The old question of whether it is a necessary condition for peace to precede development continues to haunt everybody genuinely concerned with the affairs of the trouble-torn states of northeast India. While the ideal situation should be one in which peace and development are complementary partners, the more challenging question is, what should be the way to go when they are not? That is, what should be the kind of development thrust given in a place where there are serious breaches of the law and order mechanism?
It is troubling and disheartening that a good section of the intelligentsia, including policy makers, are inclined to believe that the development agenda must be put on the back burner until insurgency subsides and peace returns. This, we are of the opinion would amount to being escapist and thus a surrender in the face of adversity. We are also of the opinion that development must not be allowed to be held at ransom by any aberrations of insurrections or any other unrest, justified or not. The responsibility of any government worth its salt must be to evolve mechanisms that will ensure that the development process is not disturbed. For example, if a state government is unable to execute its responsibilities as the prime agency for development activities, such as road infrastructure building etc, the responsibility must pass on to a supra state body. What is important is, development must be ensured, regardless of whatever the nature of difficulties faced, otherwise the lawlessness would continue to spiral and grow.
A demonstration of the success of this approach is being witnessed right next door in China’s one most problematic provinces – Tibet. This province has been stubbornly refusing to be morally integrated to China, although physically it has been, and even a Tibetan government in exile exists in Himachal Pradesh’s Dharamshala. According to journalist visitors, relentless development work by the Chinese authorities in what was once the barren underdeveloped landscape of the Tibetan plateau, despite the ethnic resistance to what was once seen as a mainstreaming process, has transformed the place for the better dramatically. The province is now crisscrossed by expressways, towns dotted with luxury hotels, and Lhasa, the provincial capital, is already on China’s railway map.
In interviews after interviews to many different newspapers and TV channels in the past two decades or so, even the Dalai Lama, the spiritual as well as the temporal head of the Tibetan government in exile, has acknowledged the changes, and expressed hope that a lasting solution to the Tibetan question may not be any longer out of sight. The Peace Nobel laureate indicated this frame of mind even in Imphal when he came visiting some years ago. Recent journalist visitors to Tibet also are of the opinion that there has been a perceptible reversal in the Chinese policy pursued brutally during the infamous Cultural Revolution, and now instead of attempting to homogenize cultures and ethnicities, in an acknowledgement of the importance of ethnic identities and worldviews, have set up massive research institutes into these subjects.
These researches have also found reflections in various governmental policy framing. It must however be added here, China’s treatment of the Muslim Uighurs in its Xingjian Province adjacent to Tibet is leaving much to be desired, but here too, despite the problems, nobody will doubt the quality of developmental infrastructures that have been introduced.
The moot point is development policy initiatives must be able to see beyond the immediate. If insurgency is continually being put up as the alibi for delaying or denying development, it would amount to accepting defeat even before entering the ring. Development work must hence be pursued to their logical ends at any cost. Maybe this cost, in terms of both physical and mental resources, would be higher in areas of civic unrest, but the attitude ought to be that this is a necessary cost if a lasting solution to the unrest is the objective. In fact, a development agenda that empowers the people by opening up opportunities, and building capacities in them that will enable them to reap the fruits of these opportunities, will in the end ameliorate the situation making the road to a settlement of even the core issue of insurgency approachable. This coupled with administrative guarantees of identity safeguards, in our opinion will make a potent medicine for most of our troubles. After all, what is freedom beyond the guarantees of these basic dignities?
Development as Security
The relevance of the “Look East Policy” now “Act East Policy” can also be seen very much as India reassessing its security concerns vis-a-vis the Northeast. The government’s seriousness in taking this policy forward, and without skirting the Northeast, therefore will also be a measure of how much the Union has changed its attitude towards the Northeast. So far, practically every policy vis-a-vis the Northeast have been seen through India’s the security prism. In the chicken and egg conundrum, security had always been placed ahead of development in much of the seven decades of India’s independence, so much so that development has always been seen as a by-product of the country looking after its security needs.
All this while, roads were made, airfields were developed, bridges were constructed, all with an eye to servicing security needs first. Even the NEC for a long time had a charter spelling out this approach in black and white, whereby it was made mandatory for all development work in the Northeast to be linked to security needs. There is ample proof of the physical manifestation of this outlook too. A comparison between the road network before and after the Indo-Chinese war in 1962 in Arunachal Pradesh should pronouncedly establish this.
A lot has changed ever since, and today the chicken and egg cycle is beginning to turn, although, the old hangover still afflicts many neo-conservative policy makers. As a border region, to some extent this is understandable, but 70 years after independence, it is time for a paradigmatic shift. This need for a change in policy stance was nowhere better expressed than by a former DoNER minister, Mani Shankar Aiyer in a seminar about two decade ago when Congress ruled supreme at the Centre after returning from a trip to China’s peripheral Yunnan province. Reflecting and lamenting on the developmental strides Yunnan had taken ahead of the Northeast, he had said, as in Yunnan, there can be no better security guarantee for India in its Northeast region than for the region to prosper and shine, and better still if it shines much brighter than its immediate neighbours across the international border.
If this approach were to be adopted, rather than development being made to dovetail security concerns, development would lead. The assumption is, this would quite naturally, without any need for further orchestration, take care of the security needs in the Northeast. Right now the scenario is quite the opposite. The Northeast looks at its own state of stagnation and then at the pace of development that has happened in neighbouring South East Asia and East Asia, and have little more to say than to sigh in exasperation and frustration. The unfavourable contrast also feeds to a sense of alienation from the Indian mainstream setting off the familiar unhealthy cycles of discontent amongst many in the Northeast on one side, and reciprocally a suspicion of disloyalty to nation on the part of Union. Hopefully, if the liberal camp prevails over the neo-conservatives, and this trend is successfully reversed, the Northeast region can begin to shine, and as the former DoNER minister had said, this indeed could be the circumstance where development becomes the best guarantee for India’s security concerns in the Northeast region.
On a much smaller canvas, this liberal paradigm should also have very profound applications in the vexed issue of Manipur’s territorial integrity. The insecurities that complicate the Indian state’s security concerns in the Northeast, is very much at play in Manipur insecurity about a bifurcation of its territory. If the neighbours begin to shine and Manipur alone continues to stagnate, or even decelerate on the development scale as it does seem to be at the moment, its own insecurity about territorial as well as emotional integrity would be up against an ever growing challenge. The thrust of the Manipur government hence should be on ensuring equitable development. If the hill districts feel neglected and alienated, the tendency will be for centrifugal forces to grow in magnitude with each passing day. Moreover, if the neighbours are marching ahead on the development hierarchy, they would become counter magnates adding to the sum total of this centrifugal pull. Let the policy makers in Manipur too reverse the security-development equation. Build roads, fan out government infrastructures away from Imphal to the districts, bring in all round development, let the whole state partake in availing the benefits of the system. Territorial and emotional integrity should follow automatically. Once this objective is achieved, a lot many other festering problems of the state too should begin seeing light at the end of the dark tunnel they have been in for all these decades.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
