“In a democracy, the worst form of deception is not lying to your enemies. It is lying to the people who voted for you.”
A Strategy Built on Sand
The Bharatiya Janata Party has mastered a certain political word in the eight Northeastern states of India and that word is Electoral Hostage. It defines the state of a group of people, who vote in large numbers on a regular basis in support of a party, which offers symbolic inclusion and structural exclusion.n. The BJP has swept Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and Nagaland, destroying decades of regional party dominance since 2014 and even more aggressively since 2018. The strategy was purely clinical local parties were absorbed, central funds were given out selectively during election periods, all opposition leaders were called anti-national, and the whole operation was cloaked by the rhetoric of development. The people of the Northeast were not given development in return. It was the illusion of being seen when their central interests on land, ethnic identity, constitutional autonomy and justice were systematically relegated, postponed or even completely undone.
The Conquest of the Ballot Box
The statistics speak of electoral supremacy never seen before. The BJP or alliances they formed won power in six out of the eight Northeastern states in 2018. The party secured 14 out of the 25 Lok Sabha seats in the region in 2019 a dramatic increase in the party to only 8 in 2014, as per data compiled by the Election Commission of India. It was not by grassroots ideological conversion that the BJP could have attained this, but by political absorption engineering defections by the Congress, the NPF in Nagaland, and the AGP in Assam, and placing loyalists under the umbrella BJP.. It is the engine of the Electoral Hostage a province conquered not by the sword of the soul, but by eating out all the other possibilities. By bringing down the opposition, you do not achieve democracy. As a default of nature you bequeath.
The CAA: Governing Against the Voter’s Fear
The most outrageous incident of the BJP ruling against the interests of its own Norteast voters is the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. Northeast has long been enduring the open wound of unlawful immigration especially of Bangladesh which has changed the demographics, put a strain on land ownership and stoked ethnic warfare. The Assam Accord of 1985 was the legal pledge that was difficult to obtain and that would answer this question. Instead, the CAA provided a new route to citizenship to Bangladeshi migrants of Hindu faith, in fact, rewarding that very influx of demographic that Northeast indigenous populations had struggled to resist over generations. Protesters flooded into the streets of Guwahati, Dibrugarh, and Agartala as The Wire documented . In Assam, police opened fire killing five people. There was a blackout of the internet with weeks. What was the BJP government doing about it? It appealed to the concept of national security, sent in paramilitants, and enacted the Act. The Northeast people were its Electoral Hostage its votes had been counted, its streets now could be tear-gassed.
Manipur 2023: When the Prime Minister Had Nothing to Say
Manipur has experienced in 2023 worst case of ethinic voilence in post independent India era. Fights between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo groups claimed the life of over 200 citizens, displaced a total of over 60,000 and burnt over 6000 homes and churches to the ground. A viral video displaying two Kuki women being paraded naked by a crowd was spread across the world, and it generated international criticism. The Prime Minister Narendra Modi leading a BJP government controlled Manipur took 77 days before he made a statement publicly. It was not until months later that he paid a visit to the state and even then, only briefly, in a clinical manner and with no real policy declaration. The lack of federal intervention and slow response that was reported by Amnesty International reported, facilitated the continued bloodshed. Such is the appearance that Electoral Hostage assumes at its worst: a state of fire, and the party that rules it, weighing whether it is convenient, or obligatory, to interfere
AFSPA, Empty Promises, and the Development Mirage
Since 2014 the BJP has promised to make the Northeast the party of development of the Northeast to frame the region as the gateway of the Southeast of India under the name of Act East Policy. Still, the Northeast is one of the least developed parts of the country ten years later. A report by NITI Aayog report on Aspirational Districts, indicates that a number of the Northeastern districts are at the lowest end of national development indices on health, education and economic opportunity. At the same time, AFSPA the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and which provides soldiers with virtual immunity against prosecution, is still renewed in Nagaland, Manipur, and some areas of Assam.The government said it would think about AFSPA after Army personnel in Nagaland’s Mon district killed 14 civilians in December 2021 because they thought they were militants. What came next was not repeal widely criticised by civil society as cosmetic. as it was only a partial, performative narrowing of AFSPA in a few districts.The Northeast is an Electoral Hostage, too, to the security state of its citizens less legally and practically secured than any other Indian.
Hindutva’s Uncomfortable Relationship with Northeast Identity
The ideological incompatibility between the Hindutva project of the BJP and the actuality of the Northeast is deeper and cannot be solved through the political branding. The Northeast is largely Christian – Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya are majorly Christian and Christianity is also very much interwoven in the cultural life of the people of the Kuki-Zo, Naga and Khasi. The plurality is a challenge to Hindutva as an ideology. It is clueless about what to do with a Northeast that prays in churches, is free to eat pork, is matrilineal, and has no organic relation to the cow-protection politics and temple-building nationalism that drives the Hindi heartland base of BJP.The result is that the Northeast is a party, but it is not on the Northeast’s electoral map or in its civilizational imagination. The Northeast, the Electoral Hostage of nationalism not made with it in mind.
The Verdict: When Ballots Cannot Buy Justice
The BJP has demonstrated over the last decade that there is the Northeast and there is the government of the Northeast. Coalition engineering performs this task of harvesting the votes in an exact manner, the flow of money that is used in the central funds is performed in a way that is timed towards the election periods and the weaponisation of the anti-immigration sentiment is performed… But by the time the ballots are cast and the government established, the urgent demands of the area are the repeal of AFSPA, the protection of indigenous land rights, the actual responsibility in ethnic violence, and the representation in the nation-wide decision-making process are again not answered. Northeast is the most politically exploited region in India. The people of it are Electoral Hostage, that has been taken captive by a party who has learnt how to be voted in and not be accountable.. In a democratic society, a vote is a voice. Northeast In the BJP Northeast, a voter is provided with a receipt, handed in and lost until the next election period.. The people of the Northeast should not be a mere figure on the night of the results. They have the right to a government that is going to serve them.