Sunanda K Datta – Ray
New Delhi must realise that the region cannot be developed as a
bridge to Asean countries until it is first groomed as a bridge to the
rest of India. The present neglect hurts all.
Whatever its cause, the panic-stricken exodus from several southern and
western cities has brought home to Indians how many of their
compatriots from the seemingly remote North-East live in their midst.
It’s a region not to be neglected, not least because, as Shashi Tharoor
points out in Pax Indica, “India’s North-East is the bridge between two
subregions of Asia — South Asia and South-East Asia.”
Now, it’s the domestic imperative that demands attention. As hostile
propaganda is curbed and fears fade, there will soon be need for special
trains running in the other direction bringing people back to Pune,
Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai and wherever else they fled from.
Integration demands two-way traffic. If the North-East is in the rest of
the country, the rest of the country must also be in the North-East.
That also applies to Jammu and Kashmir. Any region that is allowed to
pull up its drawbridge and deny access to the rest of the community
imperils the entire country.
India’s unity owes much more to incidental factors like the market
economy and what is called soft power than to political planning. As Mr
Jaswant Singh has pointed out, India was always a nation but never a
state until colonial times. British rule created the modern state with
the infrastructure of governance to hold it physically together. But
alien rulers could not create emotional unity. That came after
Independence with the imperatives of voluntary interaction. The spread
of Hindi after the self-immolation of anti-Hindi fanatics is an obvious
example. The few who voluntarily spoke Hindi then in the smaller towns
of Tamil Nadu had served in (or been connected in some way with) the
defence forces. Today, virtually every one in the Deccan States revels
in understanding and enjoying Hindi without inhibition.
That is not on account of compulsory school instruction but because of
Bollywood. No one wants to be left out of the magic that Hindi films
weave. Radio and television have taken advantage of this to strengthen
the spell with an infelicitous but effective mixture of English, folk
Hindi and the local language to reach out to society’s simplest
sections. The English and heavily Sanskritised Hindi programmes of
Doordarshan and All India Radio previously excluded them. Now, the
medium speaks in their tongue, and is itself the message.
It’s not the end of the story. Being Government agencies, Doordarshan
and All India Radio treated the profit motive with disdain. But cable
television channels survive on advertising to an extent that ads often
irritatingly take precedence over entertainment, information and even
intelligence. But whatever may be thought of it on aesthetic or
intellectual grounds, Indian TV advertising artfully blends song and
dance to appeal to society’s lowest common — and most numerous —
denominator.
Three North-eastern towns —Guwahati, Shillong and Gangtok —are rapidly
attracting people from the countryside. Aizawl is next. Kohima,
Itanagar, Agartala and Imphal lag behind, mainly because of poor
communications. That is not an obstacle for the electronic media whose
content confirms another unsuspected fact of Indian life: We are
unashamedly consumerist. All those years of socialist self-denial when
‘conspicuous consumption’ was regarded as a sin, a ‘careerist’ was
almost a criminal, and ‘import substitution’ the national dharma were
based on illusions.
Indians want as much as they can get of all they can get, which
explains the rush to migrate to the US. Just as Jawaharlal Nehru’s
reading of Indian preferences was based solely on his own highly
cultivated sensitivities, Mahatma Gandhi’s objections to universal
education (introduced in Baroda by Gaekwad Sayaji Rao III) and to
railways (established by the British) reflected private fads and no
realistic assessment of national needs or national desires. Both
education and railways, Gandhi thought, would sully his idyllic Ram
Rajya. Perhaps they would. But they were essential and inevitable
instruments of the modernity that alone converts a nation into a state
and creates the sense of inter-dependence that the ‘Unity in Diversity’
slogan demands.
Without education, people from Assam or Manipur would not have found
employment in Bangalore and Pune; without trains, they would not have
been able to escape the violence they feared, albeit unnecessarily. If
education reduces emotional and intellectual distances, roads and
railways reduce physical distances. Globalisation is the celebration of
communication. The train that drives through an open-air market in a
crowded Bangkok suburb marks the triumph of communication and commerce.
India can capitalise on both by making the most of the territorial
advantage of its land bridge to the dynamic 10-country Association of
South-East Asian Nations. China’s trade with Asean is about $300
billion, India’s is expected to touch $80 billion this year. China has
surpassed Japan as the biggest provider of economic assistance; and
invests substantially in Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. Cambodia and
Myanmar are heavily dependent on the Chinese economy. While the
Chinese-sponsored Greater Mekong Subregion scheme has made an impact,
the Mekong-Ganga project, which India launched in 2000, has not.
Nothing has come of the hopes that were once voiced of regular flights
from Imphal or Guwahati to South-East Asian cities. Plans to revive the
wartime Stillwell Road from Arunachal Pradesh to China’s Yunan province
via northern Myanmar remain just plans. The highly successful
India-Asean car rally of 2004 has not been repeated. As Mr Tharoor
notes, “Projects to create a Delhi-Hanoi rail link and a trilateral
highway linking India, Myanmar and Thailand have made little headway;
had they done so, they could also have encouraged Bangladesh to join the
bandwagon, instead of remaining a sole obstacle to India's eastern
connectivity.”
A minimal tentative beginning has been made. Mr Manmohan Singh’s
‘North-Eastern Region Vision 2020’ project marked some advance in
thinking. So did setting up a coordinating Ministry to develop the
region, focussing on infrastructure such as road and rail links, power
generation, the services sector and the region’s rich biodiversity. The
new road from Tamu in Manipur to Kalemyo in Myanmar marks progress, as
does the scheme to connect Kolkata with Sittwe port, the old Akyab, also
in Myanmar.
But much more needs to be done. Above all, New Delhi must realise that
the North-East can’t be developed as a bridge to Asean until it is
developed as a bridge to the rest of India. It’s neglected isolation
hurts the 45 million North-easterners as much as it does the rest of
India.
Courtesy : The Pioneer
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