RailEnquiry

Creating infrastructure, especially in remote areas such as India’s northeast, has become a mantra of Plan after Five-Year Plan, much like the removal of poverty. Though there is a considerable dent in poverty, the northeast, sadly, remains as distant today as it always was. Trains now connect Guwahati to most cities, but the northeast stretches a further 600 kilometres as the crow flies to the northeast and the southeast.Surface transport in the northeast, despite the grand uni-gauge and National Highway projects, lags far behind the rest of the country in both reach and quality. We showcase the Konkan Railway and the new Kargil highway, but roads, or what passes for them east of Kolkata, languish in limbo. Meanwhile, China builds rail and road links to Tibet and Xinjiang under far more trying conditions. Yet another lesson we have not learnt from China is the urgent need to knit the vast country together to keep it from falling apart at the seams. The geographic distance stunts commerce. The striking hand-woven fabrics of the northeast, which I bought by the box load even on my teacher’s salary, are not found even in the most ethnic-chic of boutiques. Most trade as it exists today is largely due to the hardiness of Rajasthani merchants found in the farthest of places — behind fenced walls, of course!

Cultural distance, too, is magnified. Parts of the northeast, notably the various Naga tribes, have steadfastly insisted on their separateness. To them and some others as well, India is a successor power to the British, much as it was in Tibet before China moved in.

Successive central regimes have done little to overcome the alienation. In my extensive travels in the northeast, I was struck by two things: the genuine warmth with which I was greeted, and that virtually any sizeable settlement had a fortified garrison overlooking it. Even as the extraordinarily polite and hospitable local population showed every courtesy to a guest – I became the honorary chief of a small Naga sub-tribe after a night of wining and dining – most people address the rest of the country as India and call the visitors Indians, as if they were not themselves Indians.

For most of us west of Assam, the northeast hardly exists. A Mary Kom becomes a star, but the problems of an average Manipuri, who is a devout Vaishnav, are beyond the ken of even the more learned. What does one make of the recommendation of an eminent chair-holder in a renowned university abroad, who graces the media opinion space regularly, that people from the south should intermingle more with people from the northeast?

The administrative and security overlords may not have succeeded in integrating the region into the mainstream, but they have certainly managed to make the northeast one with the seamier side of our democracy. The relatively egalitarian and non-exploitative local culture is now riven with faction-ridden politics and all the ills that follow from it. I witnessed one of the first such incidents during my early visits, as I have reported in these columns (“Triumph of the survivor,” June 20, 2012). Cupidity knows no region or ethnicity; no prizes for guessing where a large chunk of the resources meant for development in the northeast has gone.

The region as a whole has always lagged behind the rest of India in development. No state has ever had a per capita domestic product above the national average. These ranged from 99 per cent of the national average (Arunachal Pradesh) to 62 per cent (Tripura) in 1990-91. The reforms of the last 20 years have not materially altered this. In 2006-07, the range was 85 per cent to 68 per cent. Assam, Manipur and Nagaland had become relatively worse off over this period. The 2008-09 Economic Survey observed that even when some northeastern states performed well in the early years of the century, that was not enough to pull them out of the low-growth trajectory.

This economic backwardness has caused the outward migration of a sizeable population of the young in search of livelihood, now much in the news. This should have been anticipated, after the experience of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — but, until now, the poor in the northeast remained invisible to policy makers. Unlike the Gangetic states, they had no regional champions.

The other consequence of the distance and the neglect is far more ominous: the anger, fed by isolation and disinterest, barely under the surface, that erupts periodically through local militancy. The Naga and Mizo uprisings are well known, but trouble elsewhere is not, and is even less understood. Tensions in Tripura between the original inhabitants and the large Bengali migrant population and problems between the Nagas and the Meitis of Manipur occasionally make it to the news, but are quickly forgotten. We do not even begin to understand what it feels to be cut off, as Manipur has been for long periods of time even as the Centre and the state play dangerous politics.

These conflicts are not new. Subrata Bhowmik, revered as the saviour of Manipur, was brutally assassinated by fringe militants in his second tour of duty in the early 1980s. His crime? He was a Bengali.

The present happenings are not so much a warning about the havoc that troublemakers with access to social network can cause. Significant as that is, it is nothing compared to the wages of continued neglect – and not so benign at that – of a vital region and its people. Had we lavished on the northeast even a fraction of the care and resources we do on Kashmir, things would not have come to this pass. What little attention we pay is straitjacketed in the form of “one-size-fits-all” standard programmes, without considering whether they address the issue in the first place. Mr Bhowmik’s signal achievement is that he solved the Manipur rice problem by understanding its root cause and by not getting shackled by received wisdom.

The last word belongs to my wife: “What is the contribution to resolving this burning issue of the most illustrious representative of the northeast at the centre for the last two decades, Dr Manmohan Singh?”