A New Paradigm for the Northeast
The Northeast is poised for a leap forward, as is the rest of the country. This may sound paradoxical at a time when there are so many prophets of gloom and doom. As one who has been reporting on India since the birth of the new Republic, I have heard such apocalyptic forecasts time and again. It has not happened. Nor is it going under this time around. Yes, India has problems – which country does not? But it is fundamentally well, possessed of civilizational and democratic depth and resilience and imbued with a rich diversity that imparts it hybrid vigour. We shall overcome.
Before I come to specifics, I would like to address a structural problem. Many in this region object to being addressed as “the Northeast” as though lacking in singular identities and given a mere directional label. They are mistaken. This is indeed India’s Northeast, just as much as my state of origin, Kerala, is part of South India. The nomenclature “Northeast” is not merely a convenient geographical expression for a large administrative collective but, more importantly, represents a vital geo-political and geo-strategic concept whose significance has been imperfectly realised whether in Delhi or in this region.
The Northeast is much like an elephant’s ear. Partition cruelly isolated the Northeast and rendered it all but landlocked, with the narrow 22-km Siliguri corridor providing connectivity with heartland India. Contrast this with its external boundaries that extend over 4500 km, marching with Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet/China, Myanmar and Bangladesh. No other part of the country is so internationally positioned, with contested borders and subject to the vicissitudes of what has often been a difficult or uncertain neighbourhood.
Moreover, draw a line longitudinally south from Kanchenjunga to encompass the Brahmaputra basin to its east, and you will have demarcated what is Mongoloid India. This is a vibrant part of the country’s cultural tapestry which also includes Aryan, Dravidian and Negrito racial types. This is where Southeast Asia begins or ends, but is part and parcel of the unique design of a richly multicultural India. The Northeast is not a terminus but a bridge to lands, peoples and opportunities beyond.
The Northeast therefore reflects both a challenge and a grand design. Failure lies in not recognising this obvious reality. If Delhi has not understood the Northeast, the Northeast has equally not understood itself and constitutes eight strangers in a boat that is adrift, the oarsmen pulling in different directions.
The North East Council is not well structured. It was set up consequent to States Reorganisation when four or five regional development councils were proposed to bring administratively fragmented entities together for common purposes what had been. The Northeast too underwent reorganisation in stages to grow from three to seven “sisters” and, now, eight states, including Sikkim. But there is a disjunction between Sikkim and the rest, with North Bengal interposed in between.
Logically, everything north of the Siliguri Neck is part of the Northeast from the point of view of security, development and connectivity. Yet every lifeline of the Northeast – the railway, highway, pipeline, microwave link, transmission lines and optic fibre cable – runs through North Bengal which should logically be part of the NEC. A Darjeeling-Gorkha Hill Council was created some years ago and has now been vested with certain additional powers. Why should not this entity and the rest of North Bengal be part of the NEC just as much as Yunnan is an associate of the Greater Mekong Region for such purposes as navigation in the Upper Mekong, though China is not part of ASEAN or the Mekong Commission? In fact, the DGCA and North Bengal would benefit greatly, financially and in terms of developmental thrust and coherence, were they to be members of the NEC without detriment to their political status as integral parts of West Bengal.
Likewise, why should the NEC, designed as the planning authority for the region, have its Minister located in Delhi presiding over a redundant Department for the Development of the Northeast Region (DoNER – an unfortunate acronym in itself)? The Minister should sit in Shillong, the headquarters of the NEC, and visit Delhi periodically as and when required. Regional plans should be prepared by an upgraded NEC, which he should chair ex-officio rather than have the chairman rotate among the region’s eight Governors, an expensive and untidy merry-go-round that dilutes responsibility, aggravates delay and makes for incompetence. The Departments of Atomic Energy and Space are located in Mumbai and Bangalore respectively and maintain no more than small liaison offices in Delhi with the Prime Minister as minister-in-charge.
