Making Backwardness: How to Imagine the Northeast as a Development Deficit⁽¹⁾
By ROHAN D’SOUZA

“Development” has fallen from grace. The virtuous path of “progress” through “economic growth,” it now turns out, was not a certain road. And modernity’s many promises return, often as hollow echoes. The remaining development conquistadors, meanwhile, are barely able to cling on to their unrepentant faith in national income accounting, micro-economic calculation, consumerism, entrepreneurship, innovation, industrialization and infrastructural gigantism. To the discerning, however, the notion of development never witnessed an honest day in the sun. Despite its deployment in the immediate aftermath of the second World War as presumed technical and economic intervention, development was deeply contaminated by the epistemological baggage of colonialism, the violence of early European expansion and the blood spilled by centuries of capitalism’s ruthless march⁽²⁾.

At heart, the practice of development, in step with its troubled legacy, always pressed for the relentless transformation of societies, communities, tribes, peoples and nations. And much like earlier European quests, missions and campaigns to “civilize,” “improve,” “enlighten” or “reform,” western led development has sought to eliminate “under-development⁽³⁾.” Thus, the development conquistadors soon fell upon nations and continents with policies, programmes, institutional arrangements, regulations, markets, technologies and experts to administer change – always in the name of progress, economic growth, efficiency, productivity, to eradicate poverty, to create wealth: in a word, to “develop” people and places.

Development in such moods meant moving forward, abandoning the past, erasing cultures that stood still, recovering history solely for an instrumental future and assembling limitless frontiers for human want⁽⁴⁾. These desires for change – stirring whole societies from the slumber of tradition and to profoundly alter time itself – were invariably inflicted, much like earlier efforts, as trauma, violence, pain, shock, genocide or total annihilation. Initiated, at the first instance, inevitably, always, by the consequences that follow from how power treats historical difference.

CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES OF HISTORICAL DIFFERENCE

As is well known, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), in 1492, riding the wave of the European Renaissance and in search for gold and the silks and spices of Asia, stumbled onto the Arawak people of the Bahama Islands. Columbus dutifully records in his logbook this point of momentous impact:

They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well built, with good bodies and handsome features.… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want⁽⁵⁾.

Since Columbus’ search for wealth was overwhelming, his mental universe clearly interprets for that insatiable pursuit. The kindness and innocence of the Arawak, hence, appear to him as acts of weakness and their subjugation and domination is made but inevitable; as iron swords can easily destroy cane spears. Here, Columbus not only translates kindness and innocence as expressions of mere docility but has also simultaneously declares a use for the Arawak – as “fine servants.” Such is how difference is sought to be assimilated into likeness. The Arawak cannot exist as they are or on their own terms. The Arawak become meaningful and valued only when Columbus can “make them do whatever we want.” However for our concerns it is important to reiterate that to further understand Columbus and his actions is also to move to a second level of consequences, involving the relationships between knowledge and power.

Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliantly argued The Conquest of America throws great illumination on this knowledge/power relation. He traces for us practices for the comprehension of the “other” by Spanish conquistadores from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, as they set out to discover and conquer the New World. For Hernan Cortes (1485–1547), conquistador and destroyer of the Aztec empire, understanding the Aztec culture and people, as Todorov points out, was not lacking in either admiration or empathy. However, even as Cortes admires Aztec craftsmanship and art, he still remains somehow alien to them. For Todorov, Cortes even though he speaks well off the Aztec, he does not speak to them. That is, despite Cortes’ compelling interest in Aztec civilization, he treats the latter as an estranged object; one lacking subjectivity or a voice. The Aztec can be interpreted or spoken about, but is not allowed to speak for himself. Of this estranged framing of the other, Tordorov writes:

Now, it is only by speaking to the other (not giving orders but engaging in a dialogue) that I can acknowledge him as subject, comparable to what I am myself…unless grasping is accompanied by a full acknowledgement of the other as subject, it risks being used for purposes of exploitation, of “taking;” knowledge will be subordinated to power⁽⁶.

The near total annihilation of the Aztecs soon followed, as was also the case for the Incas with Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541) leading the charge. By the final decades of the 16th century, the Spanish conquests with sword and bible led to the substantial decimation and enslavement of a vast number of the indigenous communities of the Americas. One only needs to read the heart rending accounts by Bartolome De Las Casas (1474 or 1484?–1566) to get a sense of how immense the scale of monstrosities, plunder, loot and barbarities were perpetrated by the Spanish conquistadores⁽⁷⁾.

