Keywords

Introduction

Making regions in the post-cold war world has become “commonplace”. Inflationary regional labelling has drawn attention to the significant role played by many regions as legitimate (geo)political vectors. Regional labelling in the neoliberal era is legitimised by spatial classification, economic interpretations, resource entitlements, and developmental strategies for increasing materialism. Thus, regional entrepreneurs in contemporary times determine and use different conceptual categories in the formulation and justification of such initiatives (Ciută, 2008), having both (geo) political and (geo) economic considerations.

Propensity to functional regions is conventionally produced and derived from homogenous qualities and is politically seen as “sub-systems” within a national boundary or around national frontiers having accessibilities to the trans-transnational locations (Siebert, 1969). However, with the changing realities, many such existing functional regions tend to transcend national boundaries and become relational spaces as fluid and dynamic with informal community-level interactions. They are more broadly forged as nodes or entanglements of historical, social, economic, political, cultural, and sometimes informal (illegal) relations and flow through interactions and interfaces. They are relationally constituted through forms of “contact or exchange” (Anderson et al., 2012). Such interactions and interfaces within a state-centric approach legitimise regions to be reproduced through multiple developmental networks and agglomerations against various forms of constructs like underdevelopment, peripherality, and differences across national geographies. This reproduction, according to Woods et al. creates observable changes in physical place and landscape through “shifting configurations of relations” (Woods et al., 2021). New regional relations are thus formed and endured through “temporary permanence”, “reasonable materialism”, and “continual change” (Harvey, 1996, Bhandar & Goldenberg-Hillier, 2015, Martin & Secor, 2013). Such relational changes signify a region with relative spatiality rather than an independent and absolute geographical unit. It is bounded by a relationally connected and porous array of spaces and places. It is located as juxtapositions topologically and topographically across the worlds of Asia, Europe, Africa, and America (see Paasi et al., 2018).

In the South Asian context, India’s northeastern region is a unique post-colonial configuration and regional delimitation, having derived from the colonial construct of the Northeastern Frontier (of Bengal). With dominant reference to international borders, boundedness, and geopolitics, the post-colonial regional construct of the Northeast was marked by administrative, political, and securitised categories that eventually comprised eight state units of India. This made the region be seen with unique historical geography and with a certain degree of sequentiality in spatial and temporal specificities (Bhattacharya, 2022). The conceptual category of this region-making was drawn heavily from a conventional knowledge of homogenous socio-culture and contiguous geography, and demonstrated a compulsive construct in varied and highly ethnicised areas of the Eastern Himalayas and Brahmaputra Valley of the Indo-Myanmar frontier. India’s northeastern region afterwards became a marker of a single geographic unit and one socio- cultural entity that unheeded the reality of complex ethno-cultural pluralities and “multiple sovereign entities” (see Shimray, 2004). Thus, an idea of a region-state was legitimised in post-colonial India by unifying and clustering all the state units of this geographical area, comprising hills and plains with a “cohesive culture” and having a certain degree of homogeneity and “common importance” (see Malgavkar & Ghiara, 1975). Such regional delimitation profoundly ignored the pre-colonial timeworn trans-regional trails and settings. With a natural cross-border ethno-community connectedness and with a geographical setting with land and maritime accessibilities to the neighbouring areas, this space historically enabled and sustained flawless interactions. This, however, was completely overridden in the early post-colonial region-making process with heavy reference to the colonial cartographic agenda. The compulsion of national security reproduced this region by truncating all interactions and community relations with international and national borders, and clustering space, people, and landscape within a single nomenclature as India’s northeastern region. This new form of regional labelling was identified in the mainland narrative as “underdeveloped and isolated” with territorial appendage as a fact of geography, an act of administration, and a vector of geopolitics (Bhattacharya, 2022).

