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North-East: A Point of View
By Mrinal Miri
Hon'ble Minister, Dr. Madhab, Mr Hokishe Sema, our Secretary Mr. B B Kumar and distinguished participants who have come from different parts of the country to attend this seminar. Our hope is that this seminar will take a fresh look at the North-East and make a serious contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the problems of the region. What I wish to do is to raise a few questions - questions about us as citizens of this country and about the North-East which, hopefully, will come up for discussion during the course of this seminar. These questions – so it seems to me - are somewhat basic in nature and different from the problems of quantitative assessment that we pay so much attention to in our concerns about 'development'.
Of course, the problems of quantitative assessment are very important; unless we have authentic assessments of this nature, no effective economic or developmental program can be undertaken. It is not at all surprising that the Northeast is not a part of our serious and effective attention. But we generally accept that we must at least talk about the North-East. Why do we talk about the Northeast? One of the reasons is that the North-East, whether you like it or not, is frequently on the front pages of the newspapers which come from Delhi. So North-East is in the news, it is full of trouble and, therefore, we must talk about it. Much of this talk is consolatory in nature. In our mind we say, "We are at least talking about it".
Let us begin with the assumption that the purpose of a seminar like this is seriously to contemplate changes in the present troubled situation. Dr Jayant Madhab has talked about change, the Hon'ble Minister did so too and so did Mr Hokishe Sema. For all of us it seems that the present situation is unacceptable and it is imperative that the situation is changed for the better. But we have worked with this assumption right from the time of the nationalist movement. "Change" has been made a catchword for almost any exercise that involves a claim about the well being of our country. But look at the achievements and actions that have been motivated by this talk of change. The key words are "development", "change for the better", "progress" and "integration". We forget frequently that there is really a tremendous pressure on us conceptually to think of development in a particular way, to think of progress in a particular way. Although we talk about quality of life, even quality of life is quantified.
But what we have forgotten is that there is a qualitative meaning to development and there is a great deal of ramification of this qualitative meaning. Have we ever contemplated the possibility that "development" might mean more maturity, growing towards maturity, towards wisdom, better understanding of our inner life and of our relationship to others? The array of qualitative meanings associated with the concept of development is something, which we have not worried about at all, or have paid mere lip services to. Presumably the reason for this is that unless you have the basic quantitative infrastructure - unless you have food to eat, a home to live in and infrastructure for a proper, civilized, recognizably human life, talk abut the qualitative meaning of development will remain empty. This may be still so; but there is a real danger of losing sight of this aspect of development altogether because of our unreserved attention just to the quantitative.
Already we have paid enormously for our lopsided view of development. Think of the Northeast and of what development has brought in its wake - a near total loss of self-confidence of the people of the North-East - of many communities that live there. This has also meant the denudation of the moral and spiritual resources of the people. To my mind, this has been the result of a combination of our emphasis of the quantitative and, as Dr Jayant Madhab and the Hon'ble Minister also pointed out, a miserably inadequate actualization of this quantitative ideal. As a result, there is a sense of despair, a sense of emptiness and communities have lost their inner core which was the traditional source of their sense of autonomy and creative identity. The identity that we talk about now-a-day is a part of the current political discourse and is completely different from the kind of identity I have just mentioned.
What then are the factors that have contributed to this loss of a sense of mooring or identity? I would first like to mention the idea of nation-hood and state-hood that we have so welcomingly taken from the West. This is a European idea of the 18th and 19th centuries, when "nations" were being formed in Europe. India is not a nation like the German nation or the French nation or the Italian nation. If it is a nation it is a nation of a very different kind from all these. This should have been recognized in its full profundity long time ago; our political arrangements could have been then radically differently conceived. Also think of the idea of the modern State. The state, in our case, seems to be the repository of the kinds of authority. It has economic authority, political authority and also claims moral and spiritual authority. A question I often ask myself is: "Can the State have authority over the traditional spiritual resources of a particular community"? I doubt this very much.
As a result of our acceptance of the European concept of nation-state, the idea of a 'community' itself has been reduced to a mere instrument or means. Our political practice, under the modern political arrangement that we have accepted, has become a totally unrepentant game of power and money, and the talk of ethnic or community identity in this game has nothing to do at all with the deeper sense of identity that I mentioned earlier on. Ethnicity becomes a purely instrumental concept in the game of power and money and has now become an integral part of our political practice.
