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ETHNONATIONALISM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUNJAB by Shinder Purewal. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000. THE PERIPHERY STRIKES BACK: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland by Udayon Misra. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2000. THE UTTARAKHAND MOVEMENT: Construction of a Regional Identity by Pradeep Kumar. Kanishka Publishers, New Delhi, 2000. THE three books under review deal with regional assertions. Two of these grew into protracted militant movements against the Indian state for secession, though the Punjab problem is now behind us and one hopes that it will not erupt again in the old form. An armed fight for secession, though on a low key, continues in Assam and Nagaland. Uttarakhand has just been given statehood after a brief period of struggle, together with Jharkhand and Chattisgarh. The three books together show that the regional problem in India is made up of such diverse causes that it is difficult to talk of it as a problem but rather as so many different problems, each located in one or another region of India. None of the books advance a complicated thesis but do develop a rich description around what they consider the central reasons or causes in the making of these problems. The root of the Uttarakhand problem is linked with its economic and social neglect for over forty years of independence. The lack of an autonomous political authority in the region... has led to continuous economic degradation. The vast mineral, water and forest resources of the hills have remained unexploited or have been exploited by the outsiders for the benefit of outsiders, thereby resulting in further "development of underdevelopment" in the region. In fact the model of internal colonisation applies to Uttarakhand in toto (pp. 80-81 and the rest of the chapter, emphasis in original). Kumar cites other writers to show the degeneration of the region into the "hinterland of the countrys affluent classes and regions". Two questions come to mind. This region, especially its Garhwal belt, has seen some of the most powerful movements against the construction of big dams, Tehri dam for example, as being detrimental to the ecology of the region and the well-being of the local population. On similar grounds the Chipko movement against felling of trees for commercial reasons has made national news over the last many years. The question now is whether the creation of an autonomous internal political power will remove the causes behind these well-articulated movements of great popular involvement? If these movements have a sui generis claim to legitimacy, then both forests and water, two of the three resources mentioned above, may well become inaccessable for the generation of large resources. There is the further question that the region which used the resources of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, if examined on purely economic grounds will appear almost like an internal colony of India and a hinterland for its bourgeoisie. We must remember that U.P. wields considerable power within the Indian union and yet remains one of the most backward areas. If it is the pan-Indian bourgeoisie that exploits both U.P., and together with it Uttarakhand, then it can continue to do so like in any other region of India. We must not forget that the Indian bourgeoisie does not belong to any one region of India exploiting other regions for the development of its homeland. If it were so Rajasthan would be like the Ruhr region of Germany. We must also remember that the Indian bourgeoisie is trans-regional with an inter-regional mobility of capital as between profitable investments. It will be more useful to see how autonomous political power can contribute in small ways to the development of a region say education, health, drinking water, and so on and thus enhance the quality of life of ordinary people. The work on Assam and Nagaland, apart from a search for causes, raises some pertinent issues for the understanding of the Indian federation in general and the kind of nation we want to be. It does so by building up the regional challenges from two diverse situations: despite being contiguous, the two areas have very different histories. Historically, Nagaland had little to do with India virtually no cultural interaction and little by way of economic transactions. It was effectively brought under a unified administration only in the second and third decades of the 19th century. The innumerable Naga tribes too lived a life of relative isolation from one another. It had little involvement with the anti-colonial movement. The movement for secession and the other forms of regional assertions may thus be easily understood. But what about Assam with its centuries of close contact from the time of Ahom consolidation? The Vaishnavite movement which integrated it with the cultural mainstream is now many centuries old. The Brahmaputra and Barak valleys of colonial Assam were deeply drawn into the national movement and produced many great national leaders. Assam is, therefore, rightly seen as a test case for understanding the problem of Indian unity in general and of the handling of federal problems in particular. There is no religious angle like in Kashmir and Punjab nor historical entanglement which involves other nations. Misra thus finds that certain secessionist ethnic movements cannot be explained in terms of simple economic criteria