North-East: Map is not the territory

In an uneven and unequally distributed ethnic, tribal and non-ethnic plaines’ people across the hills and plains of seven states of North-East, the idea of state arrived much later than the idea of social boundaries and homelands. Verrier Elwin stated that the ‘state’ in the North-East could not climb up the foothills. Bengal Frontier Regulation of 1873 laid the grounds for demarcation of boundary by the state by restraining itself within ‘inner line’, beyond which the British state proclaimed “excluded area” or “partially excluded area” and drew an ‘outer line’.

This demarcation by an inner line and then by declaring a ‘no go zone’ of excluded areas in the hills created the first sense of how the state looks at the region. Further, the same regulation, while separating plains from the hills conceived of natural barriers like a river or a cliff as the natural boundary between hills and plains. For example, the inner line extended up to Sadiya and left the foothills of present Arunachal Pradesh outside it.

Similarly, natural course of the river Simsang or Someshwari was taken as the border separating Mymensing from South Garo hills. So both ‘inner/outer line’ and ‘natural barrier’ were adopted as the principle of constructing border or boundary. Very interestingly, internal boundaries between tribes and ethnic groups and their spread of habitation as a people and demarcation of spatial boundary by the colonial state could never match and intersect; as borders, in ultimate analysis, remained an administrative and a political construct.

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Frontiers and internal boundaries between people based on their membership to ethnic, tribal or linguistic communities thus were meant for construction of a homogenised ‘us’ as against ‘them’. But the so-called ‘inner line’, ‘outer line’, ‘excluded’ and ‘partially excluded’ were all aimed at delimiting a bounded community in a bounded territory. When the states emerged through such bounds, most often it ran into overlaps, contestations and gaps that left large tracts undemarcated.

The best way to look into these asymmetric forms of boundary-making is to look at the difference between boundaries and borders. While social boundaries remained more symbolic than real, the political ‘borders’ were based on hardened statist imaginary of control and power. The borders drawn out of 1873 regulation based itself on natural barrier like wherever the river divided the land or wherever the hill slope subtended.

In most cases, such natural barriers fell outside the ‘inner line’ or the ‘outer line’ meant for the self-restraint of both the state and the community and thereby natural borders remained as an extra-jurisdictional space falling de facto simultaneously in and out of any lines that were drawn by powers that be. Even the demarcation of districts in 1933 notification that drew borders between Cachar district of Assam and Kolasib and Mamit districts of Mizoram left the Lailapur inner line reserve forest areas undemarcated, the current site of conflict between Assam and Mizoram.

Most often, demarcation on the map cannot be translated on the ground as undulating and internally criss-crossed spaces cannot be straightened by drawing a line, reminding one of Alfred Korzybsky’s ‘map is not the territory’. Jumping to post-colonial Indian state, North-East reorganisation Act of 1971 that threw up two distinctive notions of ‘successor state’ and ‘Union Territory’ states on the basis of ethnic and linguistic affinities redrew state boundaries without clearly demarcated borders.

The divergence between a boundary and a border, the former being historical and the latter being a totally state-controlled zone, became more pronounced as states objected to the inclusion of certain areas into another state, pointing at the trail of unresolved differences emanating from 1873 regulation. The question of cutting into old inner and outer lines by redrawn state boundaries, as national highways and other commonly accessible and used spaces criss-crossed, issues of encroachment came alive. As inter-state border cannot be fenced and walled, but can only be guarded in mutual agreement between states, so the possibility of overlapping claims remained endemic to any such border protocol between the Northeastern states.

‘Claim rights’ of states over undemaracted and un-demarcable borderscapes at the intractable terrains lying on the edges of the newly created states since re-organisation turned them into sites of cartographic confusion and intrusion by civilians and other non-state actors. No less than a return to colonial-era spectre of isolationism between ethnic identities that are now governed by the newly created states and union territories ironically became a source of legitimate political arm-twisting. The non-delieanable forests, water bodies and land resources at the border made it a rush for competitive hold.

Un-demarcable borders

Who shall, then, re-colonise the un-demarcable borders? As big corporates are aiming at making big dams, use rivers for navigation and build tourist infrastructures in those un-demarcable hills and riverine terrains, state is slowly becoming their tool, which, in turn, shall align the task of border control to calculations of economic benefits. These new corporate players in alliance with stakeholding states are successful in bringing new terms of negotiation that undermine historical and cultural claims, if it not to their advantage.

For instance, repeated acts of transport blockade at the border by various states and its people in order to settle grudges by utilising the advantage of being on the transit route establish complex power relations centering borders. Oppressive ways of containing the other side of the dispute by way of blockade or deployments with lethal military hardware now go much beyond the stressed inter-ethnic relations or enmity between states in an already insurgency-prone conflicts over homelands.

Union government’s proposal to station neutral forces across disputed borders cannot stall the possibility of expansionist manipulation of land tenure at the border by powerful corporates, insurgents and other such actors across Assam and successor states of the Northeast. Being sites of unequal division of resources between states, borders can turn into a Leviathan, reducing any scope of de-bordering Northeastern states.

Though positioning neutral forces by the Centre in all areas in dispute geared to ensuring the security of villagers living near the borders looks like a step in transitional justice. Finding a negotiated settlement by way of give and take is a task that awaits before the Union government, as the Northeastern states refuse to de-border or give any third party a monopoly of interpretation of the border. Redressing specifics such as rights of border residents, respecting oral traditions and customary laws so that age old relations of peace and tranquility is not upset by use of force. Mere satellite imagery and cadastral survey maps, then, are not going to automatically solve disputes arising out of centuries’ old claim rights over border land.

(The writer is an independent political analyst and a professional philosopher based in Shillong and Silchar)