Fruits of unrest

A perspective on the influence of insurgency on economic growth in Assam.

M.S. PRABHAKARA in Guwahati

THE linkages between insurgency, or indeed any kind of civil unrest, and its adverse impact on economic development are generally taken for granted and have almost become a given. Such presumed linkages have become an axiom of political discourse in respect of the volatile situation, marked by legitimate protest, civil unrest and active insurgencies, that prevails in Assam and its environs in the northeastern region.

According to the Assam Human Development Report 2003, prepared by the Planning and Development Department, Government of Assam, which delineates some of the all-too-well-known social and economic indicators of poverty and underdevelopment in Assam, this situation has been further exacerbated by "two issues that have certainly been exceptional in the duration of their existence, the intensity of their occurrence and the extent of their impact". One of these, not particularly exceptional to Assam for the complaint is made routinely by most of the States, is the "severe fiscal stress, ... the mismatch between the resources needed to provide basic services, maintain assets, promote growth and development and create infrastructure and the resources available to the State... ."

An even more important challenge, given a higher priority in the Report than the "severe fiscal stress", is posed by "decades of unrest, agitation, and at a later state, insurgency". Thus, the linkage between such "unrest, agitation and insurgency" and the lack of economic development, is boldly highlighted in the text of the Report: "Inequities, lack of development, perceived discrimination and lack of opportunities for employment have contributed to discord and strife. Such situations are rarely, if ever, conducive to development."

There is also a supposedly reverse kind of linkage between insurgency and economic development. This is that the absence of economic development is also a major factor that leads to disaffection that at some critical point takes the shape of insurgency.

This argument is not always convincing. There are obvious exceptions where so-called `ethnic factors', unrealised (and often imaginary) aspirations for national sovereignty and similar issues rather than economic underdevelopment have engineered discontent. In other words, these linkages between insurgency and development are canvassed at two levels. One, the reality of economic underdevelopment, the causes for which can be traced to factors deeply rooted in history as well as to the present political and economic policies of the State and Union governments. Two, the presence of an active insurgency inescapably frustrates and indeed hinders all initiatives, government and private, to encourage economic development.

Put simply, the people who live in areas affected by insurgency are doubly damned, suffering from both the causes and consequences of insurgency. In more personal and practical realms, they are constantly under pressure both from the insurgent groups, who simply could not exist without some support from the very people whose cause the insurgencies claim to espouse, and from the state and the government that too derive their legitimacy in the name of these very people.

Such circular reasoning is both persuasive and comfortable. It provides the rationale for official inertia and indeed inaction. It also puts the responsibility for the predicament of the victims on the victims themselves, almost as if they created the situation that is destroying them.

The State and Union governments too, not to speak of various organs of the so-called civil society, which are constantly `engaged' with this situation, find it convenient to go along with such a reading. Anti-insurgency operations by the security forces and initiatives by the government, or even by the insurgent groups, with the so-called facilitators from civil society (including the media) ever eager to highlight their own profiles, for a `political dialogue' with a view to resolving the issues raised by the disaffected groups, are now a matter of routine. Often, these go on simultaneously. Civil society, in particular the media and the powerful and resourceful non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector, is an important player in such processes. Its agenda is not always easy to decipher.

There is no gainsaying that the economic situation in Assam is dire. All socio-economic indicators of growth and development, almost without exception below the national levels, drive home this reality. Here are some of the facts paraphrased from the Report:

At Independence, Assam's per capita income was only marginally less than the national average. In 1988, the average per capita income for the country was over 1.8 times that of Assam... . The State's per capita income in 1950-51 was 4.1 per cent higher than the national average; by 1980-81 the State's per capita income was 27 per cent lower than the national average; and by1998-99, the gap had widened to 45.5 per cent.

The overall growth rate of Assam since the 1980s has been a little over 2 per cent. In absolute terms, the number of the poor has increased from 7.8 million in 1983 to 9.5 million in 1999-2000. As much as 36.09 per cent of the State's population continue to live below the poverty line, a figure appreciably above the national average of 26.10 per cent. The percentage of the poor in Assam is the highest among the seven States of northeastern India. Rural poverty is much higher (40.04 per cent of the population in 1999-2000) than urban poverty (7.47 per cent). The incidence of rural poverty is higher than the all-India figure of 27.09 per cent. The incidence of unemployment, measured as a percentage of the labour force, is higher than in the rest of the country. The unemployment rate in Assam in 1983 was 2.2 per cent as compared to 2.0 per cent for the country. By 1999-2000, the country's unemployment rate had increased marginally to 2.3 per cent while in Assam it had risen to 4.6 per cent.

Life expectancy at birth is below that for the rest of the country and is one of the lowest among the major States. The percentage of people who are not expected to live beyond 40 years (21.8 per cent in 1001) is higher than the national average.

About 12 lakh children were out of school in 1999. There is high incidence of child labour among the poor. Girls from poor families also have lower transition from the primary to the middle stage of schooling. Dropout rates at the high school and higher secondary levels continue to be high. For those who do not drop out, the chances of finishing school successfully are less than 40 per cent.

