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Conflict and development in

Northeast India
Stories from Assam
16 May 2021

Neo-capitalist development in the form of resource extraction in the North

Eastern region of India has continuously expanded through mining,
hydroelectric power plants, and militarised infrastructure, while basic
necessities remain unmet. This has created a complex field for the
contestation of identities, land sovereignty, and conflict.

Article by Binita Kakati

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India’s North Eastern Region (NER) includes the states of Assam, Arunachal,
Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Pradesh, Sikkim and Tripura.
Together, they represent a distinct geographic, cultural, political, and
administrative entity. The area, which is part of the Eastern Himalayas, is also of
geo-strategic significance as it shares 90% of its borders with four countries –
Bangladesh, Bhutan, Tibet Autonomous Region/China and Myanmar, and also
with Nepal – and is connected to India by a narrow piece of land called the
Siliguri corridor, sometimes referred to as the ‘Chicken’s neck’.

The NER has the dubious reputation for including some of Asia’s most
militarised and politically volatile societies. It also has the highest number of
indigenous peoples in India, characterised by self-determination movements
that have taken the form of armed struggle against the Indian state. The NER is
also a biodiversity hotspot, including the mighty Brahmaputra River and its
many tributaries, natural reserves of oil, coal, gas and other minerals – all of
which provide another dimension to ethnic struggles and self-determination
movements.

Seventy years after independence, the states in the NER still lack basic services,
including health and education, occasionally receiving news coverage
highlighting the human rights violations that have affected the civilian
population during the years of conflict. The Union of India is a federation of
states, but the central government dictates much of the policy in the NER, and
neo-capitalist development in the form of resource extraction has continuously
expanded through mining, hydroelectric power plants, and militarised
infrastructure, while basic necessities remain unmet. This has created a
complex field for the contestation of identities, land sovereignty, and conflict.

This essay starts with brief background to the NER and goes on to look at the
most recent interventions regarding development and resource-extractive
projects in Assam and what these mean for an area that has already suffered
years of political neglect accompanied by militarisation.

A brief history of India’s North East Region

The connection between the NER and the rest of India is relatively recent, dating
back to 1826 with the signing the Treaty of Yandaboo, when Burma ceded
Assam, Manipur, Jaintia hills, Tripura and Cachar to the British at the end of the
First Anglo-Burmese War. Even under the British, the region was mostly seen as
providing a ‘buffer zone’ from Burma and China. This perspective continued
after independence and was one reason for the major army deployment and
militarised infrastructure in the region.

The integration of NER into the rest of the country was ‘abrupt ’, with no prior
history. The states were integrated and demarcated into ad hoc units for
administrative convenience, principally economic and resource planning and
security calculations. The region’s own politics or the political aspirations of
fragmented tribes were marginalised within the larger political discourse, partly
due to their small numbers.

This situation has given rise to conflict, to which the Indian government has
responded by imposing controversial laws such as the Armed Forces Special
Powers Act 1958 (AFSPA), which allows armed personnel to conduct arrests,
searches and encounters without a warrant. The actions permitted under the
Act are not subject to the law of the land and violations cannot be pursued in the
courts. Currently, AFSPA is enforced in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur,
Meghalaya Mizoram and Nagaland, and has not been conducive to
development, peace or stability.

The insurgency and the consequent counter-insurgency measures became a

part of everyday life . The attendant human rights violations, combined with
sluggish economic growth in the region, has paralysed development, further
enabling illicit economic enterprises in an already militarised zone. The
response of the central government has included ill-considered approaches to
conflict management and the injection of development funds into the oil, tea
and coal sectors, all of which are concentrated on resource extraction. Together,
these have nurtured a climate of ‘sustained low intensity conflict’ , which
allows many activities to fly under the radar and for government officials,
political elite and armed rebels to control their respective sub-states. In
conversations in Assam, a young Mising friend said:

‘… they cut the young trees! They don’t even wait for them to grow a little. We
never cut young trees. Of course, they [the state officials] know that there is
illicit mining. They won’t be able to carry out these activities without the
knowledge of the state officials. But they only think of their benefit – now’.

This sentiment also resonated in Sikkim about how development projects affect
and change landscapes and people’s experiences. A Lepcha activist in Sikkim
explained that he has been depicted as espousing ‘anti-development’ by
opposing state-backed development projects, accused of wanting to push the
region into backwardness, to which his response is:

‘We live in hilly terrain, what does a bureaucrat making plans in Delhi know
about the geography of a region like this and how large-scale projects affect us?
The dynamite they are using to blow up the forests causes landslides every
season. The soil becomes loose. We don’t cut down trees. We cut them when we
need to use [the timber] to build our homes but for that, there is a process
through which we choose a tree, we pray to it and then we cut it. We aren’t
against development – this branding is done to make it easy to dismiss our
concerns. The Teesta is a powerful river and I understand why they want to
harness it but you cannot disrupt the flow of the river wherever you want. These
projects are funded by the World Bank and the like and are implemented with
the goals of getting carbon credits, but what do we get from it?’