Interestingly, this “underdeveloped and isolated region” was reconstructed as a “strategic region” in India’s neoliberal programme with the reinvention of “locational advantage” to interlink the neighbouring geographies through relational change against the backdrop of ethno-cultural and civilisational links. A new idea of an open, unbound, and valued northeastern region has been imagined in South and Southeast Asia and further to the Asia–Pacific regional relations, without altering its core regional labelling as a homogenous category. This new regional relational architecture aims for material outreach and therefore justifies a developmental construct to remove its earlier narrative. This heavily state-centric approach has capacitated and produced observable physical changes in the landscape through new infrastructural and economic understanding and engagements, most visibly since the last decade. However, an important question arises at this juncture whether such a transformational developmental approach and shifting regional relations have made any attempt to rebalance the ethno-community relations of the Northeast and its neighbouring areas, which were ruptured in the post-colonial period, and were manifested with a diverse, differentiated, complex, and sometimes confrontational inter-ethnic relation that flows through the porous array of space and territoriality, and contested the idea of Northeast as flimsy. The historical geography and regional delimitation of the Northeast make this question relevant, and connect to the epistemic concern of region-making process in this part of India. The central argument of this chapter locates this question. It entails a critical approach to revisit such a new approach of the state and its propensity to developmental construct against a contesting and conflictual reality of this region.

New Developmental Construct and India’s Northeastern Region

A new “vision and development initiatives” in India’s northeastern region was mapped a decade earlier in 2014–15 by reproducing a (geo) economic narrative of engagements and interaction through relational constituents. With about 98 percent international borders with Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, and the Tibetan part of (China), this region was produced with a complex geopolitical vector and eluded economic possibilities to become an underdeveloped and isolated part of post-colonial India. The era of economic reforms in the 1990s, however, recognised the northeastern region as a valued neoliberal geography of South and Southeast Asia and further to the Asia–Pacific region. The centrality of the Northeastern region in the transnational economic programme has pushed a new approach to regional reproduction that essentially focused on the development of infrastructure. A new set of policies like Act East and Neighbourhood First were implemented in 2014–15 and relocated this region as an engine of dynamism and a “transnational theatre for commercial integration and neoliberal market expansion” to “augment national wealth” and “integrate with the national economy” (NITI Aayog, 2017).

The developmental configuration of the northeastern region that aims to produce an array of extended geography for interaction and exchange expects an outcome of material gain and well-being. It is mostly drawn and grounded on ethno-civilisational continuity, connection, and conjuncture that support an epistemic construct of a “uniform” or “contiguous” geography in the region-making project. Some of the successful regional labelling across the world which are formed on similar grounds are Nord Pool, which unites European Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Baltic states, and South African Power Pool (SAPP) which unites 16 member nations for such economic interaction, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Greater Mekong Sub-region. These geographical power pools produce meaningful exchange, material gain, and significant trade volume to exemplify economic integration and acceleration (Anbumozhi et al., 2019). Such economic and geographical interpretation of regional relations has prompted India since the liberalisation era to experiment with sub-regional structures like the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) to connect South and Southeast Asian nations by centralising northeastern region with “strategic location”. In such a new strategy of regional labelling, the act of state facilitates market-conforming programmes by advancing its developmental goals with accelerated policy reforms in various key economic and infrastructural sectors (see Ji, 2006).

As the Northeast has been rediscovered with a new region-making project, market-conforming route building and logistical infrastructure became the main agenda of the state. Relatively inconspicuous and seemingly logical, this discovery anchored the developmental state to push noticeable projects of economic liberalism in this part of India. Connectivity infrastructure consequently became the most pertinent sector. It was identified as an initial constituent of a new developmental approach for India’s Northeastern region, symbolising an accessible geography or “gateway” to mainland India and to the neighbouring and further Southeast Asian nations. Connectivity infrastructure is also considered the “entry point for dealing with complex problems of historical neglect” that trapped India’s northeast as a geo-politically “sequestered region” for a long period (Planning Commission Report, 1997). Such absence of connectivity and geographical isolation of the region was identified in the early planning era of the 1970s. In 1971, an important regional institute, North Eastern Council (NEC), was constituted by the Act of Parliament with a vision to make a unified and coordinated regional plan and build “an inter-state transport and communication system” in this region. Subsequently, NEC was funded in every Five-Year Plan with various development projects of inter-state nature and became a dominant institutional structure for regional planning. The role of NEC, however, was emaciated and subverted by the early 2000s with the establishment of a full-fledged Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (MoDONER). A new development revelation was unfolded in its North Eastern Region Vision Document, 2020, which provided a roadmap of a trans-boundary engagement with the neighbouring and Southeast Asian growth quadrant and mandated connectivity infrastructure for this isolated part of India, an unfulfilled strategy of the NEC. The region, however, awaited about a decade more for actual implementation, and since 2016–2017, all categories of connectivity infrastructure like airways, railways, and roadways have begun to translate into the immense reality of achievements and have transformed the region-making history of the Northeast.