With much of DoNER relocated in Shillong to the extent necessary, but otherwise abolished, the NEC should be represented in Delhi by a Minister of State. His role would be to answer Questions in Parliament and bring together in a small secretariat the Northeast Advisers in the Planning Commission and Home Ministry and take regular meetings of officials in all Union Ministries and Agencies responsible for implementing sectoral programmes funded from their mandated 10 per cent budget allocation earmarked for the Northeast or from the residual non-lapsable funds for the Northeast. The NEC, not the Planning Commission, should supervise the preparation of the NE state plans and then integrate these into a regional plan to be discussed and approved by the Planning Commission.
The NEC headquarters in the Northeast should also have seconded to it, whether in Shillong, or at appropriate regional locations, officials of the External Affairs, Commerce and Tourism Ministries, to take care of visa, trade facilitation and travel problems. Officials of the NEC should also be seconded to these Ministries and be located as attaches in our embassies in neighbouring countries and at Headquarters in Delhi to further the objectives of the Look East policy.
Finally, as part of these structural reforms, the old Indian Frontier Administrative Service cadre should be revived. This would provide officers dedicated to the region and willing to lead outdoor lives to work a single line, single window administration that takes governance to the grassroots.
The sad part is that none of this has been thought through and that a dysfunctional, top-down, Delhi-centric regime has been in place all these years.
If Delhi is locked into a certain mind set, so are all too many in the Northeast. For some, whatever their origins and the genuineness of certain of their grievances, insurgency and agitation have become a way of life and a source of profit and influence. Extortion and rent seeking – illegal tolls, taxes, levies and license fees, call it what you will – are rampant and it would not be untrue to say that the Centre is financing the underground and its over ground manifestations and in a spirit of live and let live. The Northeast is financially pampered as no other part of India and the ratio of government employees to the population is extremely high. This is partly the outcome of a lack of other avenues of employment; but the syndrome has a circular logic as some prefer to be wards of the state and are unwilling to trade easy money for self-help and enterprise. The income-tax exemption enjoyed by a section of the tribal population in the Northeast is now anachronistic and there is no reason why those to earn more than the tax exemption limit should not contribute to the exchequer. This could be made conditional on these amounts being reserved for reallocation to the states from which they are collected for a given period of years.
Many have argued, and some still do, that development is hampered by troubled conditions in certain areas. The truth is that peace and development go hand in hand. Each reinforces the other. The Northeast, parts of which were long secluded and “excluded” from settled administration and development, is undergoing multiple transitions within an India that is itself in transition. Understandably, emerging identities have sought expression and preferment in a variety of demands for “self-determination”, within and, sometimes, even without the country. There have been contending pulls of “national integration” post-Independence and efforts at differentiation on the part of small communities suddenly caught in the swirl of a great Indian ocean of diverse humanity.
Accommodation has been found through political and cultural adjustments over the years, some of this still work in progress. State formation and the creation of a range of regional, autonomous and non-territorial councils (as in Assam) has made the Northeast a chequerboard of federal, sub-federal and local entities responding to divergent fears and aspirations harmoniously fostering both unity and diversity. Many insurgencies, the strongest expression of identity and aspiration, have found resolution or are under suspension pending a negotiated settlement. ULFA has been the latest to join the peace process, though the Paresh Barua faction remains a hold-out, holed up somewhere abroad. There are some active insurgent groups in Manipur, a faction of Bodo militants and a number of other adventurist gangs scattered throughout the region. Quite a lot of violence stems from intra and inter-tribal rivalries.
Manipur and Tripura insurgents resent what they saw as the forced merger of these ancient states with the Indian Union in 1949 after their initial accession. Manipur, especially, had a popularly elected government under a newly-framed constitution. These grievances are not entirely without merit but have to be seen against the fall out of Partition, continuing Pakistani territorial claims, and the resolve of the Indian communists, following the International Communist Conference in Calcutta in 1944 and the swelling tide of Asian communism, to promote the Zhdanov line of proletarian revolution. This is what triggered Irobot Singh’s uprising in Manipur. There is now no going back. Time is a great healer and the past can only be redeemed by whatever is done in the future. The hatchet could be buried in both instances were the Union Government to express regret that such a perception should have been allowed to arise and ferment and were Manipur and Tripura to respond affirming their merger ex post facto.
