Rage of the margins: Geography as key to NE

Sudheendra Kulkarni
Indian Express, January 28

For some people, geography shapes history. When geography changes, their destiny too changes — often for the worse, as can be seen in the case of the people of Assam and other Northeastern states. I had pointed out the anomaly of this region sharing only a 21 km border with the rest of India, whereas its border with Bangladesh is 1,829 km.

But take a closer look at India’s map, and another anomaly strikes you. The region, which was well-connected to the rest of undivided India, and also to South-East Asia, through the sea route before 1947, has no access at all to the Bay of Bengal. The southern tip of Tripura comes tantalisingly close to Chittagong, Bangladesh’s second largest port. But India deprived itself of an approach to it — and through it to the rest of the Northeast.

This was because the leaders of our freedom movement lacked the foresight and the assertiveness to stake a perfectly legitimate claim, during negotiations over Partition, on at least a part of Chittagong, whose glorious contribution to India’s freedom movement bears no elaboration here.

Result: Geography suddenly changed for our north-eastern compatriots. They became land-locked. Their traditional road, rail and river transportation system, running through East Bengal, also got completely disrupted. And the Northeast became a distant ‘margin’ in the eyes of ‘mainland’ India. Not surprisingly, some people in the region started to view “mainlanders” as “Indians” and themselves only as Mizos or Nagas or Kukis or Bodos or Assamese. What a tragedy!

I read with tears the following account in former Indian Express editor B.G. Verghese’s book, India’s North-East Resurgent, of the region’s isolation from the rest of the country: “...100-150 years ago, the Brahmaputra valley was in the vanguard of Indian development and globalisation. Its alluring and ever-expanding tea production and exports triggered a variety of investments with backward and forward linkages. The discovery of coal and oil in upper Assam had resulted in the development of mining and forestry. The region was a pioneer, an investment leader, a moderniser. It attracted capital and entrepreneurs... the Northeast was then a part of the mainland, a land of opportunity, an open economy well-linked with markets at home and abroad through Calcutta and Chittagong. This has been forgotten because things changed.”

We can hence see why Partition was an unmitigated disaster for Assam and the Northeast. Just as individuals feel restless when they are deprived of the open sky and the freedom to move and build relationships, communities too feel imprisoned when they are cut off from their natural neighbours and those with whom they interacted.

In Assam, this economic and geographical isolation was compounded by the influx of Bangladeshis, which is threatening the very identity and existence of Assamese. The vote-bank inspired insensitivity of the Congress led to Assamese anger finding dangerous vent in the ISI-backed ULFA.

In an insightful essay titled ‘The Margins Strike Back’, Prof Udayon Misra of Dibrugarh University writes: “Not only did the economy of Assam take a sharp downward slide, but one of the more significant aspects of this geographical isolation was the resurgence of the separatist mindset, which had remained submerged or sidelined during the freedom struggle.”

If isolation, influx of Bangladeshis, and externally-aided extremist violence are at the root of the turmoil, the solution must squarely address each of these causes. This is where we need to realise that Bangladesh, which has become the main source of the problem because of the rise of anti-India feelings fanned by Islamist forces there, has to be made a partner in solving it.

Partition was in many ways a disaster for the people of East Bengal too. The Muslim League’s bogus ‘Two-Nation theory’ had never found enthusiastic support there, and after 1947 it was hobbled with unnatural boundaries, surrounded by India on east, west and north. Much off Bangladesh’s backwardness is because of its cutting off from Mother India in 1947 and because Indian and Bangladeshi leaders failed to create an imaginatively co-operative architecture between the two countries.

However, we should not remain prisoners of the past, one that was a product of the colonial era in its dying moments. We should explore creative new ideas and bold new initiatives. This exploration will continue next week.