Road infrastructure has made revolutionary progress that was deeply wedged with inaccessibility due to the vulnerable mountains and river systems of this region. This hilly and far-flung northeastern region of India, bordered by a set of volatile neighbours, was excluded from an adequate road network during the post-colonial period and was justified by the earlier planning model with both topographical and geostrategic challenges. However, road projects were invigorated at the policy level since 2014–2015 not only to transform the prolonged perceived sense of isolation but to be used as a technology for integration (Bhattacharya & Deka, 2021). The road currently has become a significant marker in the changing narrative of the regional entity of the Northeast. In 2017, an important North East Road Sector Development Scheme (NERSDS) replaced a two-decades-old Special Accelerated Road Development Programme-North-East that was introduced in 2005 to snap such geographical isolation of this region by building two and four-lane highways. The region has undergone a remarkable roadscape transformation across its mountainous and riverine terrains since 2017–2018, and NERSDS aims to build 19,903 km roads to make the northeastern region central to India’s transnational engagements of various categories. One of Asia’s longest, the 9.15 km, Dhola-Sadiya Road Bridge over the river Lohit-Brahmaputra was built in 2017 to connect the remotest and most cut-off mountainous Eastern Arunachal Pradesh with Assam. In 2018, another milestone over the river Brahmaputra was achieved with the construction of the longest rail-road bridge, spanning 4.94 km. The Bogibeel Bridge connects Assam, linking the southern and northern towns of Dibrugarh and Dhemaji and extending to the central part of Arunachal Pradesh. The third riverine Dhubri-Phulbari Road Bridge over the Brahmaputra is on the way to making the inaccessible interiors of Meghalaya connected to Assam. These three mega riverine connectivity projects have significantly erased decades-old imagination of the geographical isolation of the northeastern region. The data of the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (Government of India) shows that from 2015 to 2019, the growth rate of the total road in the Northeast has been 7.32 percent against all India’s growth rate which is 4.40 percent. Meghalaya has achieved the most with a 32 percent increase, followed by Arunachal Pradesh with 22 percent. Mizoram and Sikkim have achieved about a 13 percent increase in the road network, while Nagaland is at the bottom with only 0.46 percent. All major categories of National Highways, Rural Roads, and (Trans)Border Roads have made progress to become at par with the national road system. Other than Nagaland, all hill states of this region have achieved immense growth in road infrastructure by doubling their total network in the last 10 years. The most cut-off state Arunachal Pradesh has achieved road infrastructure under the component of the two-lane Trans-Arunachal highway project to connect its remotest areas of Northwest Tawang and Southeast Wakro, transcending 12 districts and its bordering areas. Similarly, the other very important mode of connectivity is rail-links, which has witnessed a significant boost in this past decade. Rail infrastructure in the Northeast, mostly in the plains of Assam, was primarily made by the colonial state during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for trade and mobility. These colonial rail-links remained the life-lines of the region in the past seven decades under the Northeast Frontier Railways system. However, Indian Railway now aims to provide connectivity to all the state capitals of the region. Capital cities of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura are already connected by the Indian railway broad gauge network. Major railway projects like Jiribam-Imphal Railway, Bhairabi-Sairang Railway, Dimapur-Kohima Railway, and Teteliya-Byrnihat Railway are awaited to bring Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Meghalaya under the Indian railway network. Transborder railway between Agartala and Akhaura has connected Tripura and Bangladesh for better mobility and accessibility. This rail route reduces the distance between Agartala and Kolkata via Bangladesh from 1613 to 514 km only. Most strikingly, the region is connected with Bande Bharat Express from Jalpaiguri to Guwahati under the ongoing high-speed railway network programme of India. In the case of airways and its infrastructure, the region has also seen many transformations. Seven airports have been built across this inhospitable terrain in the past decade under a unique UDAN programme to make regional air connectivity a reality. This has made all state capitals of the northeastern region functional with air connectivity. This implausible achievement was inconceivable in the past seven decades, and UDAN international programme now aims to connect neighbouring nations at least with two new routes like Agartala-Chittagong-Agartala and Imphal-Mandalay-Imphal, reiterating Bangladesh and Myanmar as the two most significant neighbours of new regional relation of India. This new multi-modal connectivity infrastructure undoubtedly has become a prominent marker of northeastern regional entity, and has made a 28 km Siliguri road corridor, the sole post-colonial connecting life-line of the Northeast and mainland India inconsequential. Infrastructural reproduction of the region as “gateway” for “constructive engagements” beyond the boundaries strategically recreates the vast international borders of the Northeast as the “key to cooperation dynamics” in a sub-region consisting of Bangladesh, Myanmar, Bhutan, Northeastern region of India, and Nepal, as well as the contiguous Southeast Asian region. This tight, geographically integrated sub-region, along with two neighbouring Indian states, Bihar and West Bengal, forms the core interface and provides points of connection to other neighbouring countries; and is seen as one of the most attractive (and also challenging) geographies of contemporary Asia (Lama, 2017). The connectivity infrastructure of the northeastern region therefore has cascading and spiralling impact through the trans-border junction approach on trade and exchange for economic expansion.

