SASF – Blogs

by Ramtanu Maitra

India’s six percent-plus “impressive GDP growth rate” over the years has drawn much praise from the West, and its “success” has been attributed to the “magical impact” of free-market liberalization and globalization. What it really means, is that India’s low-wage-earning labor has begun to replace a section of the high-wage-earning workforce of the West. In the process, India, a nation of 1 billion-plus people stricken with utter poverty, is becoming an economic “powerhouse”—exactly the way China became one, the Indian leaders claim.

However, a visit from one end of India to the other would make one realize that India’s GDP growth is driven by only a fraction of its population. Much of the nation remains a picture of rural poverty and urban squalor. Rising social tension because of growing income disparity between a sea of poor and a decent number of middle class, is either not noticed, or ignored, by a callous and rudderless leadership that dots the entire nation. Notwithstanding the illusions of the elites, there are definite signals that some among the many hundreds of millions of poor may not watch the process with benign and dissociated neglect, but instead, could turn violent.

The poverty in India has been exacerbated by the fact that the investors, who are no longer “led” by the powerful and visionary, now invest in those parts of the country where the investment has the maximum potential—a relative term in the Indian context—to optimize profit. As a result, regional disparities are growing fast, involving hundreds of millions of people. Nearly all foreign investments in India go to its six most urban states, with 22 other less-developed states virtually ignored. This gap between cities and rural areas is keenly felt in the suburbs of India’s cities, particularly New Delhi, the capital.

Poverty Galore

The endless poverty is there for all to see; it is not hidden like it is in China. There is no escaping the fact that a handful of “skilled Indian workers,” tied to Western workplaces through telecommunication, will not be able to pull the hundreds of millions out of the grinding poverty they endure. What is needed is leadership at every level, and the most dangerous aspect of India at the present time is that it does not have any.

Lack of leadership hits one square in the face, starting at the municipal level, all the way up to the highest offices in the North Block and South Block of India’s capital. These powerful people have little real understanding of what it would take to make India a nation that cares for all of its people; indeed, they have little intent to achieve such a goal, in any case. continue reading…

Ramtanu Maitra and Susan Maitra

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Continuing terrorist actions and violent demonstrations over the last five decades have turned India’s Northeast into a dangerous place. Large-scale introduction of narcotics and arms from neighboring Myanmar (Burma) and China has made this strategically crucial area a potential theater of violent secessionist movements.

Imbued with the British ideology of encouraging ethnic, sub-ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities—as opposed to the identity of a citizen of a sovereign nation-state—both New Delhi and the residents of Northeast India are marching recklessly along the very path prescribed by the British Raj in 1862, when he laid down the law of apartheid to isolate “the tribals.” While it is not clear how long this fateful road is, there is little doubt what awaits them at the end.

British mindset at work

Since India’s independence in 1947, Northeast India has been split up into smaller and smaller states and autonomous regions. The divisions were made to accommodate the wishes of tribes and ethnic groups which want to assert their sub-national identity and obtain an area where the diktat of their little coterie is recognized. New Delhi has yet to comprehend that its policy of accepting and institutionalizing the superficial identities of these ethnic, linguistic, and tribal groups has ensured more irrational demands for even smaller states. It has also virtually eliminated any plan to make these areas economically powerful, and the people scientifically and technologically advanced.

A situation has now arisen in which New Delhi’s promised carrot of economic development evokes little enthusiasm in the Northeast. Money from New Delhi for “development” serves to appease the “greed” of a handful and to maintain the status quo. On the other hand, fresh separatist movements bring the area closer to the precipice.

Assam has been cut up into many states since Britain’s exit. The autonomous regions of Karbi Anglong, Bodo Autonomous Region, and Meghalaya were all part of pre-independence Assam. Citing the influx of Bengali Muslims since the 1947 formation of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh in 1971, the locals demand the ouster of these “foreigners” from their soil. Two violent movements in Assam, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and the Bodo Security Force (BdSF), are now practically demanding “ethnic cleansing” in their respective areas.

To fund their movements, both the ULFA and the BdSF have been trafficking heroin and other narcotics, and indulging in killing sprees against other ethnic groups and against Delhi’s law-and-order machinery. Both these groups have also developed close links with other major guerrilla-terrorist groups operating in the area, including the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Muivah) and the People’s Liberation Army in Manipur. continue reading…