Next, I wish to say something about our system of education-particularly higher education which is again in centralized system. We have a University Grants Commission at the top, which is responsible for "maintenance of standards" in University education. We have also the National Council of Educational Research and Training, which produces text-books for our children or at least what they consider to be "model" text-books. It seems to me that we have unthinkingly abandoned the old idea of liberal education, which also includes basic education in the human and physical sciences.
The idea of such an education is to make traditions of thought, arguments and wisdom available to the receiver of Education so that it becomes possible for her to bring this traditions to bear upon her own understanding of self, her neighbor, her fellow beings and to organize her life in such a way that it is permeated by maturity and wisdom. But think of our system of higher education. What traditions are made available to you with which you can engage in a creative dialogue and which you can individually use in your understanding of the world around? It seems to me that the incredibly heavy and dense syllabi that are followed in our under-graduate and post-graduate programs are frequently nothing but a cover for the emptiness of real content in our higher education. If, in spite of this, we have done well in some areas, that is another matter.
The traditional practices, even where they survive, have in most cases, lost their original meaning. Many of these practices have now been appropriated by modern-day commerce and business. We know that in most cities of the country, wedding is a business. Even Lodi is business. With privatization and liberal "reforms" this can only increase. One can foresee a radical change in the very idea of human civilization. It seems to me that in the next 50 years or so we shall have a different kind of human organization altogether. I do not know whether it will be recognizably human or not, but, nonetheless, it will be radically different from what has been know as human civilized life.
Given this general scenario, what have we done to the North East? The best that you have done is to have a plan, allocate a sum of money, and give that sum of money. We have established a North Eastern Council which is responsible for coordinated economic development of the North-East as a whole and, of course, we have a tribal sub-plan. So we have a policy towards the Northeast. I have something to say about the very idea of a policy: To whom, or for whom, do you have a policy? What is the object of a policy? I do not have a policy towards my wife. I do not have a policy towards my friend. My friend is not an object of my policy. If I have a policy towards him, he is not truly my friend. I have a policy towards someone whom I can change to my own advantage, whom I can manipulate for my own benefit. The idea of management and the idea of a policy are almost the same. To manage people means to change them in such a way that they can be made to behave in such ways which will ultimately be to my advantage and that is why we need a policy and that also is why you need, for example, a foreign policy. The United States of America is not our friend, nor it is, of course, my enemy. But we need a policy towards the United States because we would like to be able to manipulate things in such a way that the United States' manipulation of India is neutralized. We cannot, of course, achieve this but nonetheless our effort continues.
Do we similarly need a policy for the Northeast? I become suspicious the moment people start advocating a special policy for the Northeast. The North-East is a part of this country and at the same time we think that the people of the North-East should be made the object of a policy, that they are not people, for whom we have human concerns such as love, friendship, understanding of the other; but we have some other kind of concern-management and some such. The word "policy", therefore, needs to be reflected upon. Since our present Government is so deeply to be reflected upon. Since our present Government is so deeply interested in moral and spiritual improvement of the people, it is all the more important that we pay special attention to the very idea of a "policy". The idea of "Human Resource Development" is also somewhat incongruous. It reminds one of something like forest resource development or mineral resource development. Is human resource development, anything like developments of these latter kinds?
One of the frequent complaints made by many of us is that we make good plans but that they are not adequately implemented. To my mind a plan which cannot be implemented, or is not implemented, is not a plan, it is more than like a dream. A plan must include within itself, its own implementation; implementation must be built into the plan itself. Otherwise it is not a plan. It is an exercise in sheer imagination. I do not want to say that all our plans have been exercise in imagination; but nonetheless if this idea of "plans" had been kept in mind, maybe our plans would have been somewhat different; maybe they would have been a little less flamboyant and maybe they would have been a little more effective. I do hope that this will also come up for discussion during the course of our deliberations.