However, none of these depressing facts (the Report has many more) or their impact on the larger socio-economic situation can be attributed to or explained as the causes and effect of the volatility that characterises the situation in Assam. On the contrary, far from being an impediment to growth, one can argue that insurgency, even of the kind that has prevailed in Assam for over two decades, has been an engine of growth, though here again, of a kind. Even assuming that the State's economy was thriving in comparison to that of the rest of the country at the time of Independence - the point always made in much of the analysis of Assam's present backwardness relative to the rest of the country and is indeed the starting point of the Report - there were several other factors that contributed to that health.

The Assam at the dawn of Independence was very different from what it is today, in terms of its size and population, economic resources, the absence of strong separatist pulls Statewide, with Naga nationalism being an exception, whose stated objectives have ranged from greater autonomy within the State to separation from the State to outright independence from India and, above all, sharing a faith in the possibility of growth with equity and justice, all sustained by relatively stable democratic institutions within the State and nationally.

This is no more the case. Not merely is this the case in Assam where the fragmentation process that began in the 1960s is taking unexpected and ominous directions; increasingly, such forces are coming to the fore in the rest of the country, even in areas supposedly marked by stable democratic institutional structures and steady economic growth. Inasmuch as internal factors, also factors external to Assam have contributed to these changes.

For instance, it is generally assumed that the forces released by the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the separatist and insurgent outfit that articulates the demand for restoration of Asom's lost sovereignty, have significantly impeded Assam's economic development, by scaring away potential investors by its acts of extortion and terrorism.

However, ULFA, which formally took its birth in April 1979, began to affirm its presence through its initial acts of `armed propaganda' only after the bloodstained Assembly elections of February 1983; and secured some free space to operate after the first regional party government under the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), a child of Assam's anti-illegal migrants agitation, assumed office in December 1985.

ULFA's transformation to an active insurgent outfit having links with international forces hostile to the Indian state, and prosecuting its stated objective of a `sovereign Asom' with some vigour, is a post-1990 phenomenon. These international linkages, manifesting themselves in the consolidation of militant Muslim communalism countrywide (though still in pockets), were further facilitated by another development at the national level in which Assam had no role: the mobilisation of the forces of Hindutva terrorism culminating in the destruction of Babri Masjid in December 1992.

These developments coincided not merely with the dismissal of the AGP government and the launching of Operation Bajrang, but with important shifts in the direction of the economy nationally. A decade and a half later, in Assam itself one can see the impact of these changes wherever one's eye turns. Few now complain that Assam and the rest of the northeastern region suffer from the Centre's neglect. Assam and its neighbours now occupy a high profile in the national agenda precisely because issues of vital concern to the region have been thrust to the fore by the actions and potential of separatist organisations such as ULFA and its cousins in the other States.

Cumulatively, ULFA and the social forces from which it derives its support and with which it has symbiotic links have been both victims and beneficiaries of these developments. Notwithstanding its rhetoric about carrying on its struggle for a `sovereign Asom' until the end of time, ULFA has very nearly been destroyed by successive and ongoing military operations launched against it. It is now reduced to making symbolic gestures of violence annually on Independence Day and Republic Day. Nothing else can explain its eagerness to seek a `negotiated settlement', though it continues the fiction that such talks as and when they are held will have to be on the issue of restoration of Assam's lost sovereignty.

And yet, the ideas and forces released by ULFA have not been defeated. They are bound to take new directions not easy to foresee. For instance, who could have foreseen at the height of the Assam agitation that there would come about within a decade a nexus between the extreme and exclusivist articulation of Assamese nationalism and its most visible victims at that point of time?

Finally, if ULFA has become a victim of the forces it has provoked (and released), the social forces that sustained the separatist and secessionist ideology have greatly benefited from these same initiatives taken by the Indian state to curb militant separatism in Assam. It is in this perspective that one sees that insurgency, even of the apparently self-destructive kind engaged in by ULFA, has become an engine of economic development, though of a kind, that has taken place in Assam in the last decade and a half, broadly coinciding with the high noon of ULFA and the beginning of its decline. This correspondent, who has lived in Guwahati since the early 1960s, had been away from Assam for two long spells of eight years each, between 1975 and 1983, and again between 1994 and 2002. The re-entry in 1983 was seamless; four years since the last return, one still has to pinch oneself constantly to come to terms with the changes. The world and the home have changed utterly. This again is in tune with the growth and development that has been taking place nationally, not merely in the urban metropolitan centres but in small towns and even in some rural areas. Perhaps these changes touch, very unequally at that, about 30 per cent of the population, perhaps less. This is certainly so about the development that has taken place in Assam in recent times.

However, as the Report notes, there is a causal link "between the process of liberalisation and the concomitant process of modifying the role of the Government" and the widening gap that the Report notes in almost every indicator of economic development, in Assam and nationally. The growth and development that has taken place is simply the obverse side of the denial and deprivation that sustain such growth even while destroying its victims. As was said in a different context, about another subject in another century, if you seek a monument for ULFA, just look around, the glamorous and tawdry glitz as well as the all-abounding squalour.

(The writer is grateful to Dr. Jayanta Madhab, Economic Adviser to the Chief Minister of Assam, whose lecture, "Insurgency and Development", on the occasion of the Foundation Day of the OKD Institute of Social Change and Development, Guwahati, on March 30, 2006, helped him formulate this dissenting perspective.)