Apart from people’s mobility, tourism, and mercantile trade flow that is expected to grow with connectivity infrastructure, the northeastern region is also marked as a “new energy centre”. Energy infrastructure, therefore, is another crucial constituent of this new developmental construct of the northeastern region, which is the reservoir of huge untapped natural resources. It is the repository of about 23 percent of India’s estimated reserves of non-renewable crude oil, and the document on the Hydrocarbon Vision 2030 for Northeast lays a path for extraction, processing, generation, and power trade with the neighbouring areas. Similarly, the region, with its multiple river systems, is seen as a “sleeping hydropower giant” of India and shows the potential to be the largest supplier of hydropower as an alternative non-renewable energy source. Thus, all eight states of the Northeast are recognised as “Ashtha Ratna” with many such immense natural capital, and signifies a “symbolic weaving of materiality”. Exploration and management of such resources are central as India is growing and diversifying its energy economy. The North Eastern Region Power System Improvement Project (NERPSIP) was initiated in 2014 in collaboration with the World Bank with a financial outlay of Rs 67 billion to extract and generate surplus power for trading purposes. With nineteen new power projects, six being commissioned, the region is seen as a “hub for energy trade”. North Eastern Industrial and Investment Promotion Policy (NEIIP) was reiterated in 2017 with a new investment-friendly incentive, while cross-border energy trade (CBET) is another attempt to build greater economic integration of an extended region of Asia where Northeast can play a “three-dimensional role in sub-regional energy security” to the extended Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Bhutan (Anbumozhi et al., 2019).

This new infrastructural setting is meant for larger economic mobility and expansion. It claims to provide an ontic frame to reproduce the region as a most valued and accessible geography to support capitalist modernity. Such infrastructural architecture is seen as a “constructive mechanism” that allows producing a viable regional centre and acts as an unobstructed node for the growth of a market economy under the “pervasiveness of neoliberalism” (see Springer, 2010). This influential line of thought on regional reproduction exposes the northeastern region to the global value chain and creates a modus operandi for economic agglomeration, alliance, corridor programmes, and cross-border engagements with eastern and southeastern neighbouring nations (Bhattacharya, 2017).

