Decentralize Planning, Support Innovation
By SANJOY HAZARIKA

The Northeast of India has been one of the most globalized parts of the subcontinent for well over a century. It was where the prosperous tea gardens and companies in the Assam and Barak Valleys were set up, connecting to the international markets and London. Steamers and ferries took goods and people from as far as Dhaka and Kolkata to Dibrugarh in Upper Assam and back. That changed dramatically with the new international borders that were drawn by the British in 1947, ending colonialism but creating a sundered subcontinent.

A sense of political, economic and historic alienation has exacerbated the fault lines of geography and ethnicity here and ensured that distances have grown in every sense of the word between the Northeast and the rest of India, within states and between communities in many parts of the region itself, taking various forms including pro-independence movements.

Eastern Quarterly brings out an issue (Vol. 4, Issue I) with focus on the problems of autonomy and those deeper politics behind the same. These succinctly written and elegantly argued pieces by H. Kham Khan Suan, G. Amarjit Sharma, M. Amarjeet Singh and Rajesh Dev strengthen the case of true autonomy in a supposedly democratic, federal setup where ethnic divisions have led to numerous confrontations with real political and economic power being vested in a handful of political figures.

Suan makes the point early on that the frustration about the inability to work the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution by the Khasis, Garos and Jaintias in what is today’s Meghalaya led to the first surge of demands for a separate state to be carved out of Assam. That it did take place a decade later, with minimal bloodshed, is a tribute to the overall constitutional flexibility and political astuteness with which leaders like Assam Chief Minister B.P. Chaliha and Capt. Williamson Sangma apart from Indira Gandhi sought to tackle the issue.

This is a point that, in my view, has not been made strongly enough by the paper writers: the quality of leadership is as important in giving direction to a movement as is the validity and resonance of the cause itself. Small leaders and big ideas/issues make for a poor match and that is again one of the critical problems facing governance in the Northeast today, in virtually every state – unless leaders are capable of dealing with problems with courage, vision and pragmatism, merely tinkering with concerns or replacing one set of players with another is not going to work. It only exacerbates the situation as Suan, Dev and Singh point out separately.

Bardoloi, Chaliha, Capt. Sangma were of a generation and capacity that towers over the present lot of political leaders; they were well served by a range of committed officials such as Rustomji and Kidwai among others who traveled extensively to get a real sense of grassroots realities. And most significantly, they listened to others, even if they did not agree with them. This is one of the missing elements in our current political setup.

In addition, the effort by the Central governing elites to see the issue of autonomy among the tribes, as Suan reflects, as “adjunct” to development and security and which can be taken care of only when these “overriding” concerns are met. This is no longer acceptable in any form or substance.

We wish there was more focus on the problem as defined by Dev, in the context of confrontations between the Autonomous District Councils and traditional governing elites (traditional institutions/chiefs etc.) as going beyond a clash of collective egos to “conflicts between two sets of institutions which derive their legitimacy from two opposing sources.” Indeed, there are problems with all political elites – those in the modern institutions such as ADCs and even the Bodo Territorial Council are seen as self-aggrandizing and incapable of clean and effective governance – the very charges they had laid against the state government, which was also regarded as insensitive and dominated by politicians and officials who were disinterested in governance at the rural levels, even though they may have graduated up the slippery slope through those very portals.

The need to manage the region’s extensive natural resources in a sustained manner, to prevent State or private exploitation of these resources without benefits flowing to those of the land is a major challenge. How can a more nuanced approach to jhum (shifting cultivation) be developed, one that seeks to improve it by giving jhumias access to micro-credit and better technology, for one, instead of trying to obliterate it as the Centre seeks to do (and has failed abysmally for decades). These are among the key issues that play a role in the development of social equality and political power, or the lack of it, in these regions. And the papers have neglected this for the main although Dev talks of the confrontation between the Syiemship of Mylliem and the Khasi Autonomous District Council as one over the control over revenue in resource rich-areas.

While most of the conclusions of the papers are broad and one cannot but agree with most of them, it is my view that there needs to be a crisper approach to recommendatory provisos. These cannot be of a general nature or theorist/theory-centric all the time. There needs to be a assessment of ground realities, a vision of the next 10-20 years (how long will we be around anyway?) and observations that will enable participatory democracy and planning to be the keys in pushing the change we seek.

Barring Suan (and that too briefly), the papers have not sought to make even the barest of suggestions on what should be done to deal with it. How does a system become more inclusive? More democratic? And naturally more open? In the process, it would necessarily have to become better appreciative of “the other” or “the others.”

The problems are well-known and defined; what would be of interest to hear from younger scholars about how they feel problems should be tackled through a structured approach, not through a theoretical recycling of ideas and views which are well-known. There should have been more focused suggestion in terms of policy planning.

Take for instance, the NEC. It was re-designated as a regional planning body in 2001, with an additional member, Sikkim, although strangely the security component in the shape of a Security Advisor to the Chairman (who is now the Minister for the North-east) remains. In 2005, it was expanded to include three members of the rank of Central Ministers of State. Yet in all these years, much of the economic planning at the level of the states has been conducted at the official level with senior bureaucrats and political figures developing annual and short-term plans. The involvement of the public has been minimal
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That is why the Vision 2020 effort initiated by the NEC in 2005 which took shape after a survey by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research which covered 40,000 households in eight states through 120 enumerators and 20 partner organizations – the biggest such survey of its kind in the region – is a critical component of decentralized, people-friendly planning and implementation. But this is being sought to be hijacked by Delhi by inflicting on stakeholders and the people a report developed and defined by a New Delhi institution, a recycling of the insensitivities that have been heaped on our region for decades.