A few hours later the valley rang with the sound of explosions – to make new
roads into the valley. As we sat listening to birdsong and people’s stories, the
deafening explosion felt even louder in the knowledge that nature seems to
exist only to be taken.

History of resource extraction

‘Tez dim, kintu tel nidieu’, meaning ‘We will give our blood, but we won’t give our
oil’.

These words came to signify the Assam Agitation when in 1980, Dulal Sarma, a
leader of the All Assam Students Union (AASU), slashed his chest with a blade
and drew out blood to write these words across a street in Guwahati. The words
resonated with the rebels who made opposition to resource extraction central
to the armed rebellion.

The Assam Agitation began in 1979, with a number of demands – primarily

economic development, recognition of cultural identity and illegal migration
that was causing displacement of farmland, and resource extraction. Assam has
historically had two large industries – tea and oil – with one of the country’s
oldest refineries located in Digboi. Yet a region that at the time of independence
had a stronger economy than the rest of the country, soon afterwards suffered
low GDP, poor infrastructure and lack of access to education and health care,
leading to very high rates of infant and maternal mortality. These factors
contributed to the Assam Agitation, which started as a students’ movement and
soon became an armed conflict against the Indian state. It continued for six
years and cost a total of 885 lives. The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA)
was the main active group, along with smaller groups such as the National
Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB). While initially the armed rebel groups
enjoyed mass support, the situation soon led to a parallel economy involving
kidnappings and arms smuggling. The Indian government launched several
operations to quell the armed opposition, including Operation Rhino and
Bajrang. The last was Operation All Clear, which was conducted in collaboration
with the Bhutanese army.

By late 1990s it was considered that the armed rebellion in Assam had officially
ended, but factions continued to exist. After many members of the ULFA
surrendered (SULFA), the government mobilised to murder supposed
sympathisers. Those years were known as ‘Secret Killings of Assam’, whereby
people who were considered to sympathise with the cause were kidnapped or
shot by state-backed police or surrendered militants. Those years created a
generalised sense of fear, and many questions remain unanswered for the
families of the disappeared.

Whose land is it? Contextualising citizenship and

indigenous rights
In 2019 the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which excluded Muslims from
legal frameworks to obtain citizenship, prompted nationwide protests. However,
in Assam and Tripura where the protests started, the issue was not about the
exclusion of Muslims but rather the outright rejection to granting citizenship to
any immigrants regardless of their religion. The country was confronted with
this narrative of the NER, where Assam became the pivot through which the
CAA was conceived and later implemented. The CAA followed an arduous
process of implementing the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. In
the final list, an estimated 1.9 million people were excluded, a disproportionate
number of whom were Hindus. The CAA was brought in by the ruling right-wing
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) to reinstate those omitted from the register – but
only if they were Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jains, Parsis or Sikh, not if they were
Muslim. This would effectively reinstate 90,000 of the 1.9 million and pave the
way for others to seek citizenship.

The question of citizenship and indigenous rights has a long history in the NER
with its distinct cultural, social, racial and linguistic identity that has shaped its
historical struggle to become a part of the imagination of the Union of India.
Most states, including Assam, have had a history of armed rebellion and the
assertion of indigenous identity. These movements have also shaped the fears
of indigenous populations being displaced and alienated from their land –
something that has indeed happened through development projects,
uncontrolled migration and even on the pretext of expanding conservation
areas. This struggle contributed not only to people’s stance on the CAA but also
to the invisibility of their narrative in the national discourse. Sanjib Baruah
writes ‘There is a long history of resistance to colonial and postcolonial rulers
treating their territory as land without people – or land with barely any people’.
The region and its people were considered a ‘homogenous, undifferentiated
mass’ which would better serve the Indian Union through resource extraction or
occupation.

Another reason for the longstanding Assam Agitation and armed rebellion with
the Indian state was over the questions of mass immigration from Bengal and
East Bengal. At the time of partition, the leadership in India decided that Assam
(which then included Meghalaya and Mizoram) was to go to East Pakistan since
it shares no border with India. The fear of becoming a cultural and linguistic
minority in a Muslim-majority nation prompted the Assamese people to seek to
become a part of the Indian Union. It was under the leadership of the chief
minister Gopinath Bordoloi, along with Gandhi, that this took place.