Contesting the Construct: Moving Beyond Developmental Geography

Development, however, is seen as an “invention” (see Escober, 1995) by the capitalist regime in the cold war period and a method from above that subverts social subjectivity, traditional production relation, and time-tested economic and resource management practices. It also necessarily does not produce and exemplify uniform well-being of the people or ensure a better social and ecological landscape with livelihoods, shared prosperity, and harmony. The approach, likewise, ignores and oversimplifies the varied social perceptions of such a new economic world. Developmental invention and reinvention in the region-making process similarly implicate a new level of anxiety and contradiction, especially in a differently perceived space of social consciousness. For example, developmental ramifications in the northeastern region are reflected with new concerns and resistance that largely tend to encroach upon the land system and resource reserve (Sharma, 2021). Many big developmental projects like dam construction, resource extraction, road building, and rapid urbanisation, henceforth, are contested on the ground as “destructive capitalism”, “external encroachment”, and methods for “siphoning-off” the creams of developmental outcomes and the natural resources to the mainstream and global theatres with multiple vicious practices of the state, infrastructure, market, and the global–local players, and implicates a new form of development-vacuum. In this context, infrastructure building is a channel for a “steady and unhindered outflow of development benefits” (Lama, 2020).

The modern infrastructure allows an “invisible hand of the market” and tends to give way to a “visible and often authoritarian hand of a developmental state” to enhance global influence in such emerging regions or nations (see Adrian, 2012). Infrastructure development, thus, creates an alliance of market and state, and India’s Northeast is a new theatre for such alliance and negotiation. With better infrastructure, the region is an emerging market for various national and multinational companies, including the e-commerce system. In recent times, big companies like Snapdeal, Flipkart, Amazon, Myntra, and many more are creating a steady supply chain to gradually transform the social dynamics of this region. This organised form of modern market that is penetrating the region tends to subvert many of its traditional market spaces that existed in various historical periods and remained space for exchange, community relations, and hierarchies. Cultural identities were distinctly formed and visible as such traditional markets remain embedded in society, subservient to the requirements of the norms that define the social order and assure its survival. The northeastern region is well identified with many such market spaces. They are uniquely and historically formed by women like Ima and Edu markets in Manipur and Meghalaya. Penetration of the modern market economy raises challenges to such diverse structures of historical relevance as socially inefficient and regionally-ineffective constructs and creates a contesting space among the stakeholders of traditional and modern market poles, commonly interpreted in a binary of formal and informal markets. A new regional node with such modernity is aimed and “used to mobilise the community, legitimate the region-state, establish the civil and ‘civilise’ the pre-existing forms of life”. It embodies new objectives and interests; and aims for higher social integration through an imagined economic and market order by subsuming smaller units and plural worldviews (see Thirumal, 2016). The process, in a way, implicitly makes a powerful attempt from outside to reimagine a socially and culturally diverse region like the Northeast as “unified”, “cohesive”, and “contiguous”. It ignores historical trends and tends to create a “market society” in such socially and culturally different regions of India. Such a modern emerging context where the economy constitutes an important domain, therefore, is contested as a “singular departure” (see Polanyi, 1944) from historical patterns that disembed from existing social structure (see Nee, 2000).

The other significant social composition of this region can be observed in its ethno-cultural dynamics and its links to the neighbouring areas through connected histories, contiguous geographies, and shared economic lives. As a new regional relation is pushed in the state-centric approach, it necessarily refers to these links, which sustained across the natural boundaries for time immemorial with intimate as well as hostile relations. This has been a part of the varied ethno-cultural practices across the borders that prevailed primarily through a subsistence worldview, and interestingly developmental construct to regional relation acknowledges many such old cross-border connections and aims to retrieve and formalise many such lost connections through the methods of cross-border connectivity, official exchange through border trade and border haats. Border trade in this region became functional in 1996–1997 when India signed Border Trade Agreement with Myanmar. This was part of India’s agreement for overland trade relations between its Northeast and five neighbouring countries through Land Custom Stations (LCSs) notified under Sect. 7 of the Customs Act, 1962. Border trade through LCSs is governed by the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) of the South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA) and the Border Trade Agreement (BTA). Such a structure of official exchange across international borders is derived from the older concept of a thriving border economy that supported the livelihood activities of the people from time immemorial. This arrangement was also to restore border relations that were lost and reproduced on the issue of geopolitics and national security in the early post-colonial period. Border sealing eventually turned these historical links into “illegal”.

