FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

The release of the Draft Vision 2020, prepared under the auspices of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), New Delhi, marks a watershed. For the first time, the Government of India (GoI) spells out a com-prehensive road map for the development of Northeast India. It also marks a paradigm shift as the Introduction to the Draft Document roundly attributes the underdevelopment of the Northeastern region to the “non-intervention” of the corporate bodies. Nor is the Document coy about expressing its faith in the ability of the corporate bodies to deliver development in the region by turning it into a business hub.

The tone and tenor of development projected above is one of a piece with the paradigm encapsulated under the rubric of globalization and the market. The key lies in enticing private capital – whether national corporate bodies or multinational companies or even foreign financial institutions – to invest in the region. Already, the Look East Policy had started flagging off the GoI’s overtures towards the global players to take interest in the region. These approaches in tandem marks not only the withdrawal of the state from its “assumed” welfare role, and is also an intimation of GoI’s earnest to serve as protectors of the global players vis-à-vis the people over any persisting differences as to how the resources of the region are to be extracted, developed and used. Development discourse has, however, been priorly pushed in the region in simultaneity with India’s security/counter-insurgency strategies.

Given the emerging state of affairs, Eastern Quarterly (EQ) is devoting the current issue to development. Titled “DEVELOPMENT: POLITICS AND PROSPECTS” this issue aims to demystify development by raising some core and basic questions. Already fears have been expressed that the development envisaged for the northeastern region under Vision 2020 is one associated with a Highway Economy with the people in the region relegated to the role of hewers of wood and drawers of water.

If the above fear is to be disproved, then Vision 2020 or any other extant blueprint would need to raise as well as answer the following two sets of questions unequivocally: First, whose development is it all about? Who are the real beneficiaries? How prepared are the peoples of the region to take up the development challenges? What are the pros and cons of these programmes? Secondly, is the linearity of development the only answer to human emancipation? Is the idea of progress necessarily material? Is the idea of emancipation only brought about through development? Is the debate today all about “alternative development” or is there a space to an “alternative to development?”

The debate is initiated by B.G. Verghese through his article titled “Building Northeastern Futures, Looking East.” An imminent journalist and policy maker, B.G. Verghese suggests measures to develop the region by emphasising the importance of market and trade. As a member of the Shukla Commission, 1997, Verghese had recommended many of the points elaborated in the current paper. The recommendations were then called “Transforming the Northeast.” Verghese in the current paper still maintains that the region stands to benefit from the said recommendations even though the premise of peace and development he has for the region is one mediated through the “top-down” approach.

Monirul Hussain in his paper, “Resisting the State: Grassroots Movement against the Pagladiya Dam Project” takes a case study and argues that it is not sufficient enough to just identify area-specific development potentials and surge forth with a given project. He investigates the Pagladiya Dam Project in Assam and sees it as the litmus test against the development pundits’ insistence on going ahead with policies without the consent of the people. Hussain contends that in the development discourse there is “the state as the development giver” and the people as the “development taker.” The construction of dam, roads, reservoir and canals is estimated to displace about 1,05,000 people from their land and homes and, as a result, people have been protesting against it. Hussain suggests the possibility of dire consequences of such projects based on the development giver’s paradigm.

Prasenjit Biswas’s “Post-Development, Democratic Discourse and Dissensus: A Critique of Vision 2020,” further deepens the debate by unpacking how the familiar paradigm is non-workable without the conception of development itself. He argues that India’s development discourse demonstrate the primacy of constructing intrinsic relations between the “periphery” and the “lack.” This “lack” of development is backed by the neo-liberals and capitalists to push their agenda of extracting resources from the region under the pretext of providing “fill-ups” for the lack. Biswas critiques the idea of accumulation based on investment as expressed in “market-based economy” in the Vision 2020 as it only reproduces capitalist relations of reproduction. He suggests that the alternative lies in resisting the network of global capital through enhancing the choice of self-representing collectives.

