Sanjib Baruah’s In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast (published by Stanford University Press in 2020) compliments the line of thought and questions probed previously by both ‘India Against Itself’ (1999) and ‘Durable Disorder’ (2005). It can be read as the latest addition to his discursive intervention on India’s North-east. Outlining how the frontier region has meandered, mutated, and manoeuvred in the first two decades of the 21st century, the book elucidates the contemporary dents and folds in the region’s imprudently-knit political fabric. By appraising the rituals of democracy in the region, Baruah explicates what lies beyond a journalistic observation of the region and illuminates the weight of history that informs the contemporary political claims and configurations of the region. An interesting aspect of north-east India’s post-colonial politics is the major approval for certain colonial interventions and structures – the rule of difference and legal exceptionalism – by actors and stakeholders of the region. Despite the decolonial turn in theory, the political impulses of the frontier region, however, narrate a very different trajectory. From demands for the extension of the Sixth Schedule or the Inner Line to the aspirational claim to be incorporated into the constitutional category of Scheduled Tribe by several communities, the route and the telos of political mobilisation in the region is towards (and not against) the colonial categories of rule of exception that the postcolonial Indian state has inherited in its architecture of governance.
Confronting such idiosyncrasies and the historical feud of continuity and change, Baruah’s book primarily elaborates on the colonial ethnoterritorial frame, its postcolonial mutations, and the impact of the neo-liberal regime on the politics of the region. Abandoning an approach of appraising the region in the ‘national order of things’, something that easily gets essentialised in mainstream political science discourse, Baruah’s enterprise is historical in fervour and builds mostly from the contemporary intellectual archive on theory and as well as on the region.
Beginning with the colonial etymology of the ‘north-east’ as a directional category and its official incorporation in postcolonial policy discourse, the first chapter foregrounds the political and historical themes that ‘invent’ the frontier region – excluded areas, democratic deficit, national insecurity – followed by the troubled career of citizenship in the borderland state of Assam in the second chapter.
Highlighting how neo-liberal capital has performed in a region that is governed by both the rule of law as well as legal-political exceptionalism i.e. customary laws, the third chapter shows how creative patterns of accumulation, ownership, value-extraction, dispossession and exploitation have encapsulated the economic impulse of the region. Summarizing from anthropological studies of resource extraction in the region – coal mining and the rise of a nouveau rich in Meghalaya, the dam-building and its enabling enterprise in Arunachal Pradesh, and trends of emigration and the informal economy in Nagaland – it narrates how the grammar of the newer capital accumulation regime has been internalised by the native elites and how their intimate collaboration with big corporations has bred an aspirational native comprador class. This has parallelly created a regime of dispossession which is fragmented and elusive but is capable of disturbing the political equilibrium of social cohesion and underscores the topsy-turvy cocktail of identity politics of the region – the question of sub-citizenship being a figurative example.
The fourth chapter underlines the negotiations of sovereignty and political economy that have developed recently in the biography of the Naga insurgency and the politics of ceasefire and peace-making that has precipitated as a result. The fifth chapter offers an analysis of the discourse of insurgency and explains how the confrontation of legitimate with illegitimate forms of violence can be read as ‘a collision of national imaginaries.’ Baruah highlights the trajectory of both structural and spectacular violence and the history of symbol manipulation of Lachit Barphukan that has developed recently in the public imagination in Assam. Chapter six maps the ‘strange career’ of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and how despite being ordinary and not an emergency law, its life expectancy in the region ceases to diminish. The antimony between the security state and its bargain of political obligation is parasitic to the idea of democratic citizenship – and much of the region suffers from this hollow and precarious expectation of citizenship.
By glossing over the fact that ‘yesterday’s victims can be today’s oppressors,’ the book forwards a genealogy of democracy and citizenship and its evident vernacularization and the positive and negative externalities that follow up in the process. Building upon the many bargains occurring amongst the state, the institutions, capital and the body politic, Baruah enriches the theoretical career of democracy inferring from a close reading of the particular. Given the antinomies that entail and entrap individuals in modern democracies, the book concludes with the possibility of reimagining the political – as a starting point to enable the demos of a troubled periphery to depart from a philistine political existence.
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Unmilan Kalita is pursuing a Master’s in Political Science from the University of Delhi.