With rising demand and aspiration, social forces across this region are getting inclined towards attaining economic surplus. The idea of cash cropping, monetisation of indigenous knowledge, and increasing (mis)use of resources and borders are the new phenomena here that are evolving simultaneously with formal economic push. They are pushing the region increasingly towards illicit agrarian and extractive practices and illegal cross-border trade networks (like poppy cultivation in Manipur and Mizoram; coal and oil extraction in Meghalaya and Nagaland). Better connectivity infrastructure augments several such illegal practices and links. For example, cross-border narco-production-trade circuits and unscientific coal extraction processes and illegal trading networks situate this region in the global and neighbouring markets with huge profits in the hands of few. About Rs. 75,000 crores worth of narco-trade is generated every year through Manipur alone, establishing an almost parallel channel of accumulation in the region. The other weaponry trading and trafficking of human and rare animals and poaching also allow a larger market through Myanmar to make the value of informal trade much higher than that of formal trade in the northeastern region. Ethno-cultural affinities and linguistic homogeneity are identified as binding factors for such illegalities. Such affinities also support much practising militancy among the communities residing on either side of the border to make it easier to form such close alliances. This is seen as an “extension of traditional trade” network against any official and formal structure in this part of India (Bhowmik & Saha, 2021). Such forms of alliance that are drawn from spatio-ethno-cultural dynamics are the grey areas that pose a challenge to the formal structure of neighbourhood relations. India’s northeastern region cannot merely be seen as a ground for neoliberal cross-border “constructive engagement”, as it draws reference to the deep-rooted and continuous co-existence of communities with their intrinsic bonds and affinities that survive within ethnic enclaves and cultural boundaries and flourishes by accessing new market forces with developmental infrastructure.

The developmental reproduction of the northeastern region, therefore, demands a more critical lens to contextualise its complex spatio-ethno-cultural dynamics, which intends to challenge its progressive encroachment upon various traditional systems and practices. Many a time, such an approach is contested by insiders’ views as hegemonic and adds complexities to the alternative notion of plurality and autonomy, and even imbibes inter-ethnic rivals with regional imbalance and unrest. Here one can cite the most recent and unexpected outbreak of violence in Manipur in May 2023 that erupted primarily due to state intervention in illegal poppy cultivation and cross-border connection. The state, which has been under various developmental programmes, including infrastructure, urbanisation, and market penetration, has claimed to have achieved (official) economic progress. Development supposedly demonstrated peace and stability in Manipur, which otherwise has a prolonged history of violence. The current violence has taken place on the contested issues of land, forest, livelihood, cross-border infiltration, and illicit practices, and reiterates the ethnic complexity of the state. About 38 ethnic groups co-inhabit and consolidate their identity under the umbrella terms of Meitei, Kuki, and Naga, having roots in Burma and Lushia Hills. However, the violence that has claimed more than a hundred lives, displaced about 50,000 people, allowed looting of arms and weapons, and destroyed public and private properties within a duration of 30 days not only shows its extra-ordinariness but also eludes the idea of co-existence, and demonstrates that “nothing should be taken for granted” (Bhattacharjee, 2023) in this complex part of India. Its discursive strategy “grants legitimacy to mesh with state and non-state fantasies” (see Gudynas, 2010), making the idea of the Northeast highly fragile.

