How should nations, especially those that are democratic, deal with their geographical peripheries? How does the empirical record of democracies deviate from the normative ideals of national inclusion? And how might one explain the gap between ideals and realities? These questions are at the heart of this book, which focuses on India and its Northeast—where the country’s post-independence nation-building effort has been accompanied by a great deal of resentment and violence.

Sanjib Baruah is among the most meticulous scholars of Northeastern politics. His body of work, especially Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (2005), is hugely enlightening. In this book, his principal argument is that, despite regular elections, the region has mostly seen a painful face of Indian democracy—primarily because Delhi has made democracy subservient to national security, generating huge deficits in the realm of civil rights and freedoms, regular elections notwithstanding.

Comprising eight small states, the Northeast has about 3.8% of India’s population. It borders China, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Bhutan. Deepening the notion of the periphery, the region is connected to the rest of India through a corridor 14 miles wide, called a “chicken neck,” placed between Nepal and Bangladesh. Before British India’s partition into India and Pakistan in 1947, no “chicken neck” was required, for what became East Pakistan, and later Bangladesh, was an integral part of colonial India. Geography then was a smooth continuum.

Significantly, seven of these eight states were not part of India’s freedom movement against the British colonial rulers, a movement that lasted nearly three decades after 1919. The British had built a protective ring around the mountainous tribes of the region through what was called the “Inner Line.” Although a great deal of India was brought together politically by the freedom movement, a union via politics could not come about in the Northeast.

The challenge of nation-building in the Northeast thus began after India’s independence. This was certainly not untypical for much of the postcolonial world, where strong mass-based freedom movements did not emerge, as the literature in the 1950s and 1960s showed. But it was unusual for India. Through the decades of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, movement politics against the British, led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party, had reached far and wide. The freedom movement politically constructed an “imagined community,” called the Indian nation, despite its inner conflicts and its linguistic, religious, and larger social diversity. This project, of course, was not fully successful in that a Muslim-majority Pakistan was also carved out of British India—but the freedom movement did penetrate large parts of the country. Much of the Northeast, ringed off by the colonial rulers, remained a big exception.

Baruah contends that a suspicion of insurgency and disloyalty to India, even when that insurgency was neither serious nor mass based, has undergirded Delhi’s policy. It is a policy in which the state has managed to build an alliance with local elites, who are on the whole dependent on Delhi’s patronage for their continuation in power. The elites have certainly benefited from the alliance, but the national security narrative has led to much suffering at the mass level. “Democratic citizenship” has been reduced to “securitized citizenship” (p. 162).

Baruah documents this argument by examining the conflict in two important Northeastern states, Assam and Nagaland. Especially illuminating is a chapter on the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which India’s national parliament created in 1958 to deal with a nascent insurgency in Nagaland. Still in effect, AFSPA has been extended to seven of the eight Northeastern states at various points. It gives the armed forces legal protection, even when they “make preventive arrests, search premises without warrants, and even shoot and kill civilians” (p. 4). The immunity so provided has seriously degraded the regime of civil rights, which in turn impairs democracy.

One learns a lot from Baruah’s elegantly written tale of citizen suffering. Yet he misses two big theoretical opportunities that his materials open up. One is about nation-making as a process, and the other is about democracy as a system of ascertaining popular will.

It is widely known that nation-making is a difficult process, often seeking to generate inclusion by force or pragmatism. As long as the nation continues to be what Benedict Anderson called a modular political unit in the post-medieval world, this may remain an empirical reality regardless of our normative positions. In particular, it is unclear how an imposition of force can be entirely avoided, though surely certain forms of violence—extrajudicial killings, brutal injuries, sexual assaults—in the garb of nation-building simply cannot be defended. Moreover, one can also make the establishment of national political order less painful than it would otherwise be.

Consider what the historiography of some European nations tells us about the less brutal acts of nation-making. In Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992), Linda Colley gives us an account of how the extremely contentious relationship between the Scots and the English kept impeding the creation of British nationhood, especially given the inferior positions that the Scots held in the English national imagination. In the end, the problems were in part resolved by making the Scots an equal partner of British imperialism in the colonies. Similarly, Eugen Weber (Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1976) shows how it took a century after the French Revolution for the French national identity, which was very Parisian in texture, to reach the Breton, Gascon, Basque, Catalan, and Corsican peasants, who were also objects of derision and condescension. The peasants showed regional, not national, patriotism. Via state-sponsored institutions, such as public schools and the army, they were brought into the national mainstream, but often reluctantly.

The point of these examples is to ask a question of Baruah’s materials: Is Delhi’s behavior in the Northeast an example of the generic processes of nation-making, or is there something singularly egregious about it? Of course, one could probe models of nation-building that minimized the use of force, and one can charge India with not following those processes, which could well be a valid analytic judgment. But to separate the Indian materials entirely from the well-known processes of nation-making attenuates the potential conceptual value of Baruah’s empirical materials.

A similar theoretical deficit marks Baruah’s treatment of democracy in the Northeast. He notes the remarkable fact that election turnouts in the Northeast have been among the highest in India, often breaching the 70% threshold and even reaching 80%. In comparison, average turnouts in India have rarely been higher than 60%. This raises an important paradox: If the Indian state has been so oppressive in the Northeast, why are Northeastern citizens voting in national elections so heavily? If they were only regionally driven and deeply upset with Delhi, one can perhaps understand why they would vote heavily for state assemblies and perhaps ignore national parliamentary elections. But that is manifestly not the case.

It may well be that the high turnouts do not indicate a sentimental unity with Delhi, but do they represent a pragmatic acceptance of Indian nationhood, as the cases of Scots vis-à-vis Britain and Bretons vis-à-vis France show? Even if the latter is an implausible interpretation, the abnormally high election turnouts, despite the claim of widespread oppression, require an analysis of what they signify. From the theoretical perspective of both nation-making and democracy, it is an opportunity missed.

In sum, Baruah’s book should be read for its hugely knowledgeable account of how a security anxiety affects the functioning of democracy. But one wonders how a comparative perspective, if deployed, might have generated a richer theoretical yield.