North East - Assam/Bodo


Given the pin drop silence in international response to the abrogation of Article 370 and the status of J&K within India, I’d wondered if Modi was copying the Chinese playbook: if you criticize us, we’ll (temporarily) prevent companies from your country from doing business in our country. An NBA manager tweeted in support of Hong Kong, and China took all NBA matches off the air. An EPL footballer criticized the treatment of Uighur Muslims, and China prevented the broadcast of the match of his club, Arsenal, in China. You get the drift…

And then I read this Tyler Cowen article confirming what I had suspected:
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India is an avowed student of the Chinese experiment. Is it so far-fetched to imagine that he would help to create comparable pressures on speech for institutions doing business with India?”

But it seems like there’s one area where Modi does not seem to follow the Chinese playbook: how to deal with areas that want to secede. The Chinese way has been to send the Han majority to those areas (Tibet, Uighur etc), and over time, change the demographics enough that there’d be no demand for seceding.

On that front, Modi seems to be deal with the North East differently. In his last term, a lot of folks from the North East used to say that development projects were getting sanctioned and executed faster than ever before. I’ve never been there, but it would certainly explain why the BJP started winning state elections and Lok Sabha seats (in 2019) in the North East. Of course, the Chinese threat may also have played a role in Modi’s choices: if those regions remained backward, they’d be more susceptible to Chinese overtures.

In Assam, insurgent morale was low: the will of the Center to hold on showed no signs of waning, development projects (as explained above) were reducing grudges, and Bangladesh was no longer a safe haven for them anymore. The top Bodo leader, Ranjan Diamary, was in fact extradited to India some time back from Bangladesh.

At such a time, from a position of strength, the Indian government offered to negotiate and gave several concessions, says Shekhar Gupta. The Bodo issue was always greater autonomy, not secession. During the negotiations, the Center even released Ranjan Diamary on bail. Greater autonomy was granted to some of the districts, including the Bomdila region which China had tried to annex in 1962.

Will the deal work? Only time will tell. But it shows that the Modi government is willing to rule with an iron fist (think J&K), but is also willing to switch to the velvet glove approach as in the Assam/Bodo case.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why we Deceive Ourselves

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn...
Read more

Europe #3 - Innsbruck

The last city we visited in Europe was Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. After the cold and windy experience (at times) of Paris and Netherlands, Innsbruck was a wonderful change – it didn’t feel that cold, it was not windy all of which made it easy to walk around. Something absolutely necessary given how scenic the place is.   Since the hotel check-in time was much later in the day, we left the baggage and went to the Swarovski HQ-cum-museum about an hour by bus from Innsbruck. The crystal exhibits were brilliant – colorful, bright, shiny. Jewellery aside, it was a display of what one can do with crystals. While my wife and daughter loved the jewellery, I liked the superhero themed exhibits of Batman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Star Wars. We didn’t buy anything there, though we did buy stuff in the Swarovski store in Innsbruck – jewellery, not the superhero stuff.   Innsbruck is a major tourist attraction during the skiing season but now in summer, we saw many groups of ...
Read more

The Thrill of the Chase

So many people complain about the difficulty in making decisions while shopping. Do you buy Brand X that gives 20% extra free? Or Brand Y that has 10% off? Or Brand Z that gives something else free with it? Do you buy that flat screen TV today or wait for the sale at Diwali? Now since the customer is king, shouldn’t companies be simplifying pricing choices? Like maybe offering consistently low prices all the time? Not so fast, as the US store, JC Penney discovered to its cost. Turns out that while people do complain about pricing choices, they are irrational. Also, they enjoy the thrill of the chase. Huh? The word “sale” acts like a siren call for many people: it lures them in to make that purchase. Consistently low prices don’t do the same. Besides, if a competitor lowers their prices just one time of the year, and Poof! Suddenly that low price claim becomes suspect in shoppers’ eyes. Then there are those sites that offer coupons: have lunch at Restaurant A on Wedne...
Read more