The antiquity of resistance, intolerance, and violence and various contesting movements of multiple ethno-secessionist groups of Manipur in the past and many other states of the region like Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Tripura have been the prominent representatives of this region in the early post-colonial period. A culture of violence against “others” and a history of bloodshed has made this region a site of identity matrix with extra-ordinary ethnic rivalries and armed movements having a deep cross-border connection. Many alternative imagined ideas of sub-nationalisms have defined this region with cultural as well as political boundaries. The demand of the sovereign entities for separate lands like Nagalim or reunification of hill-ethnic groups like “Zomia” cuts across state territories and national boundaries and encountered many resistance and armed movements in the past. Such prolonged representation of the region invoked alternative ideas of homelands and created the ground for new intellectual discourse, mostly evolved from the Western frame, to recognise this region in the context of geography, community, worldviews, and collective consciousness rather than within a defined nation-state boundary. A new branch of borderland studies (Schendel, 2004) thus situates many communities of the Northeast in a trans-boundary and non-state spatial contiguity such as “Zomia” grounded on distinct historical links, cultural and traditional peasant and agrarian practices and identity consolidation. These studies redefine the views on politics, history, demography, and constituents of civilisation in this part of Asia. Such a radically different approach situates the communities across the highlands of the northeastern region of India and Southeast Asian nations as “stateless and ungoverned, where any form of state-making is contested as ‘internal colonialism’” (Scott, 2009). It should be noted that such scholarly recognition of the distinctiveness of the hill-ethnic areas that emerged only in the decade of 2000 is acknowledged by many scholars of the Northeast. It also needs to be pointed out that the uniqueness of the hill-ethnic areas in this region was recognised much earlier by the Indian nation-state, and in the late 1940s, a system of unique political and financial autonomy and governing structure was made within India’s system of asymmetrical federalism. India’s Constitutional arrangements of Sixth Schedule, Fifth Schedule, Article 371A and political arrangement of Inner Line Permit (ILP) were introduced in the early post-colonial period to protect and safeguard all the traditional systems, practices, economies, and laws by conferring autonomy and special rights to the indigenous communities over land and resources. Such innovative governing structure not only recognised the unique politics, history, demography, and constituents of civilisation of India’s northeastern region but has “protected and preserved” traditional practices and systems and apparently retained “cultural traits and habits and leaving them to develop along their own lines without any compulsion from outside” (Khosla, 2014: 58–59).

However, over time and with changing realities, these methods have failed to serve the purpose, and the idea of autonomy has suggested power relations and interest groups that evolved among local elites like village chiefs (Gao Bura), who commenced negotiation with land, forest, and other natural resources. Autonomous District Council that was formed as a new lyre of governance in such protected areas ruptured traditional systems, created disjunction between legal and social realities in the absence of any accountability, and implicated perpetual conflicts among communities over land and resource rights through a narrower view of territorial and cultural identity (Pereira, 2005, Roy Burman, 1989, Fernandes, 2005). These extra-ordinary Constitutional mechanisms on the ground therefore produced “unruly hills” (Karlsson, 2011) where natural resources have been used and extracted in unregulated mechanisms. This is rampantly visible across the region with coal extraction, timber trade, uranium extraction in Meghalaya, oil extraction in Nagaland, and poppy cultivation in Manipur. These practices form a deep nexus of local and trans-local stakeholders, like political representatives, underground militants, traders, and business groups. Extensive poppy cultivation, for example, has made Manipur a part of the “Asian Golden Triangle” of narco-production-trade circuit. So the idea of autonomy and protection of indigeneity in the Northeast by such exceptional legal forces resonates with “an ontological alternative” (see Postero, 2017), while on the ground, it has been serving the interests of politically privileged business people to form indigenous capitalism and threaten any harmonious and shared existence of communities. Coercive control and power over an autonomous territory, unfortunately, cannot distinguish between public and private realms for a variety of historical reasons and results in a number of “distorted states” with illegitimate authority structure, personalistic leaders, and governance of poor quality (see Kohli, 2004: 9). In the neoliberal era, such autonomy finds newer channels to negotiate and expand unregulated practices and faster commodification of land and resources (see Buğra, 2017). It also allows new social formation based on “ethnic fusion” and collaboration and provides a convenient channel for ethno-identity reconsolidation. In the Northeast, unequal power and resource relations under autonomy support several sovereign entities and contesting forces to propel violence and make the region a complex theatre that embodies ethno-plurality and divisive forces. India’s new developmental construct that attempts to change such symbiotic relations of this region with inclusive mechanisms and to form a higher social and economic integration augments complexities among the various resisting ethnic groups and their idea of rights, autonomy, and plurality. Visible and expressible articulation of power and resistance of ethno-social groups of the Northeast are alternatively the inevitable counterforces of any such new knowledge production in the region-making process. The idea of development that penetrates the deeper forces of geography, territoriality, resources, and ethnicity, therefore, tends to reorient the relationship between the state, space, and society with a new form of regional unrest and tends to make its construct more flimsy and debatable. This disposition poses a few serious questions on the development model that has been pushed as an alternative to a violent-prone region of the Northeast. Development is a mediator for a stable state and society relation, while a higher order of integration remains an ultimate goal. Such act of region-making is contested as an external construct in an inimitable geographical site of India’s Northeast over multiple cultural and social worldviews, overlaps, and conjectures. Development and its linear approach have failed to provide peace and harmony in this region, and violence, unfortunately, continues to define and represent this ethnically volatile and diverse region of India. The notion of development and its form and content, therefore, needs deeper ontological investigation in this complex theatre of polity, society, ethnicity, and geography with more testable features, which not only locates observable physical change in the landscape but also see how it translates to the life-worlds and aspiration of the people, and how are they negotiating with new realities. Ontological investigations also need to test if such a new creed in the regional construct capacitates permanence in the epistemic frame with or without altering socio-cultural complexities, ties, and pluralities of the Northeast.

