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.

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