New Delhi must realise that the region cannot be developed as a bridge
to Asean countries until it is first groomed as a bridge to the rest of India.
The present neglect hurts all.
Whatever its cause, the
panic-stricken exodus from several southern and western cities has brought home
to Indians how many of their compatriots from the seemingly remote North-East
live in their midst. It’s a region not to be neglected, not least because, as
Shashi Tharoor points out in Pax Indica, “India’s North-East is the bridge
between two subregions of Asia — South Asia and South-East Asia.”
Now, it’s the domestic imperative
that demands attention. As hostile propaganda is curbed and fears fade, there
will soon be need for special trains running in the other direction bringing
people back to Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai and wherever else
they fled from. Integration demands two-way traffic. If the North-East is in
the rest of the country, the rest of the country must also be in the
North-East. That also applies to Jammu and Kashmir. Any region that is allowed
to pull up its drawbridge and deny access to the rest of the community imperils
the entire country.
India’s unity owes much more to
incidental factors like the market economy and what is called soft power than
to political planning. As Mr Jaswant Singh has pointed out, India was always a
nation but never a state until colonial times. British rule created the modern
state with the infrastructure of governance to hold it physically together. But
alien rulers could not create emotional unity. That came after Independence
with the imperatives of voluntary interaction. The spread of Hindi after the
self-immolation of anti-Hindi fanatics is an obvious example. The few who
voluntarily spoke Hindi then in the smaller towns of Tamil Nadu had served in
(or been connected in some way with) the defence forces. Today, virtually everyone
in the Deccan States revels in understanding and enjoying Hindi without
inhibition.
That is not on account of
compulsory school instruction but because of Bollywood. No one wants to be left
out of the magic that Hindi films weave. Radio and television have taken
advantage of this to strengthen the spell with an infelicitous but effective
mixture of English, folk Hindi and the local language to reach out to society’s
simplest sections. The English and heavily Sanskritised Hindi programmes of
Doordarshan and All India Radio previously excluded them. Now, the medium
speaks in their tongue, and is itself the message.
It’s not the end of the story.
Being Government agencies, Doordarshan and All India Radio treated the profit
motive with disdain. But cable television channels survive on advertising to an
extent that ads often irritatingly take precedence over entertainment,
information and even intelligence. But whatever may be thought of it on
aesthetic or intellectual grounds, Indian TV advertising artfully blends song
and dance to appeal to society’s lowest common — and most numerous —
denominator.
Three North-eastern towns
—Guwahati, Shillong and Gangtok —are rapidly attracting people from the
countryside. Aizawl is next. Kohima, Itanagar, Agartala and Imphal lag behind,
mainly because of poor communications. That is not an obstacle for the
electronic media whose content confirms another unsuspected fact of Indian
life: We are unashamedly consumerist. All those years of socialist self-denial
when ‘conspicuous consumption’ was regarded as a sin, a ‘careerist’ was almost
a criminal, and ‘import substitution’ the national dharma were based on
illusions.
Indians want as much as they can
get of all they can get, which explains the rush to migrate to the US. Just as
Jawaharlal Nehru’s reading of Indian preferences was based solely on his own
highly cultivated sensitivities, Mahatma Gandhi’s objections to universal
education (introduced in Baroda by Gaekwad Sayaji Rao III) and to railways
(established by the British) reflected private fads and no realistic assessment
of national needs or national desires. Both education and railways, Gandhi
thought, would sully his idyllic Ram Rajya. Perhaps they would. But they were essential
and inevitable instruments of the modernity that alone converts a nation into a
state and creates the sense of inter-dependence that the ‘Unity in Diversity’
slogan demands.
Without education, people from
Assam or Manipur would not have found employment in Bangalore and Pune; without
trains, they would not have been able to escape the violence they feared,
albeit unnecessarily. If education reduces emotional and intellectual
distances, roads and railways reduce physical distances. Globalisation is the
celebration of communication. The train that drives through an open-air market
in a crowded Bangkok suburb marks the triumph of communication and commerce.
India can capitalise on both by
making the most of the territorial advantage of its land bridge to the dynamic
10-country Association of South-East Asian Nations. China’s trade with Asean is
about $300 billion, India’s is expected to touch $80 billion this year. China
has surpassed Japan as the biggest provider of economic assistance; and invests
substantially in Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. Cambodia and Myanmar are
heavily dependent on the Chinese economy. While the Chinese-sponsored Greater
Mekong Subregion scheme has made an impact, the Mekong-Ganga project, which
India launched in 2000, has not.
Nothing has come of the hopes
that were once voiced of regular flights from Imphal or Guwahati to South-East
Asian cities. Plans to revive the wartime Stillwell Road from Arunachal Pradesh
to China’s Yunan province via northern Myanmar remain just plans. The highly
successful India-Asean car rally of 2004 has not been repeated. As Mr Tharoor
notes, “Projects to create a Delhi-Hanoi rail link and a trilateral highway
linking India, Myanmar and Thailand have made little headway; had they done so,
they could also have encouraged Bangladesh to join the bandwagon, instead of
remaining a sole obstacle to India's eastern connectivity.”
A minimal tentative beginning has
been made. Mr Manmohan Singh’s ‘North-Eastern Region Vision 2020’ project
marked some advance in thinking. So did setting up a coordinating Ministry to
develop the region, focussing on infrastructure such as road and rail links,
power generation, the services sector and the region’s rich biodiversity. The
new road from Tamu in Manipur to Kalemyo in Myanmar marks progress, as does the
scheme to connect Kolkata with Sittwe port, the old Akyab, also in Myanmar.
But much more needs to be done.
Above all, New Delhi must realise that the North-East can’t be developed as a
bridge to Asean until it is developed as a bridge to the rest of India. It’s
neglected isolation hurts the 45 million North-easterners as much as it does
the rest of India.
Sunanda K Datta – Ray
Business & Investment Opportunities
YourVietnamExpert is a division of Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd, Incorporated in Singapore since 1994. As Your Business Companion, we propose a range of services in Strategy, Investment and Management, focusing Healthcare and Life Science with expertise in ASEAN. We also propose Higher Education, as a bridge between educational structures and industries, by supporting international programmes. Many thanks for visiting www.yourvietnamexpert.com and/or contacting us at contact@yourvietnamexpert.com
No comments:
Post a Comment