If Biswas contends that the “lack” of development has been a post-development construct, Thingnam Kishan Singh in his “Understanding Underdevelopment: State of Economy in the Northeast” locates the development of “underdevelopment” historically. Beginning with colonial plunder for extracting resources and the introduction of “monetized” economy, the transformation and obliteration of the pre-existing mode of production gave way to “dependency” of the tribes and people of the Northeast to the colonial market system. He points out that development debates of the Northeast in the Indian intellectual discourse exudes a bureaucratic slant and have conspicuously ignored the inextricably intertwined relationship between modes of development and modes of production. Thingnam insists that a fruitful debate should necessarily address generation of productive base in the region apart from just being supplier of primary products in three sectors – oil, timber and tea.

Ramananda Wangkheirakpam in his “The Role of International Finance in North East India: Fuelling a New Colonization” widens the issue of induced dependency by bringing out the structural linkages between global capital and the Indian state. He points out how international finance has been making an attempt to intrude into the region even as there is the talk of development. He argues that India’s neo-liberal push since the 1990s has seen little penetra-tion of liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG) in the Northeast. However, beginning around 2000, there has been meticulous planning and strategizing by international financial institutions, in particular the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank (WB), in facilitating LPG in the region. Wangkheirakpam profiles the entry of ADB and WB to argue that these International Financial Institutions are laying the foundation for a new phase of colonization.

The foundation of colonization is based on numerous historical encounters and experiences. Rohan D’Souza’s “Making Backwardness: How to Imagine the Northeast as a Development Deficit” traces how “development” came to be associated with “desires” of moving ahead, “abandoning the past, erasing cultures that stood still, recovering history solely for an instrumental future and assembling limitless frontiers for human want.” These desires for change and development often accompanied by violence followed from how power treated historical difference. Hence, there is a need to understand the conceptual challenges posed by the “development” dynamics in India’s northeast. D’Souza asserts that failure to do the same has produced several contradictions in the manner in which development policies and projects for the Northeast have been enunciated in recent years. He cites the much-critiqued Vision 2020 as a glaring example of such conceptual poverty.

In the first article of the KALEIDOSCOPE section, N. Vijaylakshmi Brara in her “Gender Identity and Performance: Feminist Discourses in the Northeast” states that there is an urgent need to study feminist discourses of the entire Southeast Asian civilizations to give the world an alternative to the so-called mainstream feminist paradigm mainly based on Western values and systems. There is urgency to this endeavour because of the growing trend towards globaliza-tion and its impact on the region. She takes the case of the women empowering contents of indigenous ritual practices and mundane world to argue her case to bring out the nature of “women” power as positioned by the social and the political milieu.

In the second article, Lianboi Vaiphei’s “Addressing Multiculturalism for Ethnic Equations in Manipur” takes social fact of Canada as a reference point and looks into the social reality in Manipur. She goes on to postulate the underlying plural cultures as the thread that can lead to a common consensus over the issue of sharing of power and resources among the different ethnic communities. The imperative of such proposal is governed by the existing contestations over the issue of power and space.

In TAKE TWO, Gurpreet Mahajan in her “Land, Community and Self-Governance: Emerging Normative Issues” makes an insightful review of the last issue of Eastern Quarterly, “LAND AND TERRITORIALITY” (Vol.4, Issue II). She says that while dealing with issues of land and territory the challenges are many, and “they become more intractable as different kinds of elites compete for power.” Examining “how did it all begin,” or attempting to explain why it happened in terms of how it happened, helps to historicize self-representations. It enables individuals to recognize that what is presented as a “fact,” or a “pre-given truth,” is malleable and open to reconstruction. This is an important precondition for political and social struggle and intervention. But it does not help us to charter the path for the future. Mahajan puts a cautionary note that “imagined future” based on claims of rights and entitlements must be sensitive to the concerns of the “self” and the “other.”

While inviting our readers once again to engage with questions raised above, we would like to remind that the current EQ is a combination of two issues, viz. Vol. 4, Issue III, October 2007–December 2007, and Vol. 4, Issue IV, January 2008 – March 2008.