Manipur too has the additional grievance that though coverage of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act has shrunk – and it can in any case only apply if the concerned state government declares all or part of that state a “disturbed area” – the deep emotional scar it has caused will not heal as long as Sharmila Irom continues to suffer her cruel ordeal. The Jeevan Reddy Committee appointed by the Centre some years ago suggested applying a healing salve: AFSPA should be withdrawn while incorporating certain of its essential provisions in other enactments. There is little reason to fear that national security will suffer in consequence.
The Naga issue is a tougher nut to crack as Nagas claim they were never part of India but were conquered by the British, administratively parcelled between Burma and India and then scattered across four different states within the latter. Two demands are common to all Naga underground groups, namely, sovereignty and integration within a single homeland, Nagalim, which would also ultimately incorporate Eastern Nagaland in Burma, though Myanmar is of course a separate country. A third problem is the continued splintering of the Naga movement along tribal fault lines, ideology and turf battles. This has engendered bitter fratricidal struggles despite unity appeals from the Church, which has worked for peace and reconciliation.
The prolonged cease fire between the Government and the NSCN factions has witnessed a process of peace talks between the Union and the NSCN (IM). The Government has accepted the “unique history of the Nagas”. This has been a balm. Sovereignty has neither been conceded nor is it being currently pressed, but the Government has proffered a via media. It is prepared to consider such omissions from and additions to the Constitution as the Naga people may desire and to incorporate these in an expanded Article 371-A that makes “special provisions with respect to the State of Nagaland”. Such a Naga constitution within the Indian Constitution would be no different from the special provisions made for certain other states under the umbrella Article 371 numbered 371-A to I, suitably elaborated in keeping with the Nagas’ “unique history”, or Schedules 5 and 6, which provide a constitution within the Constitution for Tribal India.
Such an arrangement will not, however, address the issue of Nagalim. Territorial unification is not possible without the consent of the other states concerned, namely, Assam, Arunachal and, above all, Manipur, which is a far older state entity than Nagaland and is not ready for dismemberment. A creative solution would be to confer considerable local autonomy on the Naga majority districts of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal and empower them to adopt through their own regional or autonomous councils such patterns of social and cultural norms as would safeguard Naga customary law and cultural and social rights. Joint consultations could take place through a reformed NEC to dovetail economic plans while the all-Naga Ho-Ho could, as even today, function as an over-arching forum for political consultation. This could foster Naga togetherness without injury to the integrity of the other three states.
The Assam issue too is replete with demographic and cultural complexities. ULFA’s pitch for sovereignty had no merit and little support and has wisely been abandoned by the majority pro-talk faction. What the pro-talk ULFA seeks is no different from AASU’s original demand for demographic, linguistic and cultural safeguards against the push of illicit in-migration. Migration into Assam and the Northeast from what is now Bangladesh and Nepal has historical roots going back to the Raj. Partition changed the entire nature of the problem and gave it far sharper edge in the competition for land, employment and political representation and a certain communal tinge against the background of the two-nation theory.
The Assam Accord has limped along but has not brought closure. All those “detected” have not been “deported”. While the Union Government may be held to account for the failure to act effectively, local responsibility cannot be evaded for encouraging illicit immigration for garnering votes or securing cheap, skilled labour. Fencing has only yielded limited dividends. Illicit immigrants have now penetrated Nagaland and Arunachal to till the land or perform menial jobs. The answer lies in a series of measures: compulsory registration of births, marriages and deaths, swift issuance of Adhaar (UID) cards as a basis for building a national register of citizens; and naturalisation of all “foreigners” who have lived in the country for more than 10 or, if desired, even 20 years, together with their progeny. Thereafter, the mechanism for detection, detention and deportation should operate swiftly and strictly with condign punishment for default.
