Academic studies of northeastern India are rare, partly because of government-imposed limits on access to this isolated area, especially during recurrent counterinsurgency campaigns. In any case, the region is viewed in New Delhi as peripheral in culture and economics, if not strategically, the latter due to the ongoing border dispute with China.
Sanjib Baruah has the great advantage of being both an insider of Assamese origin and an outsider by reason of his training as a political scientist at Bard College in New York State. His thesis in this book is that the policy of the government of India toward tribal insurrection—a skillful combination of using brute force, according statehood to new tribally defined states carved out of Assam, and co-opting rebel leaders—has succeeded during the 50 years or more since Indian independence in containing these “independentist” movements. But this has been at a heavy cost to democracy through the creation of a virtual parallel government by the authoritarian and autonomous centrally directed security apparatus made up of the army, border police, home ministry, and intelligence. This has led to toleration of what he calls “durable disorder” as part of normal politics. This argument is comparable to Paul Brass's finding that violent anti-Muslim riots and pogroms have become a normal part of city politics in North India and the condition of Kashmir since 1989.
For an American reader, the conflict between tribally organized practitioners of shifting or slash-and-burn agriculture and land-hungry settlers from the lowlands is strongly reminiscent of the history of warfare between Native Americans and European settlers along the ever-moving western frontier. Only in the South Asian case, British colonial and Indian postcolonial policies of cultural protection for the indigenous peoples have produced the opposite outcome: State legislatures, civil service positions, government contracts, and other benefits such as the right to own land are almost entirely reserved for the tribals. Newcomers, whom Baruah calls denizens, are regarded as second-class citizens.
But the seemingly inexorable tide of legal and illegal immigration from Bangladesh, somewhat like the Mexican reconquista of the American Southwest, has driven both the tribes, beginning with the Nagas in the 1950s, and even the indubitably Indian Assamese into armed revolt. They rightly fear becoming minorities in their own homelands. What Baruah underplays is that the Bangladeshis are overwhelmingly Muslim, which adds a religious dimension to the dispute, as the Assamese are a majority Hindu, and, one might add, the Nagas are largely Christian by conversion by American missionaries.
Beyond consideration of the local history and context, Baruah raises questions of broader import for political science. Like many of his generation influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Ernest Gellner, and Benedict Anderson, Baruah is disdainful of the “old modernization paradigm” (p. 175) centered on “nation building” and political development by centralized or quasi-federal state bureaucracies, and he accuses the discipline of a “state-centric bias” (p. 143). He even quotes Keniche Ohmae approvingly that “the nation state has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional unit for organizing human activity…. It represents no genuine, shared community of economic interests” (p. 217).
Yet, when it comes to the alternative paradigm that he urges us to imagine, we are presented with a borderless utopia in which migrants, ideas, and investment flow unimpeded across regions in a benignly globalized world without political consequences. Or perhaps he has a private hankering for the goal of some of the insurgents: a new independent region of eastern India plus northern Myanmar (Burma).
Most of the insurgent groups give at least lip service to socialism, but historically that has required a powerful, centralized state with a planning apparatus, not easily reconcilable with local autonomy and cultural differences. However, I agree with Baruah that the record of more than 50 years of periodic counterinsurgency campaigns causing massive human rights violations, and punctuated by almost meaningless elections, is not a pretty picture. We do need to imagine some form of shared sovereignty, or perhaps dual citizenship, in order to envision long-lasting solutions to civil strife as in Kashmir, Nagaland, and Sri Lanka.
One might wish that Baruah had been a little more comparative in his analysis, and also that he had provided the reader with a map of this complexly bounded region, and perhaps some account of the source of the insurgents' sophisticated weapons. But his book nonetheless represents a sound contribution to an understanding of the “durable disorder” of northeast Indian politics.
