INITIATED
in the early days of the post cold war era, India's Look East policy has
begun showing results. India is now one of four summit level partners
– along with China, Japan and Korea – of the Association of South East
Asian Nations (ASEAN). Trade between India and ASEAN countries is expanding
significantly. India has signed free trade area (FTA) agreements with
Thailand and Singapore; there are plans to create a free-trade area with
Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia by 2011 and with the remaining ASEAN countries
– the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam – by 2016. There
are a number of structures of sub-regional cooperation in place including
the Mekong-Ganga Cooperation (MGC) and BIMST-EC (Bangladesh, India, Myanmar,
Sri Lanka, and Thailand – Economic Cooperation). Outside of ASEAN, bilateral
trade between India and China has improved significantly and Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh's proposal for an Asian economic community – to include
ASEAN, China, Japan, Korea and India – generated significant excitement
at last year's third ASEAN-India summit.
There has been much talk about the potential of the Look East policy
transforming India's Northeastern region that borders ASEAN. In this foreign
policy vision Northeast India is often described as the gateway to Southeast
Asia. The ASEAN-India car rally in 2004 was flagged off in Guwahati. According
to Rajiv Sikri, Secretary East of the Ministry of External Affairs, the
Look East policy ‘envisages the Northeast region not as the periphery
of India, but as the centre of a thriving and integrated economic space
linking two dynamic regions with a network of highways, railways, pipelines,
transmission lines crisscrossing the region.' He expressed the hope that
one day it would be possible to drive from Kolkata via Dhaka, or from
Guwahati to Yangon and Bangkok in three or four days and trains and buses
would carry ‘millions of tourists, pilgrims, workers and businessmen in
both directions.' Sikri spoke at a Forum organized by the Guwahati-based
Centre for Northeast India, South and Southeast Asia Studies [CENISEAS].
The theme of this issue of Seminar grew out of that Forum and
a number of the essays are revised versions of papers presented there.
1
The opportunities that economic integration with its transnational neighbours
could open up for Northeast India are enormous. The region's difficulties
as a result of the loss of connectivity and market access following the
partition of 1947 are well known. But there is also an older story of
colonial geopolitics that cut the region off from its neighbourhood across
the eastern and northern borders. 19th
century British colonial decisions to draw lines between the hills and
the plains, to put barriers on trade between Bhutan and Assam, and to
treat Burma as a buffer against French Indochina and China severed the
region from its traditional trade routes – the southern trails of the
Silk Road. While colonial rulers built railways and roads mostly to take
tea, coal, oil and other resources out of Assam, the disruption of old
trade routes remained colonialism's most enduring negative legacy. After
a century and half the opportunity has now arisen to undo the effects
of colonial geopolitics. However, there are serious hurdles to the Look
East policy developing its Northeast Indian thrust. Indeed there is a
growing sense in Northeast India that there may be more rhetoric than
substance to the talk of the region becoming India's gateway to Southeast
Asia.
This symposium on Northeast India and the Look East policy begins with
Jairam Ramesh's essay reviewing Indian policy towards the Northeast. Despite
good intentions and a variety of approaches, the region, he points out
is always in crisis. For every ten citizens there is roughly one armed
personnel – not exactly how things should be in a democracy. He argues
against the current conventional wisdom that spending more money on development
will get the region out of its current predicament and concludes by outlining
a bold vision for the region's future: political integration with India
and economic integration with Southeast Asia.
Sushil Khanna's essay outlines a vision of Northeast India supplying
hydroelectric power to its cross-border neighbours, pipelines moving gas
and petroleum products across the transnational region and a water transport
network – with lower transportation costs – making Northeast India an
attractive investment destination. Picking up the last theme from another
angle, Sanjoy Hazarika writes that since the main road and rail corridor
of the region is under water or is affected by water for long periods
every year, without substantial investments in water transportation the
Look East policy will ‘run into the sandbanks of the Brahmaputra.' M.P.
Bezbaruah spells out the potential in the area of tourism. India's tourism
industry has traditionally focused primarily on western tourists and Northeast
India is far away from the places from where most western tourists enter
India. However, the changing geography of tourism since 9/11 has brought
home the importance of regional and domestic tourism. By 2020 the Asia
Pacific region is projected to become the second largest tourist generating
market in the world. To open up to that market could be very rewarding
for Northeast India.
While economics dominate discussions of what the Look East policy could
do for the region there are potential non-economic dividends as well.
