Big Brother statism

The notion of Southasia is not a cartographic grid of a specific geographic region, but an India-centric approach that dominates the region as a whole. For a resident of Northeast India, this vision of Southasia is frustrating. This narrow approach has emerged out of a Big Brother-type mentality of dominant state perspective on history, politics and people in the region. Although the Northeast seldom appears outside the security-and-insurgency framework in India, it is one of the most diverse areas in all of Asia, where groups speak a different tongue every 30 kilometres, and which shares boundaries with five countries (China, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Burma). Yet what ultimately dominates the region's imagination is the 22-km 'chicken's neck' strip that connects the Northeast to the rest of India, or the New Delhi security analysis.

While the possibilities of extending the SAARC trade-and-commerce project in the Northeast have been highlighted, the area will occupy only a marginal position in the national imagination of states and regional forums such as SAARC if we fail to question rigid and dominant notions of history, politics and spaces. In essence, SAARC is a state forum to oversee economic cooperation in the region and, for that reason; it represents exclusive and hegemonic history and politics, where real people are relegated to the margins.