An argument could be made against naturalisation of large numbers as this could tilt the electoral balance. Here, those naturalised and other Indians not of Assam domicile should be eligible to register as voters only from one or two specially created “non-territorial” or general constituencies. This would ensure that such “outsiders” or latecomers are not disenfranchised but will be unable to distort voting outcomes. As of now, ex-Assamese communities like tea-garden labourers (tea tribes) determine electoral outcomes in over 25 constituencies.
The same principle may be applied to other Northeastern states to overcome the fear of “outsiders” unduly influencing political outcomes and government formation and eroding the tribal character of the state. However, “outsiders” should not be made to feel unwelcome as the Northeast will require a huge infusion of labour and skills if its rate of growth and development is to accelerate to match its needs and potential and enable it to catch up with the rest of the country. The non-territorial constituency could facilitate just that. For the rest, the best way to prevent any overspill from across international boundaries would be to help our neighbours develop and expand employment opportunities at home and allow them freer access to the burgeoning Indian market so as to be able to exploit economies of scale. Work permits could also be issued against registered job vacancies in the organised sector in India.
Development is vital. In the absence of suitable jobs to match growing aspirations beyond traditional occupations like jhum farming, young north-easterners are seeking their fortune elsewhere in the country after higher education. Otherwise, idle hands and minds are easily attracted to drugs, insurgency and other undesirable activity. Indeed, the reports of children joining insurgent ranks to escape poverty and secure a “job” are most distressing. Further, if peace accords are struck, hitherto insurgent cadres will need to be trained and rehabilitated in gainful employment. Else, like some former SULFA cadres, they could become a menace. So Peace and Development must go hand in hand, with time-bound counter-guarantees and tax breaks being offered to investors, wherever necessary, in order to kick-start the process and build confidence. The lead must come from Assam as it is the dynamo and prime regional hub of the Northeast, the largest and most advanced state in the region and the one that connects all the constituent units. If Assam forges ahead, the Northeast will be propelled forward by its energy and the synergy it offers.
The key to Assam’s future lies in harnessing its rich land and water resources. This calls for agrarian regeneration, flood moderation and exploitation of the enormous hydro-power, fishery and inland waterways potential of the Brahmaputra and Barak basins. Presently, feudal land relations and weak rural infrastructure, itself a product of devastating floods, breed low-risk farming and result in diversion of funds to embankments, whose annual repair entails wasteful expenditure and is a source of revenue leakage.
Rather than encourage the development of multipurpose storages in Arunachal, in addition to run-of-the-river projects, there has been a tendency in Assam to discount dams on the basis of alleged seismic risks, sedimentation issues and geo-morphological hazards, reportedly based on technical studies. A strange agitation was mounted last autumn against the Lower Subansiri Project and the whole gamut of run-of-the-river hydel schemes in Arunachal by AASU, AGP and sundry NGOs in Assam. In Manipur there has been protest against commencement of work on the 1500 MW Tipaimukh dam that would moderate floods and improve navigation, fisheries and the ecology generally.
Arunachal has unfortunately followed an unwise policy of literally auctioning hydro sites to private contractors on the basis of who is willing to offer the highest percentage of free power to the State. This has stimulated artificial bids that do not augur well for the future. The Supreme Court’s initial Lower Subansiri Project judgement was also short-sighted and loaded all manner of extraneous development and conservation costs on to the project.
Indeed, dams in remote and hill regions must be seen as area development projects. In order to construct them, roads, electricity, communications and all manner of social infrastructure like health and educational-cum-training facilities must first be provided. Connectivity necessarily improves administrative and development reach, ensures market access and stimulates commercial activity, thereby ending isolation and neglect. The Government has further ordained that while at least 10-12 per cent of free power should go to the host state, at least an additional one per cent of the profits from the sale of power shall be committed to community development within the immediate project-impacted area. All these are over and above payment of ecological and human compensation and confer huge, permanent benefits on the local populace.