Transnational ties could speak to Northeast India's current political
troubles. The politics of recognition 2
is a recurrent theme in the movements of ethnic assertion and in the insurgencies
of Northeast India. The European Union has facilitated the pursuit of
recognition at the international sphere by dissenting regions – e.g. the
Basque country, Catalonia or the Tyrol. One can imagine new transnational
structures some day allowing regions like Assam, Manipur and Nagalim to
reclaim their identities through the pursuit of European Union style paradiplomacy
by non-state regions. 3 Plans to develop
Northeast India's tourist industry could include building community cultural
centres and museums to showcase and celebrate the cultures of the region's
many ethnic communities. This could attract tourists while at the same
time respond to the urge for recognition. However, such projects would
require substantial investment of economic, political and intellectual
capital. Both Khanna and Bezbaruah emphasize the need for investments
to build infrastructure – including highways, rail links, bridges and
trading facilities. Tourism, as Bezbaruah points out, ‘cannot be developed
in a vacuum. It requires social and economic infrastructure.'
The prism of security through which Indian policy-makers view the Northeast
is likely to remain a major factor inhibiting serious investment of resources
– intellectual, political and material – to make the region India's gateway
to Southeast Asia. The porous borders that allow insurgent groups to procure
arms and the inclination of some of India's enemies to fish in these troubled
waters, understandably, make the security establishment quite nervous.
Despite India's growing official ties with Myanmar, the country's uncertain
political future will remain a hurdle in pursuing policies with a longer
time horizon.
Dolly Kikon's account of the hornbill festival in Nagaland illustrates
the tension between security anxieties and tourism. ‘As advertised,' she
reports on the festival held last year, ‘the colours and tastes were truly
unlike anything one would see in festivals in South Asia. Where else would
pork, beef and assorted Naga delicacies be so grandly offered to people
in the largely vegetarian Hindu heartland of mainland India?' But she
adds sardonically, ‘where else would the army play such a big role in
organising and participating in an event meant to showcase culture?' Throughout
the festival, according to Kikon, armed security personnel were stationed
at strategic points not too far from the site of the festival and locals
complained of abuse by soldiers. In terms of the content of the festival,
a flawed military orientation, she says, led to a depiction of the ‘Orient
at our doorstep' that she considers pejorative.
Ethnic festivals held under the watchful eyes of gun-toting soldiers
are unlikely to become big tourist draws. The number of tourists visiting
the region after negotiating obstacles such as rules requiring Restrictive
Area Permits and Inner Line Permits remains very small. Few foreign scholars
are given research visas to study Northeast India. The resultant isolation
of Northeast Indian scholarship from global intellectual currents is a
little known but significant cost of official India's security obsession.
Giving substance to the Northeast Indian thrust of our Look East policy
would require settling the region's numerous conflicts through a comprehensive
approach that goes beyond the unstable peace that policies shaped by today's
counter-insurgency mindset can bring about. It would be necessary to get
out of the security prism and seek a general opening of the region, not
unlike Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost that involved opening doors
and windows in intellectual, cultural, political matters as well as in
the economic arena.
India's security concerns, of course, have a basis in ground reality.
So long as insurgency remains a part of the region's political landscape
and India's relations with some of its neighbours remain adversarial or
rancorous, counter-insurgency operations and security-driven restrictions
are likely to continue. Yet reconciling the demands of a globalizing economy
that relies on greater opening with security concerns is a policy dilemma
that many governments face today. ‘There is a potential train wreck in
the making,' says Stephen E. Flynn with reference to the US. ‘Moving in
one direction are those who would like to see national borders become
as seamless as possible, while coming from the opposite direction are
those charged with homeland security who would like to stop would-be terrorists,
contraband, criminals, and illegal migrants at border crossings.' 4
But no matter how compelling the homeland security imperative, says Flynn,
it cannot be allowed to derail North America's ‘continental engine of
free trade and travel.' Since US power and prosperity depend on ready
access to global transportation, energy, information, finance, and labour
networks, security measures that isolate the US from those networks would
be self-defeating. 5 But unlike the US,
in the case of Northeast India there are no powerful economic stakeholders
pushing for greater openness against those who look at borders through
an old-fashioned security obsessed mindset.
If Northeast India is to live up to the promise of becoming India's gateway
to Southeast Asia we must imagine a world where border-crossings are not
thought of primarily as sites for security checks. ‘Terrorists and the
tools of terrorism do not spring up at the border,' writes Flynn, they
arrive through international trade and travel networks. Border crossings
are ‘nodes in an international network that moves people and cargo' and
controls at the border can be no more than a part of a broader effort
at ensuring transportation and cargo security. In that sense security
is tied to better border management, better governance inside the country
as well as in the countries of the transnational neighbourhood, deepening
relations with our neighbours and developing multilateral institutions
of governance.
