Racist Apartheid and the Mongoloid Northeast

Sira Kharay *

Protest ride by Bikers Against Racial Discrimination (BARD) at Bangalore :: 16th February, 2014

Whilst the tricolour Indian flag flutters atop the hills of the Northeast, her mongoloid inhabitants cannot be conceptually received in the notion of "Indian" and she is a mere geography for racial experimentation. In the brahmanic-conceived notion of "India", the cradle of the casteist-hindu constitutes the "mainland" which completes the whole notion of geographical India and the peripheries thereto are mere attachments and annexes. Within this fundamental contradiction, the notion of federal India was conceived and the Constitution of India reinforces this dichotomy by not permitting multiple citizenships or federal identities to its divergent subjects.

Resultantly, the idea of multicultural "India" can consist only of the Hindu Aryans and any deviating culture such as mongoloid cannot be co-existent with this hindu-exclusivist construct of "Indian" identity. The notion of "Indian" must be Hindu by culture and any race not Aryan is a social "impure" who must be culturally proselytized and assimilated into this dominant identity.

Feeding on this cultural and racial exclusivism, cultural and racial minorities become an object of disdain and ridicule and simultaneously made scapegoats for blaming for non-conformity. Thus, the idea of multicultural and federal India remains only a fictional rhetoric and is non-existent in reality.

There is then, unfortunately, no legal regime to criminalize such racist-hate crimes and on the contrary legitimizes yet reinforces them. Taking its own typical form of Apartheid, the Northeast is racially and geographically segregated and by manufacturing a perpetual state of emergency, racist legal tools such as Inner Line Permits, Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and Disturbed Areas Act are articulated. To further the segregation, the states such as New Delhi and Bangalore sponsor establishment of separate hostels for the mongoloid race all in the name of security.

Given this prevailing systemic ubiquity and racist-conceived constitutional regime, no amount of judicial activism, attitudinal transformation of Indian schools and families or resetting of the narratives and articulation of Indian history alone can completely erase racism in India unless the sociological premise of the notion of "Indian" is simultaneously reconstructed and the Constitution is revisited in tandem with its irreconcilable historical diversity.

New Delhi's extra-constitutional Northeast policy in particular is a faux pas ab initio and is responsible for all this yawning sense of alienation and prevailing racial "othering" of the Northeast. With no intention to demeaning the Statesman, Jawaharlal Nehru's imagination of multicultural and federal India has notoriously failed in accommodating the Northeast into the fabric of Indian confederation.

One might trace the origin of modern nation-state to the charter of Magna Carta Libertatum, however, Jawaharlal Nehru failed to reflect that the process of nation making must strictly remain an Indian contextualized historical construct. His Anglicized schema of "divide and rule" and belligerent armed response in particular have remained replete with contradictions vis-à-vis the idea of multicultural India.

In his policy response towards the Northeast in general, he failed to distinguish the process of nationalizing adjacent home boundaries from that of colonizing overseas colonies typical to Elizabethan East India Company. This unresolved political and historical contradiction in the policy response is solely responsible for this aggravated racist disorientation.

New Delhi's elitist-racist conception of traditional Northeast policy in short needs tectonic shift in order to find a permanent solution to this chronic historical problem. The sub-continental India in order to meet its democratic obligations must fundamentally recast its idea of multiculturalism within a redefined structure of expanded federal polity in proportion with its cultural diversity. Perhaps, post-nationalists quest as an alternative search for solutions to such conventional problems in modern nation-state making has become an imperative.

What the mainstream political actors have pathologically failed to appreciate is the socio-political and historical dynamics of the Northeast, whose notion of dignity and self-respect is founded on the traditional notion of republic of free villagers which is conceptually not incompatible with the idea of multicultural and federal "India". It is the sanctity of this profoundly democratic traditional-political culture that any outside meddling is repelled as adversarial and oppressive.

Unless this historical and political diversity is duly recognized and accommodated, the notion of multicultural "India" in its true federal form and the idea of sociological "Indian" are bound to remain replete with racist persuasions.