It would, however, be inadequate to describe this incredible westward thrust of the Europeans (between 1492 and well into the final decades of the 19th century) as being singularly inspired by their search for gold or because of the clash with cultural otherness. More precisely, the Spanish conquests, in all its bloody savagery, proved to be only the opening lines for the subsequent longer chapter on capitalism’s global ascendance: notably, the rise of modern colonialism, propelled by the rapacity of the Portuguese, the Dutch, French and the English⁽⁸⁾. As the earlier European quest for gold, mining and slaves gave way to the desire instead for profits in landed property, plantations, commercial cropping and industrial production, the western civilizing mission was now pursued as enlightenment, improvement and reform.

For our purposes, however, the tumult brought about by this phase of capitalism is best conveyed, not in terms of the of blood and guts story of British or French or Portuguese colonialism but rather by the brutal frontier expansion that was carried out in the United States of America: the unrelenting westward march by European settlers from their modest numbers along the eastern Atlantic seaboard until their occupation of the Pacific shores, over a period of almost two hundred years. This incredible colonization of the North American continent left in its wake the defeat, immiserization, extermination and genocide of a vast number of native Indian populations.

In 1620, with the landing of the English settlers at Plymouth (current day Massachusetts) a wholly unprecedented economic and social logic was injected into the Americas. While the Indian tribes were essentially characterized by shifting cultivation, foraging and hunting, the English pilgrims defined themselves by private property, strong notions of ownership and single household based production units. In time, an unbridgeable gap opened between the native Americans intending to live on the land for subsistence in contrast to the English colonizer, who sought to reorder the environment to meet a near endless demand for commodities⁽⁹⁾. In the subsequent conflagration, the gentle tribes of the Pemaquid and the Wampanoags were completely routed from the region, as were many others such as the Potomacs, Nanticokes, Machapungas, Catawbas and so on. Thus, began the sordid conquest of the west.

The English settlers soon streamed inland across the Allegenies mountain ranges, then onto the areas around the Mississippi river and then upwards to the Missouri river’s flood plains. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, several grand tribal formations with lyrical names such as the Iroquois, Ottawas, Shawnees, Miamis, Winnebagos and so on had been either eliminated or forced to move further to the west of the Mississippi river. In 1829, with Andrew Jackson (called Sharp Knife by the native Americans) as President of the United States strategies for the destruction of the native Americans took on a fatal vigour. Hundreds of thousands such as the Cherokees, Chickaswas, Choctaw, Creeks and Seminoles, to name a few, were simply decimated⁽¹⁰⁾. Much of this was accomplished by the ascendant American nation, in the course of the nineteenth century, through a series of treaties, broken promises, resettlement programmes (forcing native Americans into concentration camps called Reservations) and outright war. The “Indian wars” in concert with the idea of the presumed limitless “frontier,”⁽¹¹⁾ in fact, ironically enough, became crucial to shaping the American imagination on democracy and economic growth.

The point, however, for us to underline, is not the great massacres and debilitation of the native Americans but to emphasize, instead, the nature of the implacable antagonisms that drove the white Europeans into permanent conflict against the indigenous peoples of the American continent. That is, the English settler’s commitment to capital accumulation, economic growth, private property, commodity production and the market imperative was incapable of coexisting with the native American’s diverse social and ecological arrangements. Put differently, American capitalism – its insatiable hunger for lands and resources – could unravel only as a force that was premised on the annihilation of subsistence agriculture, subsistence hunting and gathering and shifting cultivation. The great American frontier expansion, thus, meant the assured death of any other type of social ecological world and any other way of living with nature.

READING THE VISION: OF PEACE, PROGRESS AND PROSPERITY

The intention of the above (albeit long winded) discussion is to provide context to the recent draft document titled Peace, Progress and Prosperity in the North Eastern Region: Vision 2020 (henceforth NER) brought out under the aegis of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (New Delhi). The NER, I will argue, not only reiterates the long abandoned idea of development as being an apolitical and ahistorical project but also carries out a disingenuous exercise for imagining the Northeast region in India as a particular type of development deficit. That is, the authors of the NER, unwittingly or otherwise, can be faulted on three significant counts. First, they do not credibly reflect on the challenge of historical difference. That is, how does one engage with social and cultural heterogeneity. Second, by constituting the Northeast as principally being an underdeveloped region they advocate for the latter’s global economic assimilation through market interventions and lastly remain committed to strategies for dispossession, enclosure and displacement.

