of Assam alone. The density of population varies from 13 per sq km in Arunachal Pradesh to 340 per sq km in Assam. The predominantly hilly terrain in all the States except Assam is host to an overwhelming proportion of tribal population raging from 19.3 per cent in Assam to 94.5 per cent in Mizoram. The region has over 160 scheduled tribes and over 400 other tribal and sub-tribal communities and groups.It is predominantly rural with over 94 per cent of the population living in the countryside.
Troubled by history and geo-politics, the NER has remained one of the most backward regions of the country. The trauma of Partition in 1947 not only took the region backwards by at least a quarter of a century, but also placed hurdles in its future economic progress. It isolated the region, sealed both land and sea routes from commerce and trade, and severed access to traditional markets and the gateway to the East and South-East Asia- the Chittagong port in East Bengal (now Bangladesh).It distanced the approach to the rest of India by confining connectivity to a narrow 27km-wide Silliguri corridor making it a “remote land” and constraining access for movement of goods and people. The uneasy relationship with most of the neighbouring countries has not helped the cause of development of the region either. With 96 per cent of the boundary of the region forming international borders, private investment has shied away from the region.
If truth be stated then we must accept the fact that discontentment and unrest have become synonymous with this part of India so whimsically known as the North East. This unrest, however, is not the result of any single cause or incident. Instead, it is the byproduct of so many causes through a protracted period of time, the most important being that of ignorance, neglect, economic backwardness and not the least, mal-governance at its worst.
Ignorance
Ignorance of the region and ignorance within the region constitute one of the reasons for the state of continued unrest that prevails within the boundaries of the Seven Sister States. Geographic and historic reasons are mainly responsible for the lack of social and cultural interaction between the people of this region with the rest of the country and contribute largely towards ignorance of the region. We do not know them and they do not know us. A saying goes “We hate people because we don’t know them ; and we don’t know them because we hate them”. (It applies appropriately to the North East). A vicious psychological cycle. Our ignorance of outsiders begets suspicion. This suspicion, in turn, often gives rise to mistrust and fear. Fear, in the ultimate analysis, is the main ingredient of social unrest. If we claim, however, that we are ignorant of our Indian brethren, the same goes for them too. Mainland India is totally in the woods as far as the Seven Sister States and their people are concerned. In all fairness, who has the time and energy to understand the local politics, aspirations, dreams and apprehensions of individual tribes from a potpourri of hundreds of different tribes from the region? This aspect is responsible for ignorance of the NER. For convenience sake New Delhi opted on a common nomenclature for the entire region and prefers to call it the “North East”. With the passage of time this word has conjured up, within the corridors of power in Delhi, a false but comfortable perception and vision of a composite political area populated by a homogenous North East community . Social, political and economic issues have, therefore, been perceived and accordingly addressed within the parameters of this mainland perception of the region. Nothing can be further from the truth and this fallacy has been one of the most contributive factors for the continued rancor; persistent mistrust and enduring communication gap between the people of the region and the so called outsiders from rest of India! They don’t understand us and we resent this failure! This resentment, in turn, manifests itself in many forms, the most common of which is violence. Ignorance of each other, therefore, contributes in no small manner towards the suspicion and misunderstanding that continuously dog the State-Centre relations between New Delhi and the Seven Sister States.
Mainland India and its people carry an image of the North East where they think that an all pervading fear of constant and unseen death, injury or harm envelops the region. We know this is false, and though occasional localised tension may occur, for most times all of us continue to live a life of trust and camaraderie among ourselves. Fear over loss of identity is on the other hand a constant and ever present threat for the people of the North East. This fear, real or imagined, usually arises out of the perceived unchecked influx of outsiders in some states and due to the economic superiority of outsiders in some other states. Be where it may occur, this fear is one of the most pertinent factors that contribute to the state of unrest in the Seven Sister States and where logic and common sense are constantly upstaged by raw and coarse emotion. The democratic ethos of the North East is often put to the test when one is forced to choose between rights of the Individual over rights of one’s community and often one opts for the latter. Fear of social ostracism overwhelms even the educated and in the North East they prefer to remain the silent spectators. The horror of a demographic imbalance detrimental to the interest of the indigenous tribal population is a powerful silencing factor for the region’s intelligentsia. Solutions to this fear must therefore be found immediately if the integrity of the country is to be protected. The Indian Constitution with its inherent flexible characteristics may surprisingly be the most appropriate place to start looking for such answers.