Submergence and displacement in the hills, being minimal in most cases, cannot therefore be lightly treated. Tribal populations being small, ethnic and kinship links can be disproportionately affected. Flat-lands, whose value in a perpendicular landscape is increasingly being recognised, are precious assets for modern development. It is here that Assam can imaginatively strike a mutually beneficial bargain with its hill neighbours. With the hiving off of Arunachal, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram from Assam, unresolved boundary questions have left behind a legacy of disputed border strips – 740 sq km in the case of Arunachal and lesser areas in respect of the others. In each case, the hill states begin where the plains end. These forest strips have been denied development and reduced to denuded no-man’s lands to become hide-outs for smugglers and mafias and periodic battlefields for rival police forces. Everybody loses.
Why not Assam take the lead and propose to the partner states and the Centre that these contested plains be declared Trusteeship Zones and developed as special economic zones. Given cheap power and plentiful water, such TZs could become both hard and soft infrastructure hubs that would assuredly attract investments in national and international joint ventures to develop energy-intensive, cement, agro-processing, cold storage, herbal-based pharmaceutical and floriculture enterprises with assured road connections and access to railheads, IWT jetties, warehouses, banks and freight handling firms. The revenues generated could be shared by the partner states and the Centre. Locals could enjoy training and employment preferences. However, “outsiders” will be needed to construct and run these enterprises and could be registered in any one general non-territorial electoral constituency.
A truly regional airline with base hubs in Guwahati and, maybe, Silchar, operating 20 to 40-seater short-take-off-and- landing (STOL) aircraft, could run regional and short haul international services to Biratnagar and Kathmandu, Paro, Sylhet, Dhaka and Chittagong, Mandalay and Rangoon, Chiangmai and Bangkok, even Lhasa and Shigatze, and connect with select points in the Indian heartland. This could revivify and operationalize the tragically idle international airport and air cargo terminal in Guwahati and stimulate regional tourism for which there is enormous national and international potential that could generate considerable employment opportunities in the hospitality industry so well suited to the genius of the North-eastern people.
The Assam-Meghalaya TZ could cater to the Bangladesh market, the Mizoram-Assam TZ to Mynamar and ASEAN, and the eastern Arunachal-Assam TZ to Tibet, Bhutan and eastern Nepal – all this as part of India’s drive to Look East. Commerce would be greatly stimulated by simple and obvious trade facilitation measures such as motor-vehicles agreements, a single combined transport document for inter-modal carriage, common signages, testing laboratories, standardised customs, immigration, weighbridge, currency and banking procedures, transport depots and hotels, guides and interpreters. Their absence has reduced legitimate Moreh-Tamu-Kalewa-Mandalay trade to the merest trickle while permitting licensed smuggling. The Kaladan Corridor from Southern Mizoram to Sitwe port in Myanmar will assuredly meet the same fate if all these trade facilitation measures are not undertaken concurrently here and now, with all concerned actors on board.
Again, in view of well-known last mile problems, it could help to start with the establishment of small bilateral growth poles or growth triangles across boundaries as a stepping stone to large inter-country and international trade. This could also help cool the Government of India’s paranoia about smuggling, dumping and the likelihood of terrorists, intelligence agents and nasty ideologues penetrating the country’s soft underbelly. These concerns are not unreal but can be tackled differently.
The Northeast houses a treasure trove of bio-diversity. Its rich plantation potential and locational advantage in terms of a range of micro-climatic zoning by latitude, altitude and aspect offers prospect for the cultivation of myriad species of fruit, vegetables, herbs, grasses and flowers. The days of large commercial plantations, tea “gardens” or “estates” are over. This is now the era of smallholders and community landholdings. Modern, commercial (as opposed to subsistence) cultivation calls for high technological, processing and marketing skills and matching capital. The options therefore are cooperative farming or joint ventures that could bring together smallholders, corporate houses and tribal associations or the host state as partners. Arunachal farmers in the foothills even now grow tea and sell the leaf to neighbouring tea companies in Assam which provide them extension support. In Tripura ex-insurgents given rehabilitation land grants have formed cooperatives to grow and market rubber with the support of the Rubber Board. Extend the analogy, and big food processing and pharma firms and agencies like the National Dairy Development Board, and Spice Board, could come together in joint ventures. Food processing, with cold chains, would be highly income and employment generating enterprises able to sell their products not merely in local markets but nationally and internationally.
