Pluralities

For over two decades now, green politics in India has largely been about resisting neoliberalism and replacing it with an alternative development ethos. During this period, the greens jousted with governments that, while being committed to a liberal economic order, were also politically secular and liberal. But now, with a majoritarian Hindu state, which is even more fanatically neoliberal, firmly in the saddle, green politics is in a state of limbo. New rules of engagement are a must. Whether they are possible is moot.

With their varied history and social location, the youth as a distinct socio-political category has historically played the role of effective agents of change in India’s Northeast region, both as channels of protests as well as participation. Implications of ‘infrastructure development’ in India’s Northeast, therefore, must be placed in the context of the unfolding ‘aspirations’ as well as the ‘lived realities’ of the region’s youth. How does the twin framework of security and ‘neo-liberal’ development operating in the region affects the youth’s engagement with the infrastructural interventions? How to connect the infrastructure debate to the phenomena of increasing outmigration of young people from the region, even when the ‘ethnic identity’ discourse remains significant?.

In this essay, I offer a gender perspective on infrastructure in Northeast India. Policy documents, vision statements, and livelihood programmes, including various agencies and key actors, underline the significance of building or improving infrastructure in the region to transform lives of people. Understanding infrastructure as networks and matters that create the conditions for the movement of other matters, I highlight how the transformation of the region – from super highways, mining operations, cash crops, to new markets – has created new networks and social relations. Particularly, for the composition of households, family relations, and youth seeking employment, these developments are constitutive of the infrastructure boom in Northeast India and have created conditions that go beyond the material and physical functionality of the material objects such as roads, malls, and increased circulation of goods and people to and from the region.

These photographs taken by the author across different parts of India’s Northeast over a period of time attempts to sketch a visual vocabulary of the region that has been embracing as well as confronting the passage of a complex transition. Going by Susan Sontag’s exposition on ‘photography as a new grammar and ethics of seeing’, the author believes in the importance of the camera, specially in a region like India’s Northeast, where every mile can potentially throw up a new way of seeing and telling. As presented in pairs, the photographs presented here try to juxtapose the multiple strands of realities in the region. The idea is to show life as it exists in the region, portrayed through the dynamics of anxiety and aspirations that are in essence unleashed by the infrastructural flows in the region. Amidst these flux and fixities, a visual archive will serve as a repository of social memory and will also provide one with critical frames to engage with the ‘growth’ story of the region.  

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has completed five years and in that time it has expanded over Asia, Africa and Europe with increasing concerns about the transparency, economic feasibility and objectives of its projects. This paper looks at the key features of the BRI and the reactions from and implications for India. It suggests that the BRI is less about infrastructure development and more about promoting Chinese strategic interests - particularly its model of political development - in opposition to the United States and other regional powers and democracies like India.

70 years ago, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We work with our partners around the world towards making democracy and human rights, dignity and freedom a reality for all. The triad of HUman Rights - Democracy- Ecological Sustainability is the basis for our work.