Acknowledging highland systems of governance

ON RECENT VISIT to Nagaland, a place that conjures up all sorts of disturbing stereotypes among many of us “plains people” of northern India, I had a number of humbling and clarifying moments. The beauty of this region was breathtaking. I was also moved by the nuanced ways in which the people had evolved their insightful institutions to preserve and harness their land, natural resources, and cultural heritage. It is clear that the Naga people, made-up of over a dozen ethnic groups described as “tribes”, have historically managed their affairs through processes suited to their environment and cultural roots. And they have done this while negotiating the machinations of a post-colonial government that has failed to evolve a framework for accommodating the cultural complexity of the Northeastern states. Of all I experienced during my stay in Nagaland, perhaps the most striking was the disconnect between the formal institutions of governance created by the Indian government from the 1950s onwards on the one hand, and those that continue to animate the lives of Naga communities in their day-to-day affairs. The former, which include governmental ministries, civil servants in their ever-proliferating departments, and now the burgeoning manifestations of “public-private partnerships,” seem to have no meaningful relationship with the Naga village councils, the deliberations that animate the “hohos” (village assembly halls), and networks of largely Baptist churches that hold sway over communities. There may be alliances between these institutions here and there, but there is little sustained overlap. This disconnect, between the formal legislative and developmental apparatus, and the popular institutions of politics, begs a fundamental question: In whom do the people of Nagaland (and dare I ask, all those who have historically been placed at the topographical and ethnic margins of mainstream democracy) place political legitimacy? My recent travels to India’s Northeast, and soon thereafter, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh have amplified this troubling question. As with the larger history of capitalism, democracy is perhaps characterised by a core-periphery dynamic. In the Indian context, this dynamic plays out in terms of the fundamental hegemony of those ideas that emerge out of the plains, or the populous cities of the lowlands. The highlands, far away from the rough and tumble of mainstream politics, have usually been at the receiving end of the modern state’s developmental onslaught. It would not be a stretch to argue that Indian policy-makers have generally displayed a “plain-centric” bias, i.e., in which an understanding of the socioeconomic attributes of plains people has served as the basis for policies often applied universally, and damagingly, in the highlands. The standard justification for this has been framed demographically, i.e., that the largest populations are concentrated in the plains. This is a simplistic view, because it is apathetic to the cultural, ecological, and topographical realities shaping the lives of people living in the highlands. Worse, this bias is fundamentally tilted in favor of an urban, capital-intensive, and environmentally disruptive notion of progress. Nowhere is this asymmetry between the political imagination of the plains and the highlands more apparent than in the Northeast. For starters, the Northeastern States are very different from each other, leading one to question the foundational rational for the creation of a single “Ministry of Development of Northeastern Region” in 2001. The needs of a state like Nagaland, which has its own history of ethnic and political marginalisation from the time of Nehru’s visit to the region in 1953, are different from those of many other northeastern regions. But the gaze from New Delhi blurs this distinction. Within Nagaland, life in Kohima is radically different from that of the rest of the state; and this would be the case elsewhere in the States of northeastern India. In a similar vein, it is not a stretch to argue that Uttarakhand, with its 12-year long history of political autonomy from Uttar Pradesh, is learning how difficult it is to evolve meaningful developmental models when the prevailing discourses (shaped by the inertia in this region’s erstwhile capital Lucknow, and now New Delhi) are based on their limited grasp of the complex relationship between the forests, hills, and people of this new state. Developmental initiatives like the MGNREGA, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, or most recently, the UIDAI’s Adhaar card system (which is supposed to facilitate “direct benefits transfers”) pose unique challenges in the highlands not always appreciated by policy makers in the plains. Uttarkhand is learning this the hard way. In an important book published recently called The Art of Not Being Governed, Yale University’s James C. Scott argues that throughout the world, people living in the uplands have adopted lifestyles, livelihood strategies, and agricultural practices starkly different from those of the plains. More fundamentally, these communities have resisted the formal institutional apparatus of the modern state in remarkable and creative ways because they find it oppressive and impracticable for their needs. Though the book focuses on the countries of Southeast Asia, Scott’s chief concern is with the universal upland phenomenon of the “cultural refusal of lowland patterns,” those dictated by homogenising governmental structures. Intertwined with his description of state avoidance by hill people, Scott also outlines a fundamental critique of conventional notions of agriculture, state formation, and civilisation that, he argues, are largely irrelevant to those who inhabit the upper margins of the modern developmental state. A extrapolation of Scott’s analysis would be that village councils of Nagaland (or the “zumsas” of Sikkim, and other democratic formations in India’s northeastern higlands), which draw sustenance from the immediacy of grassroots engagement and communitarian values, remain vital and legitimate political arrangements for the tribal communities they serve. And with a grand total of one Member of Parliament from the entire state of Nagaland, the cognitive gap between this highland State and New Delhi is unlikely to change any time soon! This notwithstanding, it is gratifying to know that deliberative democracy continues to flourish at India’s margins, whether it does so at its centre or not.