such as uneven or lop-sided development or disjunction between industry and agriculture (pp. 157, 183). In the case of Assam, economic neglect remains important but what makes for the problem is the inability of the Assamese to realise themselves within their culture. On one hand the mosaic that surrounds it demands dissection as the influx from across the borders has threatened its identity. Equally, it has found it difficult to handle the diversity within. The complexity of Assam is unique to itself, non-generalisable; yet the underlying emphasis throughout the book is on Assam as an internal colony of India. This, I suggest, begs the question. I do not want to dispute the nature of the exploitative relationship with pan-Indian capital, whether we take tea as an export commodity or extractive industries like oil. Even in regions which have done much better like Himachal Pradesh, where the author wrote his book, it can be shown that the entire surplus capital out of the orchard economy goes out of the region through the operations of merchants and merges into the pan-Indian monopoly capital. The question is important because backwardness cannot be the sole criterion of a region being an internal colony. This would be patently unscientific from an economic point of view. A more objective criteria is required and none of those who argue for it have ever worked out one. Who extracts how much of the surplus of a region and for what purposes? Consequently, the magnitude of surplus as well as the enrichment of some other area(s) is the minimum we require to establish. Something more intricate is happening in what is now left of Assam. Assam, par excellence, is a region that inverted the logic of pan-Indian nationalism and is unfortunately paying for it. All nationalisms question outside domination, logically, a power seen as an external authority defining our situation as a nationality or a sub-nationality. Due to a variety of factors listed in the book, the Assamese feel that they are not an equal partner in the Indian union but are dominated by it, like Punjab too did. But in building up a movement on such grounds it is hoist on its own petard. The logic Assam uses can easily flounder, because given the specificity of its make-up in terms of the composition of populations, it is easy to activate smaller, distinct identities. The Bodos, for instance, remain far more backward than the Assamese and feel they do not have a say in the making of decisions vis-a-vis the Ahoms. Would it make any sense to call Bodoland an internal colony of Assam? The separation of smaller but distinct people from the Assam mainland has gone on for a long time. Even what remains of Assam has been besieged from within for being too dominant a presence among smaller, distinct populations. What will be left of Assam when the Bodos, with their elongated stretch of territory, too exit? The many plains tribals, all comfortably contiguous, feel the same as the Bodos. In an attempt to solve the Assam problem, Ahom-defined nationalism will have to try something creatively new while fighting the arbitrariness of the Indian state. Nothing of the kind seems to be emerging as one looks within the sophisticated and finely tuned criticism of the Assamese intelligentsia. The book on Punjab is in a sense much simpler. It advances a straightforward thesis and examines all the different aspects of the Punjab problem through it. Though written sympathetically, it is without the slightest apologia for the Khalistani or Sikh militant viewpoint. If anything, it is more sympathetic to the many deviant sects within Sikhism for being targetted by the Bhindranwale orthodoxy. This is welcome for most volumes written on the Sikh problem take a blanket pro or anti stance. The books central thesis is drawn from the working of the political economy of India as it impinges on the region called Punjab. This is not reducing everything to the economic factor as is often alleged when someone takes recourse to a political economy approach. The thesis is simple. The present day Punjab problem had its genesis in a clash of two forms of capital for hegemony. Which of these capitals would call the shots in Punjab? There was the industrial capital controlled by the pan-Indian bourgeoisie operating through the central government. And there was the ascendant capital in Punjab agriculture seeking a dominant position in the politics of Punjab. The battle for hegemony was joined. The kulak was confident and impatient like all ascendant forces, seeking a quick victory. I am in sympathy with this thesis. There is nothing in Sikh religion or in Punjabs history which suggests a clash between Sikhs and Hindus. That it happened was a purely contingent matter. In another conjuncture something else from the same religion and history could have been activated. The thesis of clash for hegemony is however insufficient. It needs to be extended. This I will do by citing from my earlier article, The Political Implications of Economic Contradictions in Punjab, Social Scientist 161, October 1986. I wish to make two points: First, the widespread success of the green revolution in Punjab, unlike in many other regions of India in terms of its extent and depth, created very sizeable classes of capitalist landlords and rich peasants, each with a large surplus in their hands. As the surplus accumulated, there were no productive outlets for its investment. It could not expand itself in agriculture because of land ceiling legislations. Neither