Soon after independence, immigration from the new country of Bangladesh was
inevitable, especially into Assam and Tripura with their porous border. The
backlash from Assam came in as early as 1950s but since the region was not
fully understood by New Delhi, such concerns were not addressed. In 1978
India’s Chief Election Officer spoke publicly of the ‘large-scale inclusions of
foreign nationals in the electoral rolls’ . In the by-elections held in Mangaldoi
in the same year, it came to light that there was a phenomenal rise in voters,
which was attributed to the inclusion of illegal migrants from Bangladesh in the
electoral rolls. The student bodies in Assam asked the Indira Gandhi
government to postpone the elections until an agreement was reached on
deleting foreigners from the electoral rolls. The Nellie Massacre took place on 18
February 1983 days after the Assembly elections. There had been isolated
incidents of violence and the Assam police had cited Nellie as a “troubled”
spot . The official narrative claims that Tiwa, Lalung and Assamese tribesmen
descended from the hills and over the course of a few hours massacred the
people in Nellie and a few neighbouring villages. Official numbers state a total of
2,191 lives were lost.

The victims were Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh. The survivors of the
massacre distinctly remember the villages being cordoned off for months and
for at least 24 hours before the massacre took place, and that none of their
Assamese neighbours were among those wielding daos or machetes. This begs
the question of who participated in the massacre. The Tewary Commission
Report suggested the involvement of the RSS, the youth wing of the BJP. Is it not
too far-fetched to imagine that political parties thrived on the chaos their own
policies had created. Subsequent governments have treated the region as a
field to secure their own seats in the parliament, which shows that the region
has not only functioned as a “disturbed area” but one in which the
continuation of disorder has been encouraged to benefit those in power to
retain and maintain their power. While migration from partition is a continuing
process, the lack of development in the region and the historical atrocities
experienced by local people creates the field for ethnic violence.

The Assam Agitation fed off some of these tensions and only came to an end
with the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985. It was decided that ‘foreigners
who came to Assam on or after March 25, 1971’ (the cut-off date for the rest of
the country had been set at 1951) would be detected and expelled. Its Clause 6
said: ‘Constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards, as may be
appropriate, shall be provided to protect, preserve and promote the culture,
social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people’. The BJP came to
power on the promise of implementing the Assam Accord in ‘letter and spirit ’,
which the CAA violated.

Leading up to the CAA in 2019, fear was again mounting that the indigenous
population in the NER would lose their culture, identity and land. At present,
Assamese is the first language of 48% of the population; many feel this
foretold a future as dismal as Tripura where the indigenous population have
been reduced to 30 per cent and have lost more than 40% of their land to
migrants. It is automatically assumed that the fears arise from xenophobia,
which not the case as land has a particular significance for communities who
eke a living out of subsistence farming. The fear is not about religion or the
‘other’ but rather a tangible fear of losing their living and way of life in a context
where the state offers them no protection.

In an interview , Dr Walter Fernandes of Northeastern Social Research Centre,

describes the problem as economic, revolving around the question of land. He
emphasises that religious persecution is not the primary cause for migration
from Bangladesh but rather economic conditions and high population density,
which makes migration essential to the ‘demographic balancing process’,
noting that ‘most come and occupy what is known as common land which is two
thirds of the land in Assam. The CAA paves the way for further immigration
which will pose a threat to the land, language and culture and the whole social
system. That can mean ethnic conflict’.

The region’s historical struggle is also an extension of India’s colonial past.

Armed rebellion from the borderlands against the state existed even during
colonial times and the troubled post-colonial integration of the NER with the
rest of the country has never fit into the ‘standard narrative of democracy in
India’ combined with draconian laws such as the AFSPA. As early as 1980,
academics and activists were making the argument that the region suffered
internal colonialism. This idea was also the basis of the ideology of the ULFA.
The unfulfilled promises of the Assam Accord created the political space for the
rise of the ULFA, which started as an attempt to ‘avenge the perceived betrayal
of the Assamese people by the central government’ .

The loud protests in December 2019, after years of historic marginalisation,

have therefore hit at the only aspect the people believe they have retained –
their identity. The perception of threat is shared across the NER. Indigenous
people in the borderlands face the struggle of establishing and preserving the
integrity of their cultural identity. Most communities in the region are
subsistence farmers with no constitutional or legislative means to guarantee
ownership of their land. The CAA was viewed as paving the way for uncontrolled
inroads into their lands through demographic changes which would also affect
their political rights.