Neglect and Rapid Transformation
Most people summarily reject the concept that unrest in the North East is also the byproduct of a time warp in which the people of the region find themselves in. But there may be more to this theory than we are willing to accept. Within a short span of less than five generations the people of the region have been transported from stone-age cave dwellers to high rise apartment dwellers; from primitive warrior headhunters to seat-bound office commuters; from simple village headmen to computer punching administrators and jetsetting political executives. If Alvin Toffler is to be believed, the North East in 1947 was in the first stage of First Wave Civilisation. It practiced and survived on a primitive form of Agriculturist Economy, slash and burn to be exact, which continues even today. Then within the last ten years we leap frogged simultaneously into the 21st Century and into Third Wave Economic pressures, where information and knowledge, computers and digital technology are the base ingredients for economic survival. Even advanced nations and communities are finding the demands of the information age traumatic. For the NER the pressure to adapt has become humanly unbearable. We have been asked to adjust to momentous changes within an unrealistic time frame. Is it, therefore, surprising to find domestic tension amidst social trauma, heightened by confusion, doubt and mistrust. We ourselves don’t know who we are or where we are heading. Ignorance among ourselves and within the region!
Governance and Infrastructure
Poor infrastructure and governance is combined with low productivity and market access. Inability of governments to control floods and river bank erosion causes unmitigated damage to properties and lives of millions of people every year in the region. If the quest for ethnic and cultural identities has sowed the seeds, frustration and dissatisfaction from seclusion, backwardness, remoteness and problems of governance have provided fertile ground for breeding armed insurgencies. There is much dependence for resources on the Central Government, while public investment in the region has sub-optimal productivity due to lack of forward and backward linkages.
One of the lapses in development planning for the North East can be attributed to a general failure to recognize the imperatives that impinge upon the land and the region. This part of the country is mostly made up of mountains and uplands. The Socio-economic issues of such an environment are usually dictated by what can only be called mountain imperatives – terrain, climate, remoteness, inaccessibility, isolation, cultural and indigenous uniqueness, etc. On the other hand, the Central Government, through the Planning Commission, till quite recently, was definitely lacking in experts, technologies and strategies to tackle such inherent problems for mountain areas. For instance, the agricultural production systems of this fragile high altitude environment are yet to be understood. They differ radically from that of the fertile Indo-Gangetic plains. Now tested and proven technology for agricultural enhancement for the plains, the so called Green Revolution Technology, has been juxtaposed on the agriculture practice of the hills with catastrophic results. Failure, through wrong technology application has been attributed to inherent NE slothfulness! This hurts and deepens the feeling of cultural alienation.
Politically Marginalised
The Seven Sister States vis a vis other states of the union are politically marginalised in so far as political representation to Parliament is concerned. Politically we don’t count and, as such, in a politically oriented Central Administration, when shove comes to push, the voice of the North East is seldom heard if at all paid heed to. Again, assertiveness has never been a strong point with North East politicians and in the process political marginalisation has perpetuated the feeling of neglect. Administrative steps to rectify this perception have been taken and cognizance is to be given to the creation of the North Eastern Council (NEC), its recent attempts at reorganization so as to appear more ethnically oriented and the concurrent creation of a separate Union Ministry known as the Department on Development of the North East (DONER) with a local North Easterner as its minister, are definite and well meaning steps to erase the impression of Central nonchalance towards the region. The fact, however, remains that the taste of the pudding is in the eating. This has yet to take place and people have yet to savor the culinary skills of DONER and the restructured NEC.
The basic foundation of the market-driven development path is based on the assumption of the existence of an organised and efficient market system. However, for an efficient market to exist certain basis preconditions need to be fulfilled. A primary requirement for a market to function properly is that there should be proper law and order such that any transaction can be carried our in the market without any fear or coercion. The second important precondition for markets to function is the presence of well-defined property rights. In the absence of either of these two conditions, either the market fails to exist or it functions wrongly. In the discussion on development alternatives in the context of NER this crucial point is often ignored. In several of the NER States, markets do not exist for many commodities, either due to extortions and fear of life and property (consequence of extremism) or because of the absence of well-defined private property right (land, for example) or simply due to poor connectivity.
Ensuring peace and progress in the region are on the top priority list of the government. The gap between the region and the rest of the country in terms of various developmental outcomes, productivities and capacities of people and institutions in large and growing, and has to be bridged. Even within the region, there are vast differences, particularly between populations living in the hills and in the plains and between those living in the towns and villages. Given the vast disparities within the region, a development strategy will have to be evolved depending upon prevailing resources, conditions and people’s needs and priorities.
