Of Sentinel, Mainstream and Merger
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: December 01 2015 -
Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju on September 27 last had stated that it is the “duty of North Indians to merge with Northeast”.
Delivering his speech at a festival in Shillong, the Union Minister had argued that the Northeast of India is also the mainstream and that it was the responsibility of the North Indians to merge with the people of the Northeast.
He pointed out that India is defined by its borders and Delhi is the capital of India “but Delhi is not the beginning of India.”
He stated that the region is the sentinel of India as the people in the border region protected the country.
Kiren Rijiju stated that his concept of looking at India is based on the idea that a country begins to define itself from its borders and argued that India does not begin from the Centre.
Referring to people who held the view that there was a need for bringing the region into mainstream India, he aired his difference and argued that the Northeast is also the mainstream of the country and everybody must respect and adjust with each other.
The key words used by Kiren Rijiju in his speech can be fruitfully understood when one takes a cursory look at how the mainstream envisaged by New Delhi shaped the very conception of the periphery.
Given the expanding network of information on the region based on inaccuracies, hyperbolic reportage and news in the absence of context and perspective, one can well imagine the extent of damage already caused in the minds of the people from the Northeast.
Mere rhetorical comments reversing the idea of mainstream are not adequate to salvage the already dented imagination of India. Even the very conception of the Sentinel has over years undergone a semantic shift.
This is precisely due to how India has been represented all along by New Delhi based on its own imagined and real ideas of the Northeast region.
It is time that political analysts go to the core of certain ‘images’ that have more enduring value than any other concept of the region or even the country.
It should be noted that there is a need to relook at the unconscious ‘absence’ of the region from the dominant imagination of the Indian national ‘Self’.
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