Journey To Nowhere

Sanjiv Barua
TOI, January 16

One does not have to spare words to condemn the atrocities against Hindi-speaking migrant labourers by ULFA. But it is far from obvious that the politics of condemnation produces the best public policy. The government's knee-jerk response so far tougher counter-insurgency operations is not exactly a sign of thoughtful policy-making. There is hardly a word on why this approach would work this time, and how exactly it would pave the road to a peaceful Assam. One would have thought that after the failures of past policies our key decision-makers would be asked to provide some justification for why 'more of the same' would work this time. US president George Bush might wish that he were as lucky vis-'-vis his Iraq policy. There is little room in the Indian style of decision-making on the north-east for accountability and for learning from policy mistakes. Are the principal perpetrators the only ones responsible for the atrocity in Upper Assam? British philosopher Ted Honderich makes the case for apportioning responsibility for atrocities between those who supply the necessary conditions and the final agents. International jurisprudence on crimes against humanity is premised on this notion of accountability. But by concentrating on the perpetrators, the politics of condemnation lets every one else bureaucrats, politicians and military men off the hook and permits ostrich-like behaviour vis-a-vis policy failures.

Perhaps a domestic equivalent of a system to try crimes against humanity would produce more accountability in our north-east policy and a less knee-jerk style of decision-making. It is about time we acknowledge that there is something dreadfully wrong with our north-east policy and think beyond the crude carrot and stick approach blame insurgents and the ISI and on the carrot side, spend huge amounts of money in the name of development and complain about corruption. India has a dreadful record of resolving internal armed conflicts. Internal civil wars in South Asia are unusually protracted. Studies have found that a much larger percentage of such conflicts go on for more than 10 years in our part of the world than the global average. The nearly five-decades-old Naga war is one of the longest wars in the world. There is now a virtual revolution in the academic study of armed conflicts. But we have insulated ourselves from those insights by adopting a closed-door approach to foreign scholarship. Thus on north-east India on which some of the classics of anthropology were written before Independence, there is almost no major work by a foreign scholar since Independence.

This is not because of a lack of interest, but our restrictive policy on research visas. It is hard to avoid the impression that the fear about the 'foreign hand' causing trouble is only an excuse. A desire to avoid an unfavourable comparison of our record of conflict resolution in the north-east may better explain this paranoia. On those rare occasions when foreign observers have looked at north-east India's predicament, their diagnosis and policy prescriptions have been radically different from those of our security and development establish-ments. Consider a report done last year by the World Bank not exactly a bastion of radicalism. It describes the region as "a victim of a low-level equilibrium where poverty and lack of development (compared with the remainder of India and other South East Asian nations), lead to civil conflict, lack of belief in political leadership and government, and, therefore, to a politically unstable situation. This in turn leads to further barriers to poverty reduction, accelerated development and growth". The report does not say that spending more money for development or greater militarisation are the answers to this condition. Instead it sees institutional arrangements as the major obstacle to utilising the region's vast water resources for sustainable development. Our highly centralised approach, it finds, suffers from "the paternalism of central-level bureaucrats, coercive top-down planning, and little support or feedback from locals".

Local stakeholders in north-east India have such distrust of these centralised structures that no one believes that developmental initiatives are actually meant for bringing about real benefits. So deep is the mistrust that the study team found to its astonishment that even an embankment project designed to benefit the people of an area, is opposed by its intended beneficiaries. This is the cumulative legacy of five decades of bad policy. The World Bank study was done in collaboration with government's Department of Development of North Eastern Region. Yet there is little interest in focusing on this aspect of the report on the part of our bureaucrats. The report warns of the dangers of path dependency of being locked into bad choices even when better alternatives are quite obvious. It calls for "strong political will to counteract the tendency of a society to follow the path it has already taken due to the political or financial costs of changing it". This applies not just to managing water resources: but to our entire approach to the north-east. We need to ask some hard questions about how we have come to this point, recognise errors in old policy and begin the process of rectifying those mistakes.

The politics of condemnation currently shaping the response to ULFA's atrocities is only the latest illustration of a dysfunctional policy process that stands in the way of a radical course reversal needed to bring about peace and prosperity to the north-east.

The writer is currently at IIT, Guwahati.