On the diplomatic front, while China no longer backs Northeastern rebels,
writes Subir Bhaumik, many of them buy weapons in the black markets of
Southeast Asia. Cheap weapons from China are either transported through
the land route through Myanmar or they are brought by sea through the
Bay of Bengal. India, according to Bhaumik, would have to engage China
on the issue of small arms proliferation. Until the Chinese are willing
to forego profits from weapons in the interest of peace and stability
in the region, India has to turn to the military rulers of Myanmar to
stop the thriving Yunnan-Upper Myanmar-Northeast India weapons route.
Bilateral relations between India and Myanmar will determine India's
ability to keep out drugs as well. Indeed, such ‘realist' considerations
– including the goal of limiting China's influence in Myanmar – have pushed
the Indian policy of ‘wooing the generals', to use the words of Renaud
Egreteau. 6 Egreteau is critical of this
policy. While it might pay in the short-term, in the long-term it will
be to India's interest to have a democratic neighbour. Whatever the argument
for or against realism in foreign policy, it is clear that so long as
the situation in Myanmar remains fluid, and the sanctions of the US and
the EU on Myanmar continue, the level of Indian interaction with Myanmar
cannot acquire the depth necessary to turn the Northeast into India's
gateway to Southeast Asia.
India's relations with China are also an important piece of the puzzle.
Massive investments in infrastructure to revive the southern Silk Road
was at the core of the vision that inspired the Kunming initiative of
1999 that created the Track Two body called the BCIM Forum that includes
Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar. While relations between India and
China have shown signs of improvement, many in India are skeptical of
Chinese plans to build roads and ports in Myanmar that will give China
a strong presence all along our eastern border. It is unlikely, therefore,
that the BCIM Forum's vision of cooperation on infrastructure building
by Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar would come to fruition any time
soon. On the other hand, India is actively engaged in road diplomacy with
Myanmar – there is a trilateral highway project involving India, Myanmar
and Thailand and a proposal for building railway links. It seems that
in the foreseeable future China and India will go on their separate ways
vis-à-vis Myanmar.
So far though we have taken a state-centric perspective on borders –
as if states can open or close them at will and practice inclusion and
exclusion distinguishing between citizens and non-citizens. But this understanding
of borders is empirically problematic. At the Ceniseas Forum, M.S. Prabhakara,
a former journalist, who has extensively covered the region, observed
that cross-border contacts are ‘a feature of daily experience, indeed
a necessary condition of the people's existence on both sides of the border.'
Outside the world of formal trade, he said, there are routine exchanges
of goods and services of many kinds. Apart from the thriving border towns
such traffic goes on even in the ‘obscure, almost invisible little settlements
that dot the border.' 7
Indeed, informal transnational processes today escape the surveillance
of most states and, arguably, they subvert the primacy of the nation state.
Many border communities make flexible use of citizenship8
and develop what can be described as post-national forms of belonging.
Karin Dean's essay throws light on the lives of some trans-border communities
on the Indo-Myanmarese border. Jayeeta Sharma describes the consequence
of Assam's integration into British India in 1826 as follows: ‘While Assam
had, through the centuries, served as an intersection between the Indic
and Sinic worlds to its west and east, the colonial annexation brought
the former centrally to the forefront.' While colonial and postcolonial
borders have undoubtedly solidified the Indian connection, these borders
have been far from closed – strictly conforming to the norms of the national
geographic order.
Dean gives the example of a community known as Kachin in Upper Myanmar,
Singpho in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh and Jingpo in Yunnan, China. According
to her the community has ‘creatively adjusted to the dominating international
system of the states' by incorporating into their self-definition references
to the three ‘host' states of China, Myanmar and India. Despite being
citizens of three different states they are ‘united through a tight unique
kinship lineage network of various spatial trajectories and social bonds,
a commonly recognized lingua franca and a variety of tangible
ethnic features.' She emphasizes the absurdity of state-centric geography.
Citing Dutch historian Willem van Schendel, she notes that there are four
settlements in a 50 kilometre radius, that are part of three sovereign
states and four different world regions: Gohaling in Yunnan is part of
‘East Asia', Sakongdan in Myanmar is part of ‘Southeast Asia', Dong in
Arunachal is part of ‘South Asia' and Zayü in Tibet part of ‘Central
Asia'.
