Neoliberal Capitalism and Ethno-Territoriality in Highland Northeast India: Resource-Extraction, Capitalist Desires and Ethnic Closure

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine the relationship between state, ethnicity, territoriality and neoliberal capitalism in the tribal areas of highland Northeast India, where I focus in particular on the socioecological and socio-political corollaries of its rediscovery as a resource and capitalist frontier. In so doing, I apply (capitalist) ‘desire’ and (ethnic) ‘closure’ as key analytics to capture the contentiously unfolding history of the region’s present. This article shows how new resource and capital flows lead both to the production of capitalist ‘desires’ and socioecological destruction through the privatization, acquisition and depletion, mostly by ethnic tribal elites, of communal assets now embedded in newly capitalist relations, and to the intensification of a politics of exclusive ethnoterritorial belonging and rights. The latter comes in the form of volatile social processes of ethnic ‘closure’; an increasing preoccupation, that is, on part of tribal ethnic communities with the protecting, patrolling and legislating of ethno-territorial rights. The upshot of this is a dialectic between new neoliberal connectivities and ethnic ‘closure’, one that ensues in a frame of the specifics of governance and law in highland Northeast India.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethno-Territoriality
• Neoliberal Capitalism
• Capitalist Desires
• Ethnic Closure
• Highland Northeast India

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jasnea Sarma, Tanka B. Subba, Roderick Wijunamai, Edward Moon-Little, Milinda Banerjee, Michael Heneise, Hilary Faxon and Kimberly Roberts, as well as to the three reviewers for their detailed and incisive comments. This article was originally presented at a workshop on ‘flows and frictions in the Himalayas’ at the University of Stockholm, November 20–22, 2019, where it benefitted from a critical engagement on part of the participants, especially by Bengt Karlsson, Willem van Schendel, and Gunnel Cederlof.

Notes

1. In drawing attention to the region’s economic potential this report may be seen as an ambitious extension of the 1997 report by India’s Planning Commission titled: Transforming the Northeast: Tackling Backlogs in Basic Minimum Services and Infrastructural Needs. This report, in particular, drew attention to the inadequate infrastructure in the region and to the need to develop them.

2. Again ‘re’ as colonial officers early on imagined the highlands as a commercial land-bridge connecting Bengal with markets further east (M’Cosh 1860).

3. Among other things, neoliberalism refers to a peculiar, historically specific epoch that witnesses the global expansion of free market trade, i.e. neoliberal economics (Harvey 2007) and arguably ‘the most successful ideology in world history’ (Anderson 2000, 14). What is more, neoliberal capitalism has become connotative of a culture, a ‘culture of neoliberalism’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001a), as well as reflective of a particular view of personhood, pivoted around the rational, maximizing individual (Eriksen et al. 2015, 37). On the incursion of neoliberal capitalism into ‘frontier areas’, and the emergent politics of these new resource-frontiers, see, among others, Jacka (2015) and Cons and Eilenberg (2019).

4. In arguing thus I am informed by Ong’s (2007, 1) critique of what she terms ‘Big-N’ neoliberalism, Venugopal’s (2010, 172) conceptualisation of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’, and Chakrabarty’s (2000, 47) call to recognize that every instance of global capitalism has a subtle, localized and ‘unique history.’ See further Ferguson (2007) and Jacka (2015) for accounts on how neoliberal capitalism is everywhere refracted and appropriated through local historical and cultural conditions.

5. ‘Zomia’, as originally imagined by Van Schendel (2002), refers to a vast, contiguous highland region, located at the fringes of both political spaces and academically-defined ‘areas’, and which, in a provocation, James Scott (2009) theorised as a ‘state-evasive’ zone for whose inhabitants he devised an anarchistic history.

6. Not wholly because of a jurisdictional tussle regarding forests, parts of which are classified as Reserved and Protected Forests, and formally under the control of the state instead of falling under the Sixth Schedule, and which has invited, for instance, a supreme court order to ban logging in Meghalaya (Karlsson 2011, 81–132), as well as because in some places, for instance parts of Mizoram, the state has successfully co-opted communities under the sixth schedule to be part of neoliberal connectivity projects (Sarma Forthcoming).

