Authoritarian Accents

Sanjib Baruah describes Dr Bhupen Hazarika as not only Assam8217;s most popular lyricist and singer, but its foremost cultural icon. Baruah...

Sanjib Baruah describes Dr Bhupen Hazarika as not only Assam8217;s most popular lyricist and singer, but its foremost cultural icon. Baruah then goes on to look at some of Hazarika8217;s best-loved compositions and unpack their poetics of space, that is, the way in which these songs invoke for the listener an Assamese homeland. Through images that8217;d bring tears to the eyes of Assamese nationalists 8212; the river Brahmaputra, the mother, the martyrs of the struggle for liberation 8212; Hazarika conjures up a beloved country that cannot co-exist with the Indian nation in the world of realpolitik. Poetry and politics yield very different maps.

India8217;s ruling elites and policy-makers have a poor understanding of the Northeast. A lethal cocktail of wishful thinking, paranoia and sheer ignorance continues to drive the state8217;s operations in the region. Even the designation of such a politically, culturally and linguistically diverse and complex space by a single, empty name like 8220;The Northeast8221; 8212; Baruah calls it 8220;direction-based nomenclature8221;, comparable to Pakistan8217;s NWFP 8212; is an index of the Centre8217;s inability to come to grips with reality.

What do most Indians know about their Northeastern brethren? Tribals, monsoon, rainforests, tea, floods and insurgency: this laundry list, to most, sums up seven states and millions of people. The author8217;s pioneering work of political sociology and political economy goes a long way in throwing light on a part of the country that has, since Independence, housed some of the world8217;s longest-running low-intensity conflicts. Baruah8217;s essays ought to be prescribed reading in both the administrative and the military academies, where future bureaucrats and generals are being trained to rule a region that continues to be thinly penetrated by the institutional infrastructure of the state, and seriously at odds, if not at war, with the democratic political process.

How does India tolerate the exception of the Northeast, asks the author. The idea of 8220;the state of exception8221; is actually a very useful means of understanding the Northeast, where Indian democracy is authoritarian, law and order are reduced to mere counter-insurgency, federalism is cosmetic, citizens are subject to containment rather than government, and the nation breaks down at its own frontier. Aspects of this dire exceptionality are seen in Kashmir as well. The presence and role of the armed forces in the everyday administration of both the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir ought to have every believer in representative democracy and the rule of law balk at the prospect of allowing such zones of exception to persist in a nation-state like India, which prides itself on its constitutionally guaranteed rights, and its robust electoral cycle.

Even the name 8216;Northeast8217; is an index of the Centre8217;s inability to come to grips with reality

Baruah draws imaginatively from the work of James Scott, Uday Mehta, Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, from colonial and contemporary government records, from the regional press, from the accounts of ethnographers, naturalists and environmentalists, and from the propaganda literature of local mili-

tias, separatist groups and political parties, to piece together a snapshot of society in a state of 8220;durable disorder8221;. This is a politically important, intellectually challenging and academically rigorous book that deserves to be not just widely read, but seriously taught.