According to Yasmin Saikia, the identity movement of the Tai-Ahoms of
Assam – little known in the rest of the country – extends ‘the horizons
of history and memories to include the past in the present, South with
Southeast Asia.' The efforts by a Northeast Indian community to seek belonging
among the Tai people reflect the anxieties and hopes of a marginalized
and disempowered people. The movement draws on a discourse about the Tai
people that has significant appeal among intellectuals in Thailand. From
their original home in Nanchao in Southern China, the Tais are believed
to have migrated to Assam, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand. The Tai
ethnic groups of Upper Assam are the western-most Tai people. Saikia,
however, worries that those seeking to be recognized as Tai-Ahoms have
little place in ‘arithmetic of history and commerce' that is part of today's
official diplomacy.
Mrinal Miri takes up the complexity of identity issues in Northeast India
and of the region's identity vis-à-vis the rest of India. The political
engineering response to identity movements – creating small states, extending
the Sixth Schedule etc. – has not produced a stable political order in
Northeast India. The difficulties faced by the Naga peace process today
in responding to the demand for Nagalim underscore this failure. Approaching
the question of identities from the perspective of language, Miri points
out that while a language is in a certain sense, complete in itself, its
boundaries often merge into the boundaries of other languages. There are
conversations that take place between them and such conversations make
a great deal of difference to each other. He rejects ‘mainstream' and
‘marginality' as useful metaphors to make sense of cultural India.
Northeast India's ethnic question, argues Samir Das, requires independent
attention in our Look East policy. For ‘who initiates' policies can become
more important than ‘what is being initiated'. Projects might be more
acceptable if they are initiated locally than externally. But to date
there is almost no role for the states of Northeast India in the Look
East policy – except as a site for events such as the ASEAN-India car
rally. This, for instance, is in sharp contrast with the role that the
province of Yunnan plays in the Chinese pursuit of closer relationship
with its neighbours in South and Southeast Asia. It was in Yunnan's capital
Kunming where experts, scholars and business people from China, India,
Myanmar and Bangladesh got together to initiate the BCIM Forum. Yunnan's
provincial government plays a far more active role in attracting foreign
investments to the province than Northeast Indian states. It plays a role
in institutions of the Greater Mekong sub-region. But there is little
room for India's Northeastern states in the Mekong Ganga Cooperation forum
or in BIMST-EC (Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand Economic
Cooperation). The difference is quite ironic given that China's political
system is centralized and authoritarian while ours is democratic and federal.
Mainland India's ties with Southeast Asia have historically been primarily
maritime and not continental. As it has been in the past, even today it
is both cheaper and easier to trade with Southeast Asia by sea rather
than by land. Under present circumstances, it may be a while before the
political, intellectual and material resources necessary to make the Northeast
India's actual gateway to Southeast Asia can be mobilized. But circumventing
Northeast India and down-playing the continental dimension of the Look
East policy will not only bring deep disappointment to Northeast India,
it will have serious costs in terms of India's diplomatic ambitions as
well.
SANJIB BARUAH
1. The theme of the Ceniseas
Forum was ‘Towards a New Asia: Transnationalism and Northeast India.'
Sikri's lecture at the Forum ‘Northeast India and India's Look East Policy'
is available at http://www.ceniseas.org/newasia/sikrilecture.doc. For
the full proceedings of the Forum see the Forum's microsite http://www.ceniseas.org/newasia/guwahati.html.
Only a few of the papers presented at the Forum are included in this issue.
I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Sukanya Sharma, Ceniseas
Fellow, in putting together this issue of Seminar . Unless explicitly
indicated and another source is cited, the authors and writings discussed
in this essay refer to essays included in this issue. Charles Taylor,
‘The Politics of Recognition', in Amy Gutman (ed.), Multiculturalism:
Examining the Politics of Recognition . Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ, 1994.
3. Paradiplomacy refers to international
activities on the part of regions and stateless nations. There are more
than 200 regional ‘embassies' in Brussels that lobby the European Commission
and network with each other.
4. Stephen E. Flynn, ‘The Role
of Border Technology in Advancing Homeland Security', written testimony
before a joint hearing of the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology,
Terrorism, and Government Information and the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee
on Border Security, Citizenship, and Immigration, 12 March 2003. http://www.cfr.org/pub5708/stephen_e_flynn/the_role_of_border_technology_in_advancing_homeland_
security.php
5. Ibid.
6. Renaud Egreteau, Wooing
the Generals: India's New Burma Policy , Authors Press, New Delhi,
2003.
7. M.S. Prabhakara, ‘Is Northeast
India Landlocked?' Economic and Political Weekly , 16 October
2004.
8. See Aiwa Ong, Flexible
Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality , Duke University
Press, Durham, N.C., 1999.
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