Author: Duncan McDuie-Ra, UNSW

Northeast India is populated by diverse ethnic groups, many of which are classified as Scheduled Tribes with historical ties to Myanmar, China and other locales outside India.

Since India’s independence in 1947, citizens and commentators have variously viewed the northeast frontier as a secessionist badland, the front line between India and hostile neighbours, a colourful slab of exotica and a curious geographic appendage.

But in the last decade-and-a-half a series of peace agreements, state-led development projects and increased migration flows out of the frontier have altered the dynamics between the Indian heartland and the northeast. These changes offer key insights into changes taking place in contemporary India.

The Indian government plans to transform the northeast from a frontier to a corridor linking India to the rest of Asia. The North Eastern Region Vision 2020 which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launched in 2008 promises to increase the region’s connections and create employment, encourage private investment, increase border trade and promote tourism. At its heart, Vision 2020 seeks to use the region’s natural resources and hydro-power potential, and create an hospitable climate for investment and border trade. This has major consequences for the environment in the frontier region as natural resources that were previously difficult to reach have become more accessible. The rapid changes taking place include mega hydro-power projects in Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and Sikkim, and mining in Assam (coal), Meghalaya (coal, limestone, and uranium), and Nagaland (coal). There is deforestation throughout the region, but especially in Assam, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, and other damage from highway construction, bio-prospecting, erosion and flooding.

The resulting environmental degradation has led to local-level activism, an occurrence which is it tempting to read through a ‘state-versus-frontier’ or ‘state-versus-ethnic-minority’ rubric. The situation poses complex dilemmas for environmentalists and external activists seeking to unproblematically equate ethnic minority status with a deeper ecological sensibility and anti-development worldview, and further complicates the way ethnic minorities have related to the Indian state and ideas of nation-building.

Internal migration from the northeast to Indian cities has also dramatically increased over the last five years. Given that rejecting India is an important part of tribal identity in the frontier, shaped by decades of secessionist politics and occupation by Indian military and paramilitary forces, the attraction of Indian cities for ethnic minorities deserves closer attention. There are six main push and pull factors spurring migration from the frontier: refuge from conflict, better livelihood opportunities, changing aspirations, changing attitudes toward India, aggressive labour recruitment and improved transport connections.

Equally compelling are the labour markets in cities such as Bengaluru, Delhi and Hyderabad. In places like Delhi, attempts to transform the city are driven by the desire to fashion a ‘global city’, and key to this desire is the creation of exclusionary spaces: gated neighbourhoods, restricted-entry shopping malls and restricted-entry parks which marginalise poor, working class, and migrant communities. The focus on exclusionary spaces does not take into account the ways these spaces offer inclusion in the city for other marginal communities, especially tribal migrants. Tribal migrants covet the employment opportunities in these neo-liberal capital spaces, and employers in these spaces desire tribal labour. The majority of migrants find work in shopping malls, spas, restaurants and call centres, where employers desire tribal labour for its de-nationalised aesthetic—its ‘un-Indianness’.

It is not just ‘being tribal’ that matters in the heartland cities, but challenging what being tribal means in contemporary India. Public representations of tribal people from the northeast continue to be mired in colonial anthropology. The stereotype of the exotic tribal people from the pure and unspoiled remote hill country persists. But tribal people are linked to global networks in ways that bypass the rest of India, including the influences of global Christianity, knowledge of Korean and other East Asian popular cultures, adoption of East Asian fashion and hairstyles (particularly Korean and Japanese), and a rejection of archetypal Indian pastimes in favour of basketball, skateboarding and graffiti art. These components equip tribal migrants with a feeling of sophistication that is at odds with the ways they are viewed by mainstream Indian society.

The increased connections between the frontier and the heartlands also reveals ignored dynamics of racism within India. Racism underpins the ways the frontier itself is governed, justifying military occupation, and the ways that tribals experience urban India as migrants, through harassment, discrimination and violence. Tribal people are targets of sexual violence, face severe discrimination in urban India’s housing markets, and are harassed in their everyday encounters in India’s cities.

In the standard narrative, racism is something that foreigners do to Indians, not something of which Indians themselves are capable. The 2001 Bradford riots in the UK and violent attacks on Indian students in the US and Australia were widely covered in the Indian media and abroad. Receiving less coverage, but certainly not completely neglected, are the abuses against Indian domestic workers and labourers in the Gulf, and violence against Indians in Fiji. Racist violence, abuse and the denial of individual rights in these locations are very real and indefensible, yet the preoccupation with this makes introspection on racism within India very difficult.

India’s economy is growing rapidly, and the country’s frontiers are acquiring a new value as corridors to markets, capital and resources in China and Southeast Asia. The opportunities, ruptures and grievances brought about by the creation of corridors provide extensive research possibilities. While transnational migration receives a lot of scholarly and policy attention, the changing dynamics of internal migration, especially from transforming frontiers, can be equally disorienting for the migrants themselves, who are disrupting conventional urbanisation narratives.

These migrations also raise interesting questions around citizenship. In the case of tribal communities in the northeast, citizenship has long been viewed with suspicion and even hostility, yet for many young tribal people citizenship now provides access to growing heartland cities. Studies of belonging in the Indian diaspora dominate popular and scholarly narratives, yet for ethnic minorities the scenario is very different. Limited discussion of race and racism within India leaves questions of belonging for ethnic minorities under-analysed, in favour of a macro-racial discourse drawing on the colonial past and the transnational present.

Duncan McDuie-Ra is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the University of New South Wales.

This article appeared in the East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Ideas from India’