Development and extraction

‘This development feels like an invasion!’ – Mamang Dai

Apart from the CAA, government decisions to expand resource extraction in the
region have also involved increasing securitisation. Most of these projects
threaten to damage sensitive ecological and biodiversity zones. Kikon writes
about how the nineteenth-century discovery of oil and coal in the region and
resource politics have shaped people’s lives, with militarisation and violence
becoming part of the construction of the region and of people’s lives.
Development and the exploration of resources go hand in hand ideologically,
creating ‘enclaves’ of health, prosperity and safety facilitated by the resource-
extraction industries. These zones are also militarised, but to protect them from
the outside – the people for whom the project was intended.

In January 2020, the Government of India released notification of the draft law
for Environment Impact Assessment 2020, which gave rise to public concerns
about various provisions that would allow industries to avoid environmental
accountability. The draft notification allowed industries that have violated
environmental laws to continue operating by paying a penalty after the event.
The new notification also inverted the ‘precautionary principle’ , which was
previously fundamental to India’s environmental approach and allowed for an
initial assessment of the environmental impact of projects. The notification
made provisions for industries to be exempted from public hearing clearance or
consultation with the people affected, or with state-level bodies. This is of
importance in the NER, as many indigenous tribes live in protected areas and
would possibly be displaced by development projects. For example, in the
public hearing on the Dibang dam, 99% of the speakers from tribal communities
who live in the area proposed for the dam opposed the project. The Dibang
Valley projects are also estimated to submerge 4,577.84 hectares of
biodiversity-rich forest area and have an impact on areas downstream,
including the Dibru-Saikhowa National Park in Assam. Since 2007, there have
been protests by the Students Union and Akhil Gogoi, an activist who has been
imprisoned since December 2019 by the National Investigative Agency under
the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) – another piece of legislation that
has been widely used to incarcerate activists and dissenters.

In May 2020, a gas well operated by a government-owned subsidiary company

– Oil India Ltd. – had a blowout in Baghjan, Assam. Two weeks later the blowout
became a blaze that engulfed the region as the oil well was located between a
wetland and a national park. The leakages caused irreparable ecological
damage. Official documents later showed that the company expanded
operations into the ecologically sensitive zone without the public hearings
mandated by the environmental law in force at that time.

In the same month, the Assam Forest Department issued a fine for Rs. 43.25
crore to Coal India (the subsidiary of a state-owned company) for having carried
out illegal mining in a reserved forest for 16 years. Soon after, The National
Board for Wildlife granted approval to Northeastern Coalfields (NECF), part of
Coal India, for coal mining in Dehing-Patkai forest reserve, thus legitimising
mining deemed illegal by the High Court. Soon after, the Twitter campaign
#SaveAmazonOfEast from the ‘coal mafia’ began. In July, the Assam state
government passed an ordinance to curtail land-use norms in order to
facilitate rapid industrialisation. The Union Ministry for Environment, Forest and
Climate Change (MoEFCC) gave clearance for the extension of drilling and
testing of hydrocarbons at seven locations by OIL under the Dibru-Saikhowa
National Park area. The area also includes the Maguri-Motapong wetland area.

In July 2020, the government announced an ordinance that would allow the
conversion of land for micro, small and medium enterprises to set up industries
without the need for any license or clearance, raising fears about the
expropriation of indigenous people’s land. Since 2015, Patanjali, one of the
largest businesses in India with annual sales of $1.6 billion in 2018, has acquired
approximately 1485.6 hectares of land to open up industries, flying in the teeth
of popular protests. In an interview, one of the factory managers revealed that
large tracts of forests had been cleared in elephant ‘corridors’ displacing herds
of wild elephants. Based on interviews conducted as part of my fieldwork in
December 2019, the company has also formed an illicit economy in
collaboration with government officials for tracking and procuring protected
species of plants from reserved forests and conservation sites. This kind of
network is also seen in areas where illegal mining is rampant , often in
collaboration with state officials and the political elite.

These events put into perspective the different ways in which development is
manipulated in resource-rich frontier regions to serve extractive industries or in
collaboration with local elite to form illicit economies. Both scenarios function
outside legal frameworks or create increasing militarisation to change them.
Academics in the region such as Sanjib Baruah have shown how some social
sectors were beginning to see the reality of the ‘slow violence’ of health risks
associated with air and water pollution that extraction projects inflicted on local
communities.

