The forbidden land

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission, having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition/ between two peoples fanatically at odds/ with their different diets and incompatible gods” — Auden’s poem on India’s partition brilliantly skewers administrative logic, the way states order people’s fates for their own convenience. That arrogance has guided India’s policy towards the northeastern states in general, lumped together and largely ignored. But even worse than the state’s habitual inattention is the state’s deliberate inattention, enshrined in policy. Arunachal Pradesh has had to bear the burden of India’s romantic notions as a sealed-off, pristine land where tribes live in noble harmony with forests. Nehru’s tribal panchsheel warned against “over-administering these areas” and wanted to “judge results not by statistics or the amount of money spent, but by the quality of human character that is evolved”.

Even those great change-agents, the Christian missionaries, were not permitted to work in Arunachal Pradesh, so social services are dismal. Infrastructure was not developed because of the anxiety over China’s claim to the state — and there being no lateral road out of Arunachal, all movement had to be routed through Assam. Transacting with the rest of India, not to mention the outside world, was next to impossible, leaving the state in an infantile stage of development.

So Arunachal MP Tapir Gao’s exasperation over the failure to bring railway connectivity to the state, with the aside that perhaps China might be of more help, should be a stinging reality check. Despite the prime minister’s assurances that Arunachal is an integral part of India, its integration with India has not been a priority, and the state is caught in our strategic tug of war with China. It should be obvious that developing local skills and entrepreneurship, bringing investment and tourism opportunities and shoring up social and physical infrastructure is the only way we can lay credible claim to the state. And as Gao’s statement suggests, the railways are of great metaphorical significance to us, and a place not served by the great rail network is clearly a place consigned to obscurity. About time things changed.