Another example. Large numbers of security personnel – Army, Air Force, Assam Rifles, BSF, CRPF, and police – are stationed in the NE. They require tents, haversacks, sleeping bags, mosquito nets, water bottles, belts and webbing, parachutes, blankets, tunics, badges of rank, ammunition pouches, bandages and medicines as well as canned foods, juices and poultry products. Much of this could be produced locally under contract with the respective security forces subject to strict quality and delivery norms. This would offer producers a captive market on which to build.
A major step that must be taken is opening up to Bangladesh for transit, trade and regional cooperation. Bangladesh and the Northeast are truly interdependent. At another level, transit must not just include rail, road and IWT movements but cover power transmission, optic fibre links, pipelines and, not least, water transfers from the Brahmaputra (which accounts for a third of all of India’s total annual run off) to the Ganga within and through Bangladesh. Close cooperation between all the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Barak co-riparians is also mandated by the imperatives of climate change. The Nathu La pass should also be opened up for inter-country trade and not limited to customary trade.
There is much more one can say. But let me conclude with a few bullet points.
The wasteful, ecologically hazardous and exploitative practice of rat-hole mining in the Garo Hills through child labour should be ended forthwith. This would safeguard the environment and could be done without prejudice to local tribal interest.
The small 7-10 MW (originally 15 MW) Gomti hydro project in Tripura that has outlived its life and utility should be decommissioned. A large 750 MW gas-based thermal plant is soon to be commissioned in Tripura and emptying the Gomti reservoir will allow restoration of 45,0000 acres of rich alluvial land to as many displaced tribal families who were settled in the surrounding hills to practice jhum farming that has caused erosion and silted the reservoir below. The Gomti displacement triggered insurgency in Tripura and exacerbated tribal-Bangla(outsider) discord. Decommissioning could now help give quietus to insurgency in Tripura and promote ethnic reconciliation.
Scare stories about China damming the “Brahmaputra” just above the Great U-Bend in Tibet and drying up and/or flooding the entire lower basin are completely fanciful. The Zangmu dam on the Tsang-po currently under construction some 125 kms from the Indian border is a 450-500 MW RoR scheme not unlike our own Baglihar project on the Chenab in J&K. We need cooperation with China in regard to water issues and it does no good to keep kicking it on the shins without reason. The smart thing to do would be to join with others to propose to China a joint study to tap the massive clean energy potential of the U-bend to feed a SAARC- ASEAN-China power grid.
Nagaland’s communitisation programme for community delivery of primary education, health and urban power distribution services, and its earlier National Environment Development Programme to upgrade jhum to scientific modern agro-forestry practice hold out wonderful examples to emulate.
In the process, the country needs to evolve a sensible border policy in place of merely seeking to define and defend national boundaries. We are making a belated beginning in Arunachal with new connectivity and energy programmes and by resuming border haats with Bangladesh.
What we need above all is a soaring vision that enables all communities in the Northeast and in the rest of India to see that there is space for all of us to grow and flourish together as equal partners in this unique Commonwealth of India. The Northeast has a great future. Grasp it. Who better to take a lead than the graduates and alumni of IIT-Guwahati and the youth of this region.
B.G. Verghese
Visiting Professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
www.bgverghese.com
Mr. BG Verghese is one of the most eminent editors and scholars of India, has long focused on water issues in South Asia and researched, traveled and written extensively on NE India. He is also an Advisory council member of C-NES. He delivered the abovetalk at the IIT Guwahati, which would be of interest to readers and followers of this website. — Sanjoy hazarika