In conversation with the members of the Mising community, regarding an agro-

forestry project in the region focused on livelihood generation and spearheaded
by a non-government organisation (NGO), they expressed their fear of being
displaced once the planting of trees starts. Over time many communities living
on the edge of a forest have faced displacement when the government has
decided to expand into ‘protected areas’; in most cases these areas become the
sites of illicit mining, poaching, and timber logging, with the knowledge of forest
officials and often in collaboration with them. Categories of ‘protected areas’
and the legal provisions governing them have over the years been used to
displace communities from their land. Kikon writes that he imposition of laws
 such as the AFSPA and use of the terms such as ‘disturbed area’ and ‘suspicion’
have created an environment of mistrust and intimidation – there is one armed
personnel for every ten people living in the NER.

In the sort of intervention seen in the NER, the state is seen as the guardian of
the assets of the region. Mcduie-ra, writes about how insurgency or the armed
rebellion in the region is seen as being connected to the lack of development,
with the World Bank declaring that poverty and lack of development are among
the factors contributing to the instability – the prevailing assumptions being
that ‘the northeast is poor because of the conflict or there is conflict because
the northeast is poor’.

Further, in writing about Manipur state, he mentions that words such as

‘development’ or ‘infrastructure’ acquire a new meaning in the region. In Assam,
they are used interchangeably, having the same meaning in Assamese as the
word ‘unnati’ meaning progress. The conflation of the categories of economic
and social ‘advance’ have been used as the underlying discourse to justify
extractivist infrastructure in the region, which is mostly securitised and
concentrated on connecting roads and highways. This is also evident in the
numerous banners and signs in Assam put up by coal and oil companies, and
referring to progress in the region.

Scholars from the region such as Dolly Kikon, have referred to it as a ‘militarised
carbon landscape’ with a history of securitised infrastructure and resource
extraction functioning within the trope of development. She asks, ‘How do we
still manage to conveniently walk away from seeing the interconnection of
extractive violence, consumption, market, extractive regime, and labour around
us? ’

Lived experience
‘Ami Ugrapanti Nohoi’ – ‘We are not militants’

These were among the first words spoken and often repeated during my
interviews conducted in a Bodo village in Assam in January 2020, with frequent
references to the ‘boys’ of the armed rebels – the aim being to reassure me that
the villagers did not harbour them. In fact, the armed rebels ensure that the
‘boys’ who join from a certain village don’t go back there to seek shelter lest it
put their family at risk, or that their family insists that they become state
informants. These words are also reminiscent of the times of the Secret Killings
of Assam. There are many things that people do not wish to remember or bring
up now . This was also evident in many of the interviews I conducted with
politicians, who constantly reiterated that the past must be forgotten.
Incidentally these are the same politicians and bureaucrats who are implicated
in illicit activities and extra-judicial killings. They constantly say ‘it was in the
past, let us move on’, while families still don’t know where the remains of their
loved-ones are buried.

While speaking to one of the villagers, a young man who is also a member of the
village council reluctantly spoke about the illicit sand mining in the area.

‘In the absence of job opportunities what are people supposed to do? They work
as daily wage labourers in the sand mines and illegal timber trade. They know
they get paid very little. They know the owners – which includes some people
from the tribe but not from the village, the government officials including forest
officials and the business contractors are all earning a lot from illegal trade.’

In the case of Assam, multiple layers of authorisation have been enacted with
the sole aim of resource extraction, and militarisation facilitates the extractive
network. This illustrates the complex linkages between nature, the nation and
the nationalities that make up these spaces – relationships that lie at the heart
of unlocking the perpetual ‘environmental crisis’ that the region seems to be
going through.

This essay has shown how development operates on the ground in Assam, in
conjunction with many other factors. Government thinking has been that
development would allay the region’s grievances, which have themselves arisen
by ignoring regions that have been or are still affected by conflict. First,
inequitable economic growth is unable to erase the historical injustices in the
region. In the case of the Assam the structures of power between oil companies,
local stakeholders and the central government intersect to create a structural
framework of extraction. Development in the NER has always been securitised
in an area already highly militarised. The continuation of this dynamic in an
increasingly politically volatile region has given rise to the fear of history
repeating itself. In the last year indigenous communities have taken a stand,
making it imperative to acknowledge alternative histories and stories of
development in which indigenous communities and their claims to their land are
not dismissed as ‘terrorism’ and ‘parochial’. It is evident that the problems in the
North East Region are not exclusive to the region but resonate with other parts
of the Global South, which can be solved only when communities are heard and
acknowledged.

Correction Sept 7, 2021: An earlier version of this story missed attribution of

Dolly Kikon's quote ‘How do we still manage to conveniently walk away from
seeing the interconnection of extractive violence, consumption, market,
extractive regime, and labour around us? ’ to its source The Bastion

S TAT E O F P O W E R

INDIA

CREDITS Binita Kakati

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