Concluding Annotations

New developmentalism has been key to representing and reproducing India’s northeastern region over the last decade. This is drawn from three decades of neoliberal architecture that provides a frame for regional relation, (trans)spatial classification, economic interpretation, and material gain. It also creates an epistemic alternative to spatial delimitations and fixity of boundaries that are produced around power structure and national security and was tested to be a failure and unsustainable in the case of India’s northeastern region. The neighbourhood is pertinent and integral to the northeastern region, and such alternative architecture creates ground for expectation while it rebuilds the relationships between state, space, people, and resources. Given the complex dynamics of this region, an informed choice of an unbound Northeast in the frame of a defined historical reference can map the expectations of the social forces. This requires political maturity, and the state of Tripura in this region can be cited as one of the most successful cases that has exhibited such political maturity to create an alternative idea of trans-spatiality with neighbouring Bangladesh. As the region has been appropriately reinvented for greater national and global geostrategies, the foundation for its regional permanence lies in accommodating and rebalancing multiple local forces, contradicting the canonical approach of a state that tends to oversimplify the ground realities. It undermines plurality, complexity, sensitivity, and significance of the ethno-social forces deeply embedded in violence and resistance and dismantles such regional representation through acts of power, autonomy, and small wars. In this regard, the approaches that constantly invented and reinvented the idea of the Northeast over the past seven decades endured fluidity, secessionism, and disintegration. Neither could such approaches provide any epistemic logic that could emulate such perpetual contestation and make the regional construct of the Northeast a void in any conceptual category. As a result, the construct of an “ostensibly homogenised” Northeast (Chakraborty, 2021) bounces back with unforeseen and profound contestations.

However, the idea of the northeastern region is inevitable and irreversible in the state narrative, and the dominant approaches need other ontic alternatives and soft strategies that have more natural unifying strength in social imaginaries like popular culture. With increasing physical connectivity erasing this region’s geographical isolation, a gradual shift in the mainstream imaginaries is observable. Deep fear and fantasy that represented the region with its aggressive forces and hostile geography is moving beyond a threshold level to the larger idea of India. An idea of an “incredible Northeast” is being explored in the realms of tourism, sports, music, handicraft, and food, which are the cores and embodiments of this diverse region. They also help in shaping the distinct identities of communities such as Naga, Kuki, Mizo, Khasi, Assamese, Bodo, Meitei, and many more within the larger imagination of Indianness, defined by a long cultural history predating colonial times. This uniqueness supports an assimilating identity in many parts of India in the Northeast student forum, Northeast cultural forum, Northeast society, Northeast food, Northeast handicraft, and Northeast sports. These largely create spaces for recognition, acceptability, and mutuality and transcend the boundary of state construct. The transformation is also noticed in the educational approaches by reorienting and incorporating the story of this diverse region and creating higher study centres at the university levels like Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Milia Islamia University in New Delhi. However, such a schema of converging and outsiders’ views needs to be tested with deeper epistemic understanding and testable methodological approaches that establish a conceptual category to the northeastern region-making process. Else the idea of Northeast always stands at a cross-road of multiple binaries like insider–outsider, exclusion-inclusion, us-others, indigenous-migrants, discrimination-resistance, and margin- dominant. These binaries propel constant anxiety within the social consciousness, threatening the perception of the Northeast as perpetually fluid with undying conflicts, and complicating the region as an exception and protuberant to India’s national building process.