Northeast: India's troubled periphery

During my last visit to Bangalore, a friend took me to a beer pub ‘Twenty Feet High’ not far from the Deccan Herald office.

It served the best draught beer I have had in years, but my attention was drawn more to those who were serving the beer – all Mongoloid-looking boys and girls in their late teens, who turned out to be either Nagas or Kukis from Manipur.

“You are from my region, the Northeast”, I said and began to chat with them on their experience in Bangalore.

The brief chat brought home three contemporary realities about India’s long troubled Northeast, some negative but some positive: (a) The youth in the Northeast , always the main recruiting ground for insurgent groups, have started to move out to ‘mainland’ India for opportunities as there is little back home – that points to severe under-development - but that also indicates the dwindling recruitment base for insurgents;

(b)  the new generation in the Northeast is perfectly comfortable, unlike their previous generations, in ‘ mainland India’, viewing it no more as an object of hate but as a place offering much opportunity, the exception being  when they are heckled or harassed as ‘outsiders’; and,

(c) the ‘Northeast’ identity takes shape outside the region, as the Naga and Kuki  waiters at ‘Twenty Feet High’ tend to indicate, being perfectly at peace with each other, even though back home their fellow tribespeople fight bitterly over conflicting homeland demands.

In no other region of post-colonial India has one seen so many separatist insurgencies or violent ethnic conflicts as in the Northeast.

Lack of industrialisation despite substantial natural resources has led to massive unemployment across the region.

Agriculture, the main occupation, has not been modernised and with the exception of tea and rubber in Assam and Tripura, it is hardly high value.

Assam was one of India’s most developed states when the British left.

Six decades later, it is politically truncated and its industrial output is far behind developed states.

Distance and remoteness fuelled lack of investments and development and sharpened the sense of ‘otherness’, creating an identity politics that challenges the nation-building project of  post-colonial India  and cause huge divisions and conflict within the region .

Hostile neighbours Pakistan and China have backed these violent insurgencies, making weapons and training for guerrilla warfare easily available to the rebel armies.

Armed insurgency has become the first rather than the last option for political protest. Against only one rebel group in the late 1950s – the Naga National Army - there are close to 80 rebel groups in the region now, many fighting  for secession from India, others for homelands within India and some for autonomous regions to ensure self-rule for their tribes.

Somewhere down the line in Delhi prevailed a considered opinion that impacted on policy – don’t develop the transport infrastructure because they could be used by the Chinese in the event of another future invasion. 

This mindset also discouraged major industries in the Northeast because they were in the range of a Chinese air strike. Manmohan Singh changed that as prime minister and embarked on a huge road building project across the region.

He also tried developing the region’s huge hydel power resources for energy-deficient India but ran into several environmentalist-led agitations.

For similar reasons, Meghalaya’s substantial resources could not be developed. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who appears upbeat on developing the Northeast will have to break the jinx on these controversial but highly rewarding projects.

‘Look East’ policy

India has also evolved a Look East foreign policy that situates the Northeast at the heart of our engagement with south-east Asia and China, that combined with India would account for half the world’s population (and much of its future market).

But security concerns inhibit the establishment in Delhi, as evident from the stiff resistance by the defence bureaucracy and army to open the World War 2 vintage Stillwell to Upper Myanmar and China’s Yunnan province for intra-regional trade.

The ghost of 1962 that created unbelievable policy response like planned underdevelopment of transport connectivity, is now around to undo or undermine much of smart geo-political thinking behind the ‘Look East’ policy.

In recent years, India’s success in regional diplomacy has led to Bhutan and Bangladesh cracking down hard on Northeast rebel groups based in their countries.

Myanmar is under much pressure to repeat that and China is no longer directly aiding the rebels as it did in the 1960-70s. But India’s attempt to develop the region has not really worked despite transport subsidies and a government directive to all ministries to allocate 10 per cent of their annual budgets to Northeast.

India’s joining the multilateral initiatives like BCIM (Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar) and the BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal initiative) could help the Northeast to leverage crucial trans-border linkages that could make investment in the region viable for both domestic and foreign capital.

Playing into the emerging geo-politics of Asia seems India’s only way out to handle the challenge of turning Northeast into a prosperous constituent rather than a troubled periphery of the Republic.

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