One of the things that we love to talk about now a days is our "traditional knowledge system". We say "Look, we are interested in your knowledge system as well; we shall study them with great interest". Frequently we do not realize that such talk it is all of a piece with that the so called post-mortem insistence on the fragmentation of human reality: human reality - so the claim goes - is not one; it is fragmented and ramified into various different unrelated kinds of things. But this post-mortem emphasis on difference is frequently a cover for hegemonic domination and appropriation. For science to take a traditional knowledge system seriously is really to appropriate this system wherever possible and impose its hegemonic domination over these appropriated fragments. What cannot be appropriate is, of course, left to the aesthete, to the cultural enthusiast, or to the psychologist to take an objective interest in. I do think that this approach to traditional knowledge is mistaken in a very radical way. But we have not even begun to realize this mistake.
We are likely to spend a great deal of time to the problem of "insurgency". Of course, there are many people who do not like the word "insurgency" at all. They say it is a movement for freedom and to call it insurgency distorts it altogether. But even if we take this point of view seriously, I have no doubt in my mind that this "freedom movement" has degenerated into something which cannot be called a freedom movement anymore. There is truth in the belief that some foreign nations take an interest in the North-East and in some other parts of the country to tease us, even to harass us. We might say that insurgency is an instrument in the hands of disgruntled, idle elements; we can bring them into the "mainstream"; they can become a part of the economic process and that once this happens violence and insurgency will be over. The Hon'ble Minister has assured us that we are beginning to see a silver lining in the gloomy scene of the North-East; insurgency, we are told that there has been a general decline in the incidence of violence. I would like certainly accept the Hon'ble Minister's assurance. But I do have doubts about this silver lining - he has spoken of. Of course, the Hon'ble Minister must know better. But think of the money that we have spent on counter insurgency measures. I am told by people who should be in the know of things that the amount is absolutely staggering. If this money had been spent in a wiser, more mature fashion, then perhaps insurgency would never happened at all or, at least, it would have been long over.
In this seminar, as in others, we shall talk about, as I have already mentioned, change. Marx said the point of Philosophy is not to understand but to change the world. I would like to be allowed to say that the point of the seminar is primarily to understand and, if possible, to indicate directions of change. The seminar, of course, cannot change anything at all. But what are our tools of understanding? Here I think we should be extremely wary of the academic division of labor, conceived and propagated by European and American Universities, into disciplines such as History, Literature, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology and so on. This division of labor - we frequently fail to appreciate - is recent in origin. Even three hundred years ago the scene in Europe was very different. Such a division as exists today in our Universities, mimicking western universities, did not exist.
Dr Kumar talks about Anthropology. We also teach a great deal of History in every University in the North-East and of course in all the Universities of the country. But if you look at the modern historical literature of India, does North-East figure in this literature at all. Do the tribes of India form part of the history of India? The answer is obviously 'no'. So tribes are pre-historic and therefore primitive. So historical understanding of the North-East and its tribes is yet to begin. Do we have adequate Anthropological understanding then? What does the Anthropologist of our country have to offer? Prof Bhandari is sitting here and, I am sure, Verrier Elwin is occasionally mentioned in connection with the teaching of cultural Anthropology. But I am quite certain that our Anthropologist do not take Elwin's writings seriously at all. To my mind, however, Elwin was the best thing we had, if understanding our tribes was truly high on our academic agenda.
Elwin's guru, Malinowski, did not believe in history in the conventional sense. He believed in the functional wholeness of a community, so did Elwin. This was an extra-ordinarily creative idea and revolutionary for his time. If Malinowski and Elwin were taken seriously, our Anthropology would have been free from the cob-web of Frazerian evolutionist thinking which still dominates it. The attempt of subaltern historians to bring suppressed and effectively powerless communities into the center of historical writings is laudable. But there are serious mistakes written into the very idea of subaltern history. I do not think this seminar is a forum for discussion of ideas such as ones I have just put forward; but I do hope that there will be at least a serious mention of some of them. It is also worth-mentioning that while there is hardly any creative work done in any of the academic disciplines in the North-East, in at least some parts of the North-East literature is flourishing. Let us take Assam for instance. This also, to my mind, has a profound lesson to
teach us about understanding. Thank you very much.
(Courtesy: The
Imphal Free Press)
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