A Discussion on the Northeast

Last evening, I attended the book launch of the Shillong-based journalist Patricia Mukhim’s ‘From Isolation to Integration: Navigating the Geopolitics of India’s Northeast (1990-2023)‘. (Her daughter is also my colleague at UNDP). The launch included a discussion on the Northeast by a stellar panel – Vrinda Grover, Shyam Saran, GK Pillai, Shekhar Gupta, and Tiplut Nongbri, former Professor at JNU.

While panel discussions can never be a deep dive into a topic, the anecdotes and opinions gave me a lot to ponder. Sharing some notes I took from the session:

• IAS officer C Balagopal’s book on Manipur was titled ‘On A Clear Day, You Can See India’ which neatly sums up the take of the Manipuris about Indians.
• The Indo-Bangladesh border is extremely porous. It’s believed that the fence is cut at least 800 times a day. In some sections, there is a daily free movement of people and goods (sugar, alcohol, construction material, etc). On the difficulty of policing borders, a reference to the washing away of 30 kms of the Indo-Pak border was also made.
• Manipur’s angst against Delhi goes back to the days of the AFSPA. Grover was critical of the Supreme Court’s delayed intervention after the viral video of the women being stripped and paraded in Manipur surfaced. It raises questions about patriarchy and the inability of the judiciary to be agile.
• There’s a poem written by a Manipuri called ‘I Shall Not Dance’ that is currently being circulated in Manipur. It’s a sarcastic take on the welcome processions that accompany the PM’s official visits. (The PM is expected to land in Manipur later this month – his first since the conflict broke out).
• The abysmally low levels of railway penetration in the NE is something we need to pause and reflect on.
• Shekhar Gupta argued that the treatment of the NE by Delhi in the 50s had to be put in the context of the nation at that moment. Reaching the NE was hard. Till the 90s, one could fly only up to Guwahati, that too after a series of hops and halts. India’s annexation of Goa in 1961 could have provoked a NATO response, as Portugal was a founding member of NATO. In addition to these stresses, the political leadership in NE was nascent and nebulous. The Church pulled the strings and could never become the interlocutor of the masses. In fact, the first anti-conversion law in India was promulgated in Arunachal Pradesh to halt the advance of the Church in NE.
• The prism through which the NE is being seen is still one of security and international border management. This needs to change. The flooding of the local markets with Chinese goods makes it harder for the NE handicrafts and heritage to be protected.
• Of all the NE states, the one that never had an insurgency was Meghalaya. Despite this, the social indicators of the state are still quite bad. Women representation in politics is also low.
• Investment into the NE often gets stalled due to the complexity of land acquisition. Most of the land is owned collectively.
• The political leadership of the NE that emerged after the rebellion and the peace accords of the 60s ended up being decimated by corruption and the ‘good life’. The panel jokingly quipped that their livers couldn’t keep up with the alcohol that began to flow.
• Grover also weighed in on the entrenched racism that accompanies any discussion about the region.

The question that I couldn’t ask was: The tussle between the Center and the Southern States is mainly centered around greater devolution of funds, cuisine, Anti-Conversion, etc. In the Kerala media, these are often countered by highlighting the double standards of the Center, as these very issues are rarely raised when it comes to the Northeast (rightly so). It would have been nice to hear how the NE intelligentsia sees this.