Samir Kumar Das

India’s Look East Policy Imagining a New Geography of India’s Northeast

This article seeks to find out how the new policy thinking, namely, the ‘Look East’ apparently intended to deliver India’s Northeast from its presently landlocked and peripheral status produces new geopolitical imaginaries that are not necessarily bound by the limits set forth by it. The article is more about the gaze that India’s ‘Look East’ casts particularly on the Northeast and how it constitutes and imagines into existence a space that extends beyond the region. The new geopolitical imagination set off by the new policy thinking envisages a space that apparently refuses to be bound by the present geography of the Northeast as much as it promises to spread across the international borders to the countries of Southeast Asia through such frontline states as Myanmar and Bangladesh. I propose to call this imagined space—the extended Northeast—and argue that the way the space is imagined in official circles sets in motion many new imaginaries. The extended Northeast as being officially imagined now has therefore a mnemonic effect insofar as it offers a significant cue to the alternative modalities of imagining the Northeast.

Prisoners of Peace

As Irom Sharmila Chanu breaks her sixteen-yearlong fast on August 9, 2016, struggle for peace in India’s Northeast seems to have turned a full circle. On the one hand, her battle against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958—the law that empowers even a noncommissioned army officer to open fire on a civilian and in the process kill her with impunity, that is to say, without ever being tried in a court of law—by all accounts made her the “iron lady” and “the Face of Manipur” to the world. On the other hand, notwithstanding her indefinite fast—widely believed to be emblematic of the “collective moral outrage” against the Act—persistent appeals made by a host of national and international human rights groups, eminent public intellectuals, and the recommendation of the respective Committees in favor of repealing it, the Act remains very much in force in parts of Jammu and Kashmir and in the Northeast even after fifty-eight years of its enactment, resulting in the death of hundreds of civilians. This article seeks to explain the implications of this paradox for peace politics in the region. Why does Sharmila have to take the otherwise painful and albeit difficult decision of breaking her fast even when there is little sign of repealing the Act? Insofar as she takes the difficult decision of breaking her fast, she realizes that her prolonged fast becomes subjected to a variety of technologies of governance: first, by calling for the complete sacrifice of her private life, second by turning her fast into a public spectacle rendering it both “unsuccessful” and necessary—significantly both at the same time—and finally by inculcating in her and in many of us the intense desire of pursuing peace through the established political institutions, particularly electoral institutions.

Border Economy and the Production of Collective Subjects in India’s East and the North East

While globalisation unleashes forces that the Indian State1 finds increasingly difficult to stop and contain, a variety of intermediate institutions has emerged in recent years ranging between a fully securitised State and a State integrated fully into the world economy. These obviously call new configurations of border and border economy into existence as much as contribute to the production of new and hitherto unknown political subjects. Border economy produces the community and not the other way round. Border trade is one of the many instrumentalities through which the flow of persons, goods and services is sought to be contained in order to help making the nation in the border. Ethnicity and ethnic identification serve as a technology for governing the unofficial trade and contributes to the production of ethnic subject. Besides, it is important to understand how a number of people eke out a living by taking advantage of differential pricing across the border. Thus, the labouring life of the subaltern has become an agent, and a moral community thus gets produced, bringing about, in the process, mutation in the dominant discourses of national security and functional integration.

Peacemaking and the ‘Unofficial’ Peace Process in India’s East and the Northeast

While multiculturalism with its reciprocal recognition of rights is usually held as the key to peace and peacemaking in India in general and her Northeast in particular, this article points out with the help of a series of case studies how ‘unofficial’ peace that is made independently of the state mediation bases itself on certain values and standards of culture that more often than not entail compromise with our rights in some form or the other. These values and standards, however, are neither given in our culture nor unalterable as the theorists of ‘unity-in-diversity’ would have us believe. Insofar as their viability and effectiveness in bringing peace depend on their ability to constantly negotiate with and confront the official or the State-brokered peace process and ‘interrupt’ the effects of governmental power, these values and standards constantly get reconstituted, reordered—if not hierarchized—in keeping with the changing requirements of such negotiation and confrontation. As a result, peace, as the article illustrates, acquires forms that are extremely contingent and momentary and does not necessarily depend on rights-based solutions.

Whither Regionalism in India’s Northeast?

The democratic institutions face the challenge of having to address regional demands without being pulled and swept away by them. While at one level the State prefers to distance itself from conceding to regional demands, at another, large parts of the Northeast get regionally reorganized and configured without the State having done it — through the use of wanton violence mostly by non-State actors—a phenomenon we describe as “virtual regionalism”. As the new developmental initiatives undertaken since the 1990s start being perceived as a threat to people’s lives and their very existence, ethnic and regional demands are increasingly giving way to a concern for home, for life, and the imperative necessity of shared existence with neighbors who are not necessarily the members of the same ethnicity.