7. This connoted a considerable rupture because, until then, the histories of hill and valley societies was one of mobility and interaction, whether oppositional or reciprocal. It were never histories of separation, even less of highland isolation (Misra 2011: 11). On the ‘discovery’ of tea in the region, and the tea-mania that followed see Sharma (2011).

8. Satisfied here in the sense that they accepted the elevated tribal and territorial rights and autonomy bestowed on them as it is understood as protecting land and identity. As Van Beek (2000) has pointed out for Ladakh, demands for regional autonomy, and regional autonomy in everyday practice, should not be seen as benefitting all members of the community, nor should demands for autonomy be interpreted in terms of an undifferentiated voice. At another level, these remain largely elite projects on which both traditional and new elites capitalize by securing power and (development) resources, while already marginalized sections of a now autonomous community may continue to face poverty, underdevelopment and corruption. Similar dynamics also involve claims for the enactment of new states, as Alpa Shah (2010) illustrated in relation to the creation of Jharkhand.

9. Whereas the Sixth Schedule, to the letter, guarantees local ownership of resources up to six feet below the surface, and thus legally (even if somewhat ambiguously) permits the Indian state to intervene or indeed ban its extraction below six feet (McDuie-Ra and Kikon 2015), Article 371A of the Indian Constitution, designed for Nagaland, and Article 371 G, designed for Mizoram, secures Nagas and Mizos’ inalienable ownership of resources for as deep as they can be found.

10. Not everywhere, of course. The agency and desire to extract coexist with pockets of ecological awakening, activism, resistance, and the emergence of ‘environmental subjects’ (Agrawal 2005), especially amongst the younger generation of educated youth, while the revitalization of community institutions, traditions and values is preached by community activists. Then there are cases of resistance, particularly when resource-extraction entails displacement and the presence of high-state involvement, and with that low community involvement, such as in the construction of dams (Huber 2015; Karlsson 2016) and in uranium mining (Shimray and Ramana 2007; Sirnate 2009).

11. A capitalist alternative to extraction, one that is also on the rise, is the adoption of cash-crops and their cultivation in plantations. This introduction of cash-crops, often promoted and subsidised by the state, may impact patterns of customary landownership, as was the case in eastern Nagaland, where I carried out prolonged fieldwork. Here, plots of earlier clan-owned land, used for swidden cultivation, were privatised as a prerequisite for the receipt of state subsidies for the creation of fruit an orchard plantations. The local intricacies and complications of this invasion, of cash crops that is, would merit an article on its own.

12. On the deepening of capitalist integration and relations in Nagaland specifically see Küchle (2019). Based on a dataset generated by an extensive survey, and applying class and stratification theories, he shows the rise of socio-economic inequalities among the Naga, and for which he identifies capitalist integration and relations as a main determinant. For another recent dataset on capitalist integration and emergent capitalist relations see Kikon (2019), especially chapter 6 titled ‘carbon fantasies and aspirations’ in which she shows ethnographically, first, how Naga villagers perceive of their oil and coal resources as possibilities to radically transform their lives, and, secondly, how the presence of oil and coil produced new kinds of power relations and new inequalities within Naga villages and communities.

13. To be sure: just as, according to James Ferguson (2007, 49), global capital flows across Africa thrive through a ‘patchwork’ of enclaves, often within zones of conflict and poverty, the much-hyped vision of Northeast India as a thriving network of connectivity, investment and opportunity unfolds as an assortment of hubs and nodes of capital flows, resource-extraction and infrastructure connectivity, not as a seamlessly integrated capitalist corridor.

14. The influx of labour migrants is not exclusive to highland Northeast India, but part of a wider trend in highland Asia. In the words of James Scott: ‘The biggest post-war shift throughout Southeast Asia and China is “engulfment” of the hills by moving land-hungry, demographically crowded, valley peoples, usually with state-help and capitalist financing for plantations, logging, mining – making “hill peoples” a minority in the hills and at the frontiers’ (cited in Michaud 2017, 10). Scholars have variously noted how these (trans-)national investments, infrastructure projects, and flows of labour migration worked to intensify direct state penetration and control in restive ethnic zones which politically long sought to disassociate themselves from pre-modern, colonial and later postcolonial state-projects. This argument is now well-established (Woods 2011; Rippa 2019; Nyiri 2011; Baruah 2003; Wouters 2018) and is not my focus here.