could it move into areas of (big) industrial or commercial capital as these were monopolised by the kin-networks of Hindu castes. Individuals drawn from these Hindu communities enjoyed a hegemonic control over the non-agricultural sectors of capitalist economy. Over and above the growing conflicts between the two forms of capital controlled by different religious communities, a potential communal divide, due to the perceived terms of trade, another conflict slowly built up. Any growing capital, on finding the avenues of expansion blocked and aspirations of the bearers of capital thwarted, comes into conflict with that which blocks it. So here was a situation of bourgeois aspirations (represented by the Sikh kulaks) blocked by the bourgeois hegemony (enjoyed by certain Hindu castes). Conflicts of aspiration vs. hegemony can occur anywhere without getting communalised. This happened as in Punjab the clash brought the two different religious communities face to face. Given the highly centralised nature of state power in India, the political process in the region got deflected as the Punjab (Sikh) vs. the Centre (Hindu) issue. As a result, even the day-to-day discourse in Punjab was communalised. For instance, if electricity supply is increased to agriculture (agriculture in any case consumes close to half, 46%, of the total electricity in Punjab) and cut down for industry, it is pampering the Sikhs; in reverse it is seen as pandering to the Hindus. Punjab is a rich state with the countrys highest per capita income and a sizeable section of very rich farmers. In addition to the huge agricultural surplus which is exported to different regions of the country, income flows into Punjab from all over the country. This contradicts the thesis advanced in the earlier two works that of internal colonisation. On the contrary, the state draws in money capital from all over the country. Yet the Punjabi politicians and intelligentsia drew on the thesis of discrimination. To understand this it is important to recall one peculiarity of the colonial inheritance the industrially advanced pattern of development. This has to do with a dual disjunction, to borrow the term from Amiya Bagchi, between agriculture and industry. Regions where agriculture developed remained industrially backward while regions which developed large scale industry remained agriculturally backward. In a clash with the centre, any region may draw upon one or the other backwardness to convince its people that it has been discriminated against. What Punjab can show in terms of a lack of public investment in industry, another state, say Gujarat, can argue by showing a relative lack of public investment in irrigation and therefore demonstrate backwardness in other respects. The political economy of development in India is more complicated than a mere clash of different types of capital. This disjunction between agriculture and industry is crucial, even if it does not apply in the case of Assam. Along with this there is the problem of the making of nationalities or sub-nationalities. On this question our understanding is Euro-centric, regardless of the perspective we take, Marxist or liberal, as in the writings of Lenin or Gellner. It is language in conjunction with capitalism-industry (and therefore market), that goes into the making of a people as distinct national groups. I want to suggest here a radical change which has come about in the post-colonial period. The crucial condition today for people with a national make-up, who are in the midst of movements of national awareness for the consolidation of their national distinctness, is the presence of bourgeois conditions. Needless to add, these can arise without each specific people having a (national) market. A single market may span an area which is inclusive of a large number of nationalities. In fact, the bourgeois condition can dislocate people as much as a newly emergent market did in the period of ascendant capitalism, although it may not always integrate people into new economic activities as happened earlier. We only have to look to the various people in India, as the Nagas or the Jharkandis and many others, in regions where market conditions are not even developed. We, therefore, find national movements arising out of specific conditions and taking forms not foreseen by Lenin. For example, in Africa, large coalitions of big tribes with a resemblance to one another, are moving towards becoming nations. If we hold that tribes cannot directly move to become nations, a la Engels, we are likely to be accused by African radicals of being colonial anthropologists. There is also among the hill people all over a clamour to be treated as separate national groups and here topography, with its distinct sense of space and horizon of time and of labour, has become a source of feelings of national distinctness. This can be observed in the Himalayan region of India. Ever since colonialism and late capitalism in our part of the world, determination of causal chains and relative salience of various attributes has undergone significant transformation. In citing the above examples and patterns I am not suggesting that India is like Africa or Latin America. Far from it. But within the great diversity of India there are regions and pockets within regions, which may in many ways be similar to, say, Africa. All this is a matter of specification. Clearly much work needs to be done. Javeed Alam |
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