At the outset in the NER (Summary), it is stated that the “beautiful lands” of the Northeast are peopled by over 200 tribes, marked by diversity in culture, customs, traditions and languages. This vast and immense rainbow of social diversity, however, is then pronounced as being “one of the most backward regions of the country.” The distinction of social diversity is thereby seamlessly translated into a singular all encompassing notion of economic backwardness. The diverse people of the Northeast, at the economic plane, hence, have lost their difference through the commonly shared affliction of underdevelopment. In tangible terms, the list of backwardness is enumerated as “poor infrastructure,” “weak governance,” “flood devastation,” “river bank erosion,” “insurgency” and relative “isolation or seclusion.” Historical difference is, thus, obscured with an over emphasis on governance failures, violence brought on by psychological distress and the fluvial wounds inflicted by nature. The Northeast region plagued by this “backwardness,” for the NER, can thereby be conceptualized and represented as a homogeneous landscape that is principally characterized as a development deficit. In a sense, the authors of the NER merely acknowledge social and cultural heterogeneity without attempting to grapple with the implications of engaging with such diversity. The 200 odd tribes, despite their kaleidoscopic social and cultural otherness, are interpreted as aspiring for the same things, possess similar ambitions and can be marched to the embrace of a singular national destiny. Much like Columbus’ assessments on the Arawak, the Northeast comprising unique and distinct social formations possessing a plurality in meanings and desires appears to be lost in the crude economism of translation.

Having thus flattened the social and cultural bodies of the Northeast, the authors of the NER go on to then contrive a plausible explanation for this fall into backwardness. The claim here is that the region suddenly slumped into isolation and seclusion following the “trauma of partition of the country [India] in 1947;” that not only caused the Northeast to slide into backwardness for “at least a quarter of a century” but that the event also “placed hurdles” in the path of otherwise inevitable economic growth. This trauma, according to the NER, by closing land and sea routes knocked off the region’s access to “traditional markets” to the East and South East Asia⁽¹²⁾. Hence, for the NER, the Northeast appears visible essentially as a region that was premised on trade, commerce and economic exchange and traumatically slipped into backwardness when denied the opportunity to be itself. Thus, unclogging markets becomes the key to the region’s prosperity. Towards this, the NER advocates an encompassing strategy involving:
(i) Participatory development through grass roots planning to focus on the development of sectors and sub-sectors with comparative advantage.
(ii) Augmenting the capacity of people to contribute economically.
(iii) Augmenting infrastructure by building roads and other structures for connectivity, which will ensure the two-way movement of people and goods.
(iv) Resources for public investments and in areas that can help harness the resources of the region for the peoples welfare.
(v) Transforming governance for providing a secure responsive market-friendly environment.
Clearly, such a set of suggestions acquires consistency in how the problems and solutions are matched. If the Northeast is imagined as being primarily a region lacking investments, commerce, trade and vibrant markets then interventions, must perforce, be concentrated upon assembling economies for profit seeking exchange and all developments must lead to a higher velocity in the movement of goods and services. Thus, what is framed as the problem of the Northeast acquires simultaneously the logical power to determine solutions. That is, the absence of markets, declared to be indicative of backwardness, leads almost automatically to the desire for markets for development.

While one could question whether the “trauma of partition” was the single most decisive event shaping the Northeast for close to half a century (as places such as Bihar or Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh can also be considered to be backward, despite not being hived off from markets and trade) our emphasis here will be to signal an entirely different dilemma. That is, does the NER exercise end up speaking to the Northeast and its people as objects of analysis rather than as subjects? To recollect, for Hernan Cortez, as Todorov points out, the Aztec was spoken about, but was not allowed to speak for himself. Could it be that the expertise of the NER was deployed in such an “objective” manner; as means for speaking about the Northeast and its social and cultural diversity without the latter’s subjective voice speaking for themselves? Would a diverse array of tribes, clans, forest communities, shifting cultivators, foragers and subsistence cultivators rooted in an equally diverse historical and ecological sensibility define their central problem as one aimed at overcoming the “trauma of partition?”

If, as authors of the NER contend, that the Northeast suffers from weak governance, corrupt administrations, the violence of insurgency and a deep sense of alienation, then how do the people represent themselves and their interest? Could number crunching expertise inserted into the ideology of the market tap into and explain this suppressed and troubled voice? One notes the confidence in the NER with which the people of the Northeast are spoken about:
(i) The vision of the people is not merely confined to improving income levels. They would like to banish poverty from the region by 2020.
(ii) An important component of the peoples Vision 2020 is to achieve a high level of human development.
(iii) The vision of prosperity for the people requires participatory development by harnessing the resources of the region.
(iv) The people of the region envision having state-of-the-art infrastructure not only to enhance the quality of life but also to dictate the pace of economic activity, and the nature and quality of economic growth and ensure peace in the region.
(v) The people would like the region to be economically and socially integrated so that it becomes an important hub of trade and commerce and economic bridge to east and Southeast Asia. (see pp. 5–6)

The NER, in an interesting way, appears to be able to not only speak for the people but, more importantly, the people seem to also desire precisely what the NER want⁽¹³⁾. That is, the people have spoken through the NER and have concluded that peace can follow only from economic growth and market integration with the Indian mainland and East and Southeast Asia will ensure development.

As Cortez only spoke about the Aztec’s and did not have to listen to them, he could always act on their behalf and for them. The consequences of a people lacking subjectivity are only too well known to bear repetition here.

The expansion and integration of regions under capitalism’s market imperative has not been a painless march. As indicated earlier, the American frontier expansion was premised on the brutal outcomes of the “Indian wars.” And, as pointed out earlier, the decimation and marginalization of the native American tribes was, in great measure, brought about by the European settler’s pursuit of capital accumulation, private property, economic growth etc. The market imperative of capitalism, in effect, could neither cohabit nor coexist with any other social, cultural and ecological world. Does the NER see the expansion and the integration of the market in the Northeast as lacking these features of dispossession, displacement and enclosure?

Some hint of such consequences that follow the embrace of the market imperative, are, in fact, evidently visible in the NER draft document. The authors, for example, note:
The people would like to see the large river systems converted into sources of wealth, and the mineral wealth generates opportunities to increase employment and incomes. They would like to harness the vast hydroelectric energy potential and use the comparative advantage to expand economic activities in the region. (NER, p. 6)

For the NER, therefore, the people would like to see the rivers in the Northeast straddled by large dams⁽¹⁴⁾. The implicit assumption is that the rivers, as free flowing entities, are not in any use either by traditional fisher communities, marginal cultivators or through a myriad number of economic and cultural practices by a host of groups, usually living alongside its banks. An undammed river, in effect, when seen through the gaze of the civil engineer, a policy wonk in Delhi, a secretary rank government administrator, a calculating contractor or the middle class desirous of electricity, appears as a blank wasteful discharge of water. It is now well established that large dam induced project displacement is riddled with injustice, violence and the heart wrenching forced separation of communities from their histories and sense of identity. In the same vein, mining (referred to as mineral wealth by the NER) in India has followed a similar path of rough and violent extraction; displacement, dehumanizing labour conditions, environmental stress, elimination of wild life, destruction of watersheds and the irretrievable loss of complex ecological connections⁽¹⁵⁾.

Besides mining and large dams, the NER further advocates for a network of roads (presumably to open the landscape to the market) and advances a strange opinion on forest cover. To quote the authors:

The forest cover in the region constitutes 52 per cent of its geographical area. This limits the availability of arable land and enhances the costs of delivering public services. (p. 1)

That is, the NER implies that the forest has no use or value as it currently stands. It should therefore be treated only as an obstacle either to agriculture or as hindrance to transport. Once again, deleted from the gaze of the powerful experts is a whole host of possible economic, cultural and ecological associations that the people of the region have invested into and around their forests. And even where the NER prefers to sustain ecological diversity for its own sake, it suggests an astounding focus, which should be:

high-value tourism which will require close collaboration with the private sector hospitality industry, building high-quality infrastructure and adequate promotion. Annual music and dance carnivals in different parts…Hill tourism, skiing, river-rafting and adventure tourism. (NER, p. 9)

Thus, the complex cultural cosmologies or historical associations between nature and community are all collapsed into signs for money and entertainment. Dollar or rupee rich tourists presumably will recover their over worked and adrenaline pumped bodies in the soothing environs of a hospitable people, who can sing and dance and share their paid-for-cultures on stage. While our emphasis in this paper prevents us from a more detailed critique of modern tourism and the ravages it has wrought in many culturally and ecologically sensitive places, it, nevertheless, can be stated that the authors of the NER have clearly not made even a modest attempt to comprehend the meanings and political implications of engaging with cultural diversity in the Northeast.

If anything, therefore, for the NER, the Northeast constantly presents itself not as a landscape of social, cultural and ecological diversity but as an empty space upon which the imperatives of the market can inscribe its intensions for profit-seeking through displacement, dispossession and enclosure. Not unsurprisingly, hence, in the name of the people and for peace, progress and prosperity and as a vision for 2020, the NER seems to suggest that the Northeast should be colonized through extractive industries, unequal exchange and resource capture.