Northeast is India

The region, particularly Arunachal, has been left at least two decades behind the rest of India in basic development. If the disparity continues for too long, China doesn't have to fight any war over territory.

Mountains of Arunachal Pradesh | Representative image | Wikimedia Commons

Our prime ministers, in fact most of our most important leaders, rarely visit the Northeast. And even when they do, it is usually a most non-newsy event. The politics of that region does not count for very much where we live, with all of the seven states contributing just about 20 MPs to Lok Sabha. And insurgency, which used to make headlines a quarter century ago, is now more or less dormant, barring the odd ULFA strike here and there. So who, in New Delhi or Mumbai, Bangalore or Chennai, bothers about the Northeast? Even the spasmodic twists and turns in peace talks between the Centre and Muivah and his NSCN insurgents rarely make page one. So wonderfully out of sight, out of mind the seven states — actually eight now, since we also include Sikkim in that diverse grouping — have been that if you took a poll even in one of your smartest colleges in our big cities, many students would not be able to tell you the capitals of Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. Or be aware of the fact that the state of Arunachal Pradesh, with just about 20 lakh people, has more territory than almost half the states of India. Of course, there is now greater awareness of the fact that the Chinese lay claim to this entire territory. And that is the reason the prime minister’s recent visit to that distant outpost made news.

You cannot quibble with most things the prime minister said, or did, on that very significant visit — unless, of course, you are Chinese. But you have to now face up to realities of the Northeast, as he seems to be doing. Some of these are new, most of these are old, but almost all of these are uncomfortable. Sixty years after Independence, and a clear 45 years after we fought a bitter war with the Chinese over Arunachal Pradesh, it now takes our prime minister to personally visit the region and promise roads, power, schools, air services and so on.

What’s so special about this, you might ask. Isn’t this exactly what prime ministers would promise any part of the country they visit? What is special here is just the lag between the northeastern states and even the rest of the Indian “mainland”. The region, particularly Arunachal Pradesh, has been left at least two decades behind the rest of the country in basic development. And the saddest thing is, it is only partly by cynical neglect. It is mostly by design, and on the basis of a policy formulated by our most well-intentioned political leaders and civil servants.

The Northeast, particularly Arunachal Pradesh, was mostly discovered by independent India in the mid-fifties, actually, exactly a half century ago in the first flush of separatist demands and insurgency in Naga Hills (what was to later become Nagaland) and then the Chinese claims on Arunachal Pradesh. Nehru, to his credit, saw the need to reach out to the region. But his first experience was not encouraging. He personally visited Nagaland in 1953 hoping to win over popular opinion, but was stung by the kind of rejection he confronted. In fact, the moment he had finished speaking at the large public meeting in Kohima which was expected to have turned Naga opinion away from the separatists, the entire crowd turned their backs and started to beat their backsides, the native gesture of protest and rejection. Nehru had far too much sensitivity not to understand that he was dealing with a more serious problem than what was imagined in New Delhi. So he looked for solutions, allies and ideas.

It was during this phase that an itinerant adventurer-cum-anthropologist called Verrier Elwin entered the scene. Elwin was fascinated by India’s tribes and felt as passionately for their well-being as Nehru. He wrote seminal work on many of India’s tribal communities, particularly the Nagas, and anybody who understands Nehru even a little bit would appreciate why Nehru was so easily fascinated by him. So from the moment they came together Elwin became Nehru’s intellectual inspiration, a one-man think-tank on the tribal Northeast. They were absolutely right in believing that the region was different from the rest of India and needed some kind of specialist handling. So both worked together on building and orienting an all-India service they set up specially for the Northeast, the Indian Frontier Administrative Service which produced some great titans in the history of our bureaucracy, as also some great story tellers.

One of them was Nari Rustomji and I had the privilege of getting to know him well during the two and a half years for which I was based in the Northeast as this newspaper’s correspondent (1981-83). Now retired and on a visit to meet friends, he called me because he was intrigued by the review I had written on his then latest book, Verrier Elwin and India’s Northeaster Borderlands, in the paper’s Sunday edition. Intrigued, as he told me over tea at my tiny Shillong cottage, because “it seemed not only that this guy had actually read the book, but that he even seemed to know something about the region.” Rustomji was a frontiersman in speech and style and would have made a terrible diplomat. So he wasn’t one to suck up to journalists for publicity or be in awe of them. But we became friends, even though more than five decades adrift in age. And it was during the many fascinating sittings with him that the story of the Elwin-Nehru romance with the Northeast unfolded.

Elwin was an amateur anthropologist, having read English literature at Oxford, but also a romantic. He loved the tribes so much he made a home wherever his current research interests were and became a member of the community. But the prospect that his gullible, vulnerable tribals may have to deal with the big bad world outside worried him greatly. So he devised a policy of firmly calibrated change which he described as “hastening slowly”. Nehru, in all honesty, idealism and innocence, bought this idea. This meant resisting change, shielding the tribal regions from the mainstream/mainland, preserving and protecting them. It resulted in a policy that effectively quarantined the tribes of the Northeast. Most tribal regions, which later became the states of Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal, were so completely sealed off that a fellow Indian needed an inner-line permit to visit. Fortunately for the Mizos and the Nagas, Christian missionaries had already struck roots there, so they became the bringers of change, of modern education and ideas. But Arunachal was late, and was more fully “protected”. It was under the influence of Elwin, who ironically had come to India as a missionary, that the Centre even banned Christian missionaries from entering the state. This ultimately resulted in the enactment of a law banning conversions by the local assembly.

The result was a quarantine which only became tighter following the 1962 military debacle as the fortress psychology of a defeated army harmonised so totally with the siege mentality of an ethnic protectionist. This resulted in a policy where roads, airports and power generation capacity were not built, lest the Chinese should come and grab it all from us. The lack of roads, actually, was seen as a good tactical ploy to deter the Chinese armies from venturing too deep into our territory and thereby stretching their supply lines. Very few schools and colleges were set up, and with missionaries kept out, there was no alternative either. In fact in 1983 I travelled along the Assam-Arunachal border for a story on the then growing phenomenon of Christian missionaries setting up schools right next to the border so Arunachali tribal children could come and study there. But they were too few to make a difference. That is why the young tribals you now see working in airlines, restaurants, banks and other service industry — bright, efficient and so confident — are mostly from Mizoram and Nagaland, where the missionaries resisted the quarantine, and almost never from Arunachal.

This is what Manmohan Singh is now trying to change. And this is why when he talks of massive road-building, introduction of air services, electrifying villages, it amounts to turning the clock back on that Elwin-Nehru philosophy which, though so well-intentioned, ultimately proved so disastrous. If you lived in Arunachal now, particularly if you lived close to the border, you would know how much better off the population in Chinese-controlled territory is. They have 24-hour power, roads, schools, shops full of goodies. And here, you have been protected, or rather preserved, as a museum piece. Frankly, if the disparity continues for too long the Chinese do not have to fight any war over territory. We risk seeing many of what we regard as our own people walking across. After all if the sons of rich farmers in Jalandhar would sell their family silver to get a visa to the West, why wouldn’t a poor, tribal of Arunachal exercise the same choice towards the east?

This does sound grim, but this is the reality today. The only good news is that this prime minister obviously has the intellect to understand this. And also to leave the past behind to build a new future, much as he did with our economy in 1991.