Northeast India's integration question

It is more of an administrative construct than a historical region with a shared past, given its mindboggling diversity in cultures, languages and ethnicities

Northeast India: A Political History

Author: Samrat Choudhury

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 432

Price: Rs 699

On India’s map, its Northeast region may appear to be a protuberance that hangs on to the rest of the country and sends a mere 25 Members of Parliament to the 543-member Lok Sabha. Still, the events in the Northeast, particularly Manipur, were most recently the reason the Opposition brought a no-confidence motion against the Modi government. It was only the second no-confidence motion that the government faced in the past nine years. It was proof that the region, which for decades felt alienated, is more integrated with the mainland than it ever has been in the past seven decades.

That the Northeast is part of India, as the author points out in this readable “political history”, is thanks mainly to the British love for tea, wars and intrepid missionaries. As it exists now, the region is more of an administrative construct than a historical region with a shared past. For example, Sikkim does not share its boundary with any of the other seven, but the Centre included it as part of the region by making it a member of the North Eastern Council in 2002.

The eight northeast states have, possibly because they share international borders, forced strong governments in Delhi to concede to respecting and accommodating diversity, tolerance and pluralism. Most recently, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) retreated when Northeast states opposed the Uniform Civil Code, and during the six years it has run a government in Imphal, the party has had no issues with the consumption of beef there.

The book details the mindboggling diversity of Northeast India with its 160-odd tribes, some of whom are matrilineal, speaking 220 languages. Only Tripura and Assam, of the eight, have clear Hindu majorities. Manipur and Arunachal have equal numbers of Hindus and Christians. Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram have Christian majorities. Buddhists constitute local majorities in Sikkim, Arunachal and Mizoram. The author looks at the journeys through time by which these eight states entered modern India and acquired their present shapes.

Sikkim became a part of India after a referendum on April 14, 1975 to abolish the monarchy and merge with India. Results came in two days later, 59,467 votes in favour and 1,496 against joining India, completing the map-making process in the region, which had begun roughly 150 years earlier with the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26. Although the Company Raj appointed William Makepeace Thackeray as its first official in Sylhet in 1772, it didn’t expand beyond Lower Assam because of resource crunch.

A pivotal moment in the region’s history was when, on June 22, 1841, Thomas and Ann Jones arrived in Cherrapunjee. So impactful was his work in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills that 22 June is now a public holiday there and is celebrated as Thomas Jones Day. Jones died in 1849 at age 38 but laid the foundations of education and Christianity in the region. He standardised the Khasi language, and his ignorance of Bengali proved to be a blessing in disguise. He employed the Roman script. As Jones wrote, the Khasis believed if they tried to write letters in the Bengali script, they would be struck down with blindness or a deadly disease.

Christian numbers rose to 45 in 1901 from none five years earlier in Mizoram. By 1941, it had 98,108 Christians or 64.2 per cent of the population. The First World War contributed to modernity, with war veterans bringing with them the understanding of the importance of education. During the Second World War, under threat of Japanese invasion, the road from Silchar to Aizawl was finally made motorable in the 1940s. As insurgency peaked in the 1960s, the Bangladesh War of December 1971 ended the bases and safe havens that militant groups had enjoyed until then in East Pakistan but also persuaded New Delhi to concede to the demand for new states in the region.

The sense of alienation from the heartland has a history, starting as early as during the Company Raj when the ill-treatment of local tribals by Company soldiers from the upper castes of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar led to a violent revolt. Representatives of ex-servicemen spoke up in favour of independence for the hills to the Gopinath Bordoloi sub-committee constituted to advise the Constituent Assembly on tribal affairs in the Northeast. “We have been in the army for 15 years mixing with the Indians, and we are looked down upon,” said one ex-serviceman. The author writes that back in the 1980s, when he was growing up in Shillong, a slogan was emblazoned on the outer wall of the state Assembly, the oldest in the Northeast. “Khasi by blood, Indian by accident,” it read. No one removed it for months. He writes that the sense of separateness was stronger in Nagaland, or Manipur, with people casually saying they were going to India when heading to the Hindi heartland.

However, he says, cries for inclusion have replaced declarations of separateness. The people of the Northeast now demand the inclusion of their history in the history of India or point out that Jana Gana Mana does not mention the Northeast. These demands signify that the process that started with the 1826 treaty of Yandabo “is substantially complete, not only administratively but mentally.  In 2015, Tinkle, a children’s magazine, introduced Mapui Kawlim, aka Wingstar, a 13-year-old superhero from Aizawl, its first superhero from the Northeast, a crime fighter who “is burdened with homework, hates Math and enjoys slumber parties”. Like the rest of India, the people of the Northeast demand